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+{"text":" \n#    \nJOSEPH HELLER\n\n# Now and Then\n\n_From Coney Island to Here_\n\nJoseph Heller was born and raised in Brooklyn.  \nHe lives in East Hampton, New York.\n\n**_Also by_ JOSEPH HELLER**\n\n_Catch-22_\n\n_We Bombed in New Haven_ (play)\n\n_Something Happened_\n\n_Good as Gold_\n\n_No Laughing Matter_  \n(with Speed Vogel)\n\n_God Knows_\n\n_Picture This_\n\n_Closing Time_\n\nVINTAGE BOOKS EDITION\n\n_Copyright \u00a9 1998 by Skimton, Inc._\n\nAll rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1998.\n\nThe Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:  \nHeller, Joseph.  \nNow and then: from Coney Island to here \/ by Joseph Heller.  \np. cm.  \n1. Heller, Joseph\u2014Biography. 2. Novelists, American\u201420th century\u2014  \nBiography.  \nI. Title.  \nPS3558.E476Z468 1998  \n813\u203254\u2014dc21 97-49658\n\neISBN: 978-0-307-76696-0\n\n_Author photograph: Jerry Bauer_  \n _Title page photograph courtesy of Carol Schops_\n\nwww.randomhouse.com\n\nv3.1\n_For my sister, Sylvia_\n\n# Contents\n\n_Cover_\n\n_About the Author_\n\n_Other Books by This Author_\n\n_Title page_\n\n_Copyright_\n\n_Dedication_\n\n_Acknowledgments_\n\nChapter 1 - The Gold Ring\n\nChapter 2 - Coney\n\nChapter 3 - Sea Gate\n\nChapter 4 - Work\n\nChapter 5 - On and On\n\nChapter 6 - And On and On\n\nChapter 7 - And On and On and On\n\nChapter 8 - Peace\n\nChapter 9 - Psychiatry\n\nChapter 10 - Danny the Bull\n\n# ACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n\n_The author would like to thank Donald Kaplan,  \nJudy Walsh and the staff of the Brooklyn Public Library,  \nand the entire staff of the East Hampton Public Library._\n\n# 1  \nThe Gold Ring\n\nTHE GOLD RING on the carousels was made of brass. Even as kids in Coney Island we didn't believe it was the real thing. By the time we'd grown old enough to ride the outside horses and lunge out sideways to grasp the metal rings that swung toward us for the final few rotations, the carousel was no longer enchanting and we had no deep desire for the free ride that the last, lucky gold one awarded. By then we had nickels enough to go around again if we wanted to, but we tended to spend them on attractions that were higher and faster, more spectacular\u2014roller coasters\u2014and, for fun, the electric bump-cars.\n\nWe were luckier with the staying power of our craving for things like pretzels, potato chips, jelly doughnuts, and chocolate bars. Mark Twain is said to have remarked that by the time we're tall enough to reach the jar of jam on the high shelf of the cupboard, we find that we've lost our taste for jam. No such rueful fate struck me or my friends or any in the small family of four of which I was the youngest, not with edibles like halvah or salted peanuts, ice cream, kosher corned beef and hot dogs, or even salami sandwiches. When we found ourselves with enough cash to obtain as much of these delicacies as we wanted, we still had a hearty appetite for them, and we tended to indulge ourselves, and still do, by eating as much as, sometimes more, much more, than we truly did, and do, want.\n\nOf late, my best defense against corpulence has been to keep out of the house supplies of things to eat that reason cautions I shouldn't be stuffing into myself. Pistachio nuts, for instance, whether in petite jars or five-pound bags, have a feeble chance of extended survival once I discover them close at hand. If there's ice cream in the freezer, I feel a commanding moral responsibility to move it out of the house as quickly as I'm able to swallow as much as is there. Lately, I've discovered that salty pretzels go very well with just about any dessert I am likely to have at home. They're also good by themselves. If, before going to bed, I happen to remember we have sliced turkey breast in the refrigerator, the odds are heavy that I'll put some in my mouth as I find my way into the bathroom to brush my teeth\u2014on a couple of crackers, of course, or half a flat of pita bread, with salt and mustard.\n\nBut it's ice cream that still tastes most wonderful and is richest in evocative associations extending backward in time almost to the formation of memory itself, to brands and items long extinct\u2014to Dixie cups, for example, with their prized photographs of cowboy movie stars on the inside of the lid under a transparent waxed-paper seal. Like the evocations of the cookie to Proust, a meditation on ice cream soon takes me back to the age of eight or nine and into a family setting in which a small container is shared with bliss by the four of us, a mother, a sister, a brother, and me. (I was by many years the youngest.) In summer, ice cream was everywhere. In autumn, though, after the change back from daylight saving time, and even in winter on a black night after dinner and before bedtime, the idea of ice cream might be voiced, taking on a sacramental meaning to our small family in our small apartment\u2014four rooms, looking out on West 31st Street near Surf Avenue in Coney Island. My mother\u2014finally relaxing in front of the radio with the rest of us, after shopping for dinner, preparing dinner, serving dinner, and cleaning up in the kitchen after dinner\u2014might say with her Jewish intonations that she would certainly very much welcome the taste of a little ice cream. We had no refrigerator then, no freezer\u2014no family living in our apartment building did\u2014and there would be no ice cream in the house. At that late hour only the soda fountain in a drugstore two blocks away was open. I was the one who would volunteer to go. I would be given a dime to bring back a container. The flavor of our unanimous choice in those years was called Golden Glow. It's hard today to believe that just half a pint of bulk ice cream could have been so satisfying to the four of us, but that's all, as I recall, that a dime paid for. More than a dime for ice cream they couldn't bring themselves to spend. We were prudent with money because we didn't have much, but I, the \"baby\" in the family, was never allowed to feel that.\n\nMY SISTER, SYLVIA, was seven years older than I. My brother, Lee, originally Eli, born in Russia and brought to this country at the age of six, was seven years older than she was. In reality, they were only my half brother and half sister, the children of my father and his first wife, who had died. My mother was therefore a stepmother to them. They were, I realize only now, technically orphans, and although they never said so, they must have felt at least a little like orphans. I was, then, the baby in the family, treated by everyone, in effect, like an only child, which in some ways I was.\n\nI had no inkling of these family relationships until I was well into my teens, and I was shocked nearly speechless when confronted by the discovery, which unfolded at my brother's wedding. There, my mother's role in the procession down the aisle was to walk behind him, alone, and I listened dumbfounded to the officiating rabbi praise her so generously for the loving care she had given the groom, the son who was not biologically her own, and the daughter, too. I felt victimized, disgraced. My response to rage then, as it chiefly is still, was to break off speaking to the person offending me. I stopped speaking to my sister one time when she took up cigarettes and another time when she bleached her hair. And this time I may have fallen silent with all three of them, possibly with so deep and vindictive a hurt that I would obstinately refuse to tell any of them the cause, for that would be speaking. My oldest friend in the world, Marvin Winkler, with whom as an infant I had often been lodged together in a playpen, was amazed not long ago when I recalled the incident and related my stunned reaction. He was puzzled by my surprise, for he had been informed of the relationship by his mother when he was still a child and cautioned against hurting my feelings by bringing it up. My sister, too, was taken aback to read my account of this event in a biographical piece about me for which she had also been interviewed. She, along with my mother and my brother, had simply assumed, she claimed, that I'd known all along. It was not a scandal, not even a secret. They didn't talk about it because there was no need to.\n\nOn the other hand, I know it is true that neither my brother nor my sister ever said anything at all to me about my father, least of all about an earlier marriage, until out of curiosity as an adult I began to inquire. And only once did my mother talk to me about him, volunteering the information that my father could eat a whole chocolate cake at a single sitting\u2014as a delivery driver for a wholesale bakery firm, cakes were easy for him to obtain\u2014and that before he went into the hospital with a bleeding gastric ulcer, his stool was as black as coal. She told me this as an admonition against my own appetite, for I could always eat as much cake as was given me, and still want more. I discovered early in life that shelled walnuts in a bowl of raisins make a lovely late-evening treat for uninterrupted munching till bedtime. I once overheard my mother recounting that when I was a nursing infant, she had to tear me away from the breast, for I would never finish, and I can believe her.\n\nDIFFERENT AS EACH OF US was from the others, and however much there was inside us that we didn't want to talk about, we were, and functioned as, a close family. It was not in our nature to complain, quarrel, demand, or gossip. I remember a number of tantrums I discharged as a juvenile, but I believe that from the time I was an adolescent, I had acquired the family's stoic, resigned, and undemanding nature and didn't complain, quarrel, or gossip, either. My mother, finding herself after six years of marriage a widow with three children, two of them not naturally her own, had brought us up as the mother of us all, and my brother and sister had related to her as such. My brother, I learned, had at one time saved up money enough to buy her a better radio. The gift was poignantly apt, for my mother loved melodic music, Puccini arias in particular. And in those days of radio entertainment, amid the glorious profusion of comedy and variety shows, there was an opulence of weekly broadcasts featuring short selections from opera and other light classical pieces.\n\nAlthough the period was one of severe economic depression, everybody sooner or later seemed able to find employment. By the time I started school, my brother, fourteen years older than I, was already working at a brokerage in Wall Street as a customer's man, a job for which he was to prove ill suited by his modest manner and unaggressive temperament, and by a disposition to be continually obliging to others. My sister, after graduating from high school and encountering a number of startling rebuffs at employment agencies, would eventually find herself starting at R. H. Macy's department store, where she would remain for something like forty years. And I at sixteen, after classes at high school, would be cutting a dashing figure in a khaki quasi-military uniform as a part-time messenger boy delivering telegrams for Western Union, in office buildings in Manhattan weekdays, on a bicycle weekends to residences in Brooklyn, and mostly exulting in my duties with a sense of adventure and attentive curiosity. My mother, who had been a seamstress and something of a dressmaker before her marriage, worked steadily at home at her sewing machine mending garments for neighbors and doing alterations for a cousin, Sadie Pacon, who owned a dress shop on Gravesend Neck Road in lower Flatbush nearby. She also found steady work at home from laundries, turning frayed collars on men's shirts so that, from the outside and at the neck at least, the shirts looked almost good as new. Some weekend nights, mainly Saturdays, my brother would find extra income filling in at a catering hall for some banquet, dressing up appropriately for his suave role in the cloakroom or as one of the hall's hosts greeting and directing arriving guests. Neighbors outside the apartment building seeing him depart in a tuxedo or a natty, double-breasted, summer sport jacket might remark that he was off on a heavy date. But I knew he was going to work.\n\nMy mother liked to read. In Europe, her family had been bookbinders. From the Coney Island public library I would bring her Yiddish translations of novels. She enjoyed Tolstoi, especially _Anna Karenina_ , with which she had long been familiar, and thought Dostoyevsky was crazy. Her brother (my Uncle Sam) late in life was employed repairing books for the library of Brandeis University, where his son, Harry Stein, a varsity player in James Madison High School in Brooklyn and City College in New York, was one of the athletic coaches.\n\nWhen my mother noticed an apple turning soft she would briskly plan a noodle pudding that made use of it rather than have it go to waste. She took threadbare bed-sheets to her scissors and her sewing machine and converted them into window curtains. (Often, as her eyesight weakened with age, I would help with the sewing by threading her needle. Today I would not be able to.) If brother and sister had quarreled, she wouldn't let them go to bed until they had talked it out and made peace. She was never more happy than when a friend from the old country appeared unexpectedly. The visit to Coney Island of a Mrs. Rosen filled her with joy.\n\nMy sister's clothing as a teenager in high school, she recalls, came to her mainly as hand-me-downs from an older first cousin, who, because she was already at work in a business with her father, favored dresses of dark color, which my mother altered to fit. She also remembers feeling endlessly self-conscious, because she wore dresses rather than the skirts with blouses or sweaters fashionable among her schoolmates. Widowed twice, she is esteemed by a stepdaughter from her first marriage and by the three children from her second, all of them grown now.\n\nFor a little while, far back before the age of sixteen, out of eagerness more than need, I hawked newspapers in the early evening, peddling the next morning's editions the night before, crying, _\" 'Merican, News_ , and _Mirror_ , morning pape'!\" The _American_ , a Hearst newspaper more reactionary than his _Mirror_ , was thicker than the others, cost more, and had few readers in the Italian and Jewish neighborhoods I traversed in my desperate hurry to keep ahead of other newsboys who were trying desperately to keep ahead of me. I soon dropped that heavier paper from my inventory, and my sales cry became \"Hey, get your morning _News_ and _Mirror_ , morning pape'!\" At best this was very small stuff, and I was lucky if I earned as much as a dollar. I bought the papers for a penny and a half, I think I remember, and sold them for two cents each, hoping for an occasional tip of a penny or two. People who wanted both might give me a nickel. I bought the papers from trucks near the subway station at Stillwell Avenue, usually eating a frankfurter while I waited for them to arrive, and wended my way home on a route along the boardwalk and the populous avenues of Surf and Mermaid in the hope that my last batch would be entirely gone by the time I got there. If not, a humorous, audacious plea to neighbors sitting outside their houses might do the trick. \"Extra, Extra! Hitler dies... his mustache!\" was one shouted ploy to command immediate attention. Any papers that remained I might give away to mothers and fathers there who were my favorites.\n\nA wondrous incident remains indelibly alive\u2014it occurred only one time. At a boardwalk Irish bar one night, a thin man sitting alone at a table beckoned to me and reached out for one of my papers. As I stood there and waited in suspense, he opened it from the back, studying the racing results a few moments, and then returned it. And then he gave me a dime and wanted no newspaper. I was in heaven, strolling on air as I went back outside. I was in love with a world that had such humans in it.\n\nFrom repeated personal experience I've learned that few pleasures are so thoroughly reinforcing to the spirit as the arrival of unexpected money. Not long ago, I was amazed to receive in the mail, with no advance word, a royalty check from my literary agent for almost $18,000, representing cumulative royalties over the years from the publication of one of my novels in East Germany. I had long since forgotten that I'd even had a novel published there, and for the next hour or so I found myself grinning and humming a happy show tune or two. But I doubt very much that the sensation of well-being I experienced from this relatively huge windfall surpassed the joy brought me by that ten-cent gift I once received as a newsboy. It feels now as though that dime meant enormously more to me, and perhaps it did.\n\nEach of these benign surprises affecting me was a rapture someone born rich is not likely ever to enjoy. There are some pleasures money can't buy.\n\nOUR STREET AND neighborhood felt safe, insular, and secure, to a child an ethnic stronghold. Just about all the parents were immigrants, the majority from Eastern Europe. There was nothing and no one to fear physically.\n\nI did not really know who Hitler was. Our elders did, but I doubt that even they, or anyone, could have guessed at the evil immensity of the brutal destruction he was going to set loose. I remember a day: It is late afternoon, and I can hear again the newspaper vendors tearing through our street with their high-pitched cries and their \"extra\" editions of the papers with glaring headlines announcing that Hindenburg had resigned as president of Germany to make way for Hitler as chancellor. They knew they would sell every copy that day, whereas I didn't know who Hindenburg was. Until much later, I thought he was a zeppelin.\n\nThere was just about no fear of violence in that part of Coney Island where I lived and grew up. And there was practically no crime, unless one considers the peddling of ice cream or soft drinks on the beach a criminal activity\u2014the police did, but we didn't\u2014or later on, approaching the years of the war and to a broader extent afterward, the possession and smoking of marijuana. I didn't consider using marijuana a crime, either, although I never wanted to become \"schooled\" to be what was called a \"viper.\" I doubt that my brother or sister even knew about the increasing prevalence of this activity, and my mother would have been of a disapproving mind toward anything thought wrong. Then after the war came heroin.\n\nIn the nineteen years I lived on that street before going into the army\u2014except for two months away as a blacksmith's helper in a southern navy yard, I lived nowhere else\u2014I never heard of a rape, an assault, or an armed robbery in our neighborhood. I do recall having heard of a bookmaker shot to death in a poolroom, but that was on West 25th Street, six blocks away, on the very border between the Jewish and Italian sections. It wasn't really in our neighborhood, although we were eventually using that spot as a meeting place and the most convenient site for placing our bets on professional baseball games. It was run by a short, squat man called Sammy the Pig. The poolroom nearer my home was owned and run by a man we knew as Weepy. Nicknames were legion in Coney Island. _Foofson_ is the Yiddish word for the number fifteen. Sammy Foofsen, an older youth, was already Sammy Fifteen by the time I heard of him. A little while later, even his nickname acquired a nickname: He was referred to as Six-Six-Three. These mutations in title appeared to arise and take hold quite naturally, as though by spontaneous generation; no one person originated them. A guy called Chicago was Chi, then Shy. Mursh the Cripple had a leg in a clumsy metal brace from polio. In time, Mursh the Cripple matured into Mursh the Hopper. He was older, too\u2014one of the first guys we knew in Coney Island to own a car; it was an automobile with just hand controls. And a prank of his was to sit in the space beside the driver's seat, staring straight ahead with a placid smile and, with no person behind the wheel, operate the car with manual movements below the dashboard that weren't visible to disbelieving other drivers or pedestrians, who, startled, usually looked twice. My friend Marvin Winkler was Beansy for some reason, which seems almost preferable to Marvin. Murray Rabinowitz was Rup since childhood, in honor of his early surgery for a hernia, known then as a \"rupture.\" Danny Rosoff was Danny the Count. Squeezy and Frenchy were two girls\u2014I don't know how they came to merit such racy monikers. Danny the Bull, another fellow my age, was given that name before the war because of his broad chest and muscular shoulders. After the war, he was soon rendered frail and woeful by an addiction to heroin. His father, a barber named Max, gave him a cruel new title, derogating him to customers in his shop as My Son the Junkie.\n\nTHE LONE ACT of violence affecting me was one I unconsciously took pains not to find out much about until I was well into my thirties, and that was the death of my father in a hospital\u2014from internal bleeding after surgery for a condition that today I imagine would likely be considered almost routine, his bleeding ulcer. I prefer to believe that these days, with such protective facilities as intensive-care units and surgical recovery rooms standard, the falling open of his stitches would have been detected in time and that he would have survived.\n\nI was just past five. I knew he was gone\u2014I don't remember that I was ever told, I just knew\u2014but I had no notion of the cause. For thirty years I didn't care to ask. I didn't dare? It wasn't a secret. I didn't know, I eventually recognized in one startling moment\u2014and it came to me in an illuminating burst of understanding\u2014because I had never wanted to ask; they didn't tell me, I guess, because with the passing of years they simply assumed I knew. It was not a gratifying subject for family discussion. The impact upon my brother and sister\u2014losing both parents in so short a time and finding themselves in the care of a stepmother they had known only six years\u2014would have been enormous. But not only did we not complain much in my family, we didn't talk much about anything deeply felt. We didn't ask for much, either. Only one time ever was I present when one of us shed a tear, at the funeral of a spouse. And that's about all it was, a tear.\n\nAbout my father, I simply lost interest in him after he was gone. Later on\u2014outside the family, of course\u2014it became a conceit of personality to assert impertinently when the subject arose that I never missed him, and I don't believe I did. I didn't have that tender admiration for a large and generous nature that Nabokov expresses for his father. I hardly knew mine at all. If anything, the passing away of Mr. Isaac Daniel Heller was for me more a matter of embarrassment than anything else. At the beginning of each term in elementary school, it was the procedure of the teacher to call the children one by one to the desk in front of the classroom to obtain information that included the father's name and perhaps his occupation. Someone, teacher or sister, taught me the word _deceased._ I said it always in a repentant murmur brought low by a burden of shame and humiliation, and I hoped none of my classmates would hear.\n\nI did not feel I missed him. In later years, I might even wisecrack irreverently when hearing someone talk of an appalling home life caused by a father that I was fortunate mine was gone before he could inflict much damage. But I was biting my fingernails at the age of seven. And except for two hospital confinements very much later, during which my anxieties were focused on inescapable concerns, I have gone on biting them and I still do. In my late teens and afterward, I was suffering headaches before I understood what headaches were. Earlier, when someone spoke of a headache, I had no grasp of what was meant; once I did get the idea, I realized that I had been having them all along, usually on weekend mornings and afternoons. They've stopped. I studied my face in the mirror excessively. I had overheard that I was a good-looking child, mostly from repeated comments by my sister's girlfriends, and I wanted to reassure myself that I had not changed for the worse. I suffered boils more often than what was considered normal and had a school year of warts: There were seventeen on my hands and arms, including one large flat one on an elbow that didn't disintegrate with the others and had to be burned off by Dr. Abe Levine (who charged two dollars for the office visit and the treatment). I had a crazy fear I was going bald, because the hairline at my forehead was so much higher than at my ears. I did what I conceived I could to \"train\" my hair, and I moved the part from one side to the other, and then to the center and then off again to the side, and then tried it without a part, plastered flat with a stiffening hair tonic, and then with waves. I did other little things I still wouldn't want to tell anybody. I measured my height by the level of my eyes and therefore believed dismally that I was half a head shorter than I indeed was\u2014that I was much shorter than boys who were shorter than I. It was vanity, of course, but I'm inclined now to believe that it was a very anxious vanity founded on a wobbly formation of what R. D. Laing might have called \"ontological insecurity.\"\n\nI was prone to fantasizing, daydreaming\u2014and to good effect: I brought my rather overworking imagination into the classroom in book reports and compositions, and in this schoolwork I excelled. I can think of these examples: For a book report on _Tom Sawyer_ in one of the earliest grades I donned the mantle of Tom Sawyer tasked with the assignment of writing a book report on the work in which he is the principal personality; in the seventh grade, when I was about twelve, for an autobiographical written assignment supposedly by a subject in history, I became, in a first-person account\u2014not Abraham Lincoln, which would have been ordinary, others would have chosen him\u2014but the _metal_ in the gun that was used to shoot him. I was born, I remember, in a mine in Chile, in a shovelful of iron ore. Papers like these were read aloud as outstanding, which was the reward I aimed for. I very strongly did want to excel and be noticed.\n\nAnd one time I used some savings to surprise my brother with a gift for Father's Day. I bought him a carton of cigarettes, Camels, and it cost a dollar then. And I still am unable to decide, aware now of unconscious motivation, whether the deed was one of sincere gratitude and affection or merely a stunt contrived to excite comment and win me some complimentary attention. Or both. Another time, nearing the age of sixty, while experimenting with psychoanalysis as a remedy for alleviating stressful moods in the throes of a rancorous divorce, I had a coherent dream in which my brother, Lee, who then was living and in good health, was dead and resurrected from the grave to rejoin the family in the old apartment house in Coney Island, where my mother, who had long since died, was alive and active. On my back on the analyst's couch, I protested astutely that I probably wouldn't have had that dream of my father-as-brother the night before were I not in this treatment and if I hadn't known I would be coming to see him that morning. And he, chuckling in his upholstered armchair, didn't disagree, and conceded that the psychoanalytical process was indeed to a large extent \"neurogenic,\" a word I had not heard before and have not heard since.\n\nNOT LONG AFTER my father died, we moved from our old apartment into one of equal size directly across the street, and that is the one I think of as the home in which I grew from childhood. It had four rooms. All of the apartments seemed to have four rooms, one a full kitchen, one a living room that routinely also functioned as somebody's sleeping place. In spring, with us as with others, the ROOM FOR RENT sign went up, the notice went out to neighbors, and we took in a boarder for the summer, usually a single adult or an adult couple with friends or relatives nearby. None of us, not my brother or sister or I, could recall with certainty how we disposed of ourselves for the period in which we gave up that room. My sister does remember a situation in our first apartment with two parents and a child boarding in one room, while one of us slept in the kitchen. She can't remember which one of us it was.\n\nIt was to one of these boarders that I owe my first exposure to classical music. He politely requested permission to tune in to station WNYC on our radio when it wasn't in use (in use by me, usually, listening\u2014to the despair of my mother\u2014to big-band swing). WNYC was a classical music station. I didn't have to listen when he played the music he preferred, but I did have to hear. And I was overwhelmed when I recognized in these classical performances so many melodies already familiar to me as popular songs from _Your Hit Parade_ and other radio programs: \"Our Love,\" \"I'm Always Chasing Rainbows,\" \"You Are [perhaps \"This Is\"] My Song of Love,\" \"The Lamp Is Low,\" and a host, more than one host, of others (\"The Isle of May,\" \"April Showers,\" \"No Star Is Lost in My Blue Heaven,\" Tchaikovsky again, and what appeared to be a genuine Negro spiritual and was, in fact, astonishingly, the largo from Dvo\u0159\u00e1k's _New World_ symphony, \"Going Home\"). And it was while I was listening alertly to discover more of these that other strains I hadn't heard before were played and repeated and became recognizable and appreciated.\n\nWhen families moved from one flat in Coney Island to another, it was mainly to take advantage of the usual \"concession\"\u2014a rent-free first month or two given to the new tenant. When they moved away from Coney Island into areas of loftier economic standing, it was because they could at last afford to. The clearest memory I preserve of our earlier apartment was of my brother, after all our belongings had been transferred, going back with me and bringing a broom to sweep out, still one more time, the corners of all the rooms. He didn't want the new tenants, he explained, to think that the ones preceding them, us, were slobs. He would retain this conscientious and considerate trait, this regard for comportment, till the end of his life.\n\nIn the new apartment, after being put to bed, I would frequently and furtively imagine, or hope, that a policeman was stationed at each end of our segment of the dark block, keeping vigilant watch on my building and window to safeguard me from\u2014I cannot imagine what. Except for the threat of true poverty, against which I was protectively kept ignorant, there were no dangers. Both inside and outside the house we were safe. There were no kidnappings or burglaries, and always in decent weather there were scores of kids on the street to play with, and grown-ups to watch and keep an eye on us. From the earliest grades on, we were encouraged, boys and girls, to walk on our own to the grade school close to half a mile away, crossing streets. We walked home for lunch at noon, walked back to school for the afternoon session, returned on foot when classes ended at three, without fear, without harm. Except in summer, there wasn't much danger from automobiles; this was a low-income neighborhood during the Great Depression, and there weren't many automobiles. From about the age of nine or ten, we could play in the street at night or roam the boardwalk until we sagged with sleepiness or someone came to fetch us.\n\nThe two apartments I spoke of were in buildings on a side street that ran between Surf Avenue, the thoroughfare that was closest to the boardwalk and seashore, and, receding from Surf Avenue in a direction opposite the beach, the tracks of a trolley line running in a straight sand-and-stony trench we called Railroad Avenue. Once across these tracks on my walk to school, I might be joined by my friend Albie Covelman, a classmate from the second half of first grade on, or, a few years later, by Seymour Ostrow, who had moved to our block from Sea Gate, a sequestered, private settlement a few streets past the other side of the school, after his own father died. At Mermaid Avenue, we would join a thickening pedestrian flow of other friends and acquaintances from school who were coming from homes a few streets past my own. At the school, waiting on line as instructed or romping about the spacious yard, there would be many more boys and girls from kindergarten classes through eighth grade. They had come from all directions. I must note that I remember no blacks in my elementary school, and none in my high school, not even on the football or basketball teams. The high school, several miles away, drew its students from a number of surrounding areas of diverse populations, but not yet so diverse as to include \"Negroes.\" I recall no discussions of the subject before World War II.\n\nThe streets in Coney Island were divided into three residential segments, sometimes four, by Surf Avenue, by the trolley line, and by Mermaid Avenue, which had the most stores. Some of the streets had apartment houses between the beach and Surf Avenue, others didn't. On one whole block of prime property between the boardwalk and Surf Avenue and open only in summertime was a Catholic orphanage for boys, who came, I think, for short stays. With fair hair and milky, freckled skin they looked sickly to us when we passed and stared; and we, with our suntans and dark complexions, must have seemed peculiar and exotic to them. The avenues paralleled each other on linear courses from the high fences and guarded entrances of Sea Gate at one end of Coney Island to the final station of the BMT subway train routes in the amusement section in the middle, and each of the three segments between them was thickly populated, each block of each street a close-knit miniature village in its own right. Surf Avenue, the largest of them, ran past the train stop into and through the amusement area, past the games and rides and other sidewalk attractions; a Surf Avenue trolley line that began outside Sea Gate ran well past Coney Island and came to its last stop at Sheepshead Bay.\n\nDespite its bustle, solid population, and long eminence, Coney Island is not impressive in size and not really an island but part of a Brooklyn sand spit hardly more than half a mile wide, with the ocean on one side and a bay, Gravesend Bay, bordering the other. In that small span of street in which we lived, surely no more than two hundred yards between Surf Avenue and the Norton's Point trolley tracks, there were four apartment houses of three or four stories each and a sprinkling of smaller dwellings for one or two families, and there were always enough other boys of the right age to play our street games with, the older boys training us to catch and throw a ball when they needed more players to complete a team. Girls, too. My sister, near eighty now and living in Florida, is still friendly with several women she met on the block in those days. And there were always parents, mostly smiling mothers, happily overseeing us from the windowsills of their apartments as we played ball or tag or roller-skated. When weather and domestic chores permitted, they sat outdoors on chairs carried downstairs and placed alongside each other in front of the apartment houses on both sides of the street, conversing with each other in Yiddish, with us in English, or in a patois of both.\n\nRegularly on pleasant afternoons as they sat there, a Mrs. Shatzkin who lived near us would trudge by, carrying in a sack of black oilcloth a large covered kettle holding homemade potato knishes\u2014thick, circular, good-sized dumplings of mashed potatoes richly seasoned with pepper and browned onions in pockets of a special dough of her own invention which were deep-fried in vegetable oil\u2014freshly made and still warm, and from which she strived to eke out her living. She made another kind, too, with a filling of a buckwheat grain called kasha. Both kinds were unusually good, and sold for a nickel apiece. My mother was among those who relished them, and would call me to her to share one with me. A Mrs. Gelber, who lived around the corner on Surf Avenue, made in her kitchen what we called \"jelly apples\" and carried them around to sell. They cost a nickel, too. Soon she was making them in quantity to supply food stands in the amusement area. And soon Mrs. Shatzkin had leased a large storefront on the corner, with a staff of middle-aged women\u2014probably relatives, because they all resembled her\u2014making her knishes in full view and selling them to customers on the street; then she expanded into a much larger outlet on the more crowded boardwalk and supplied food stands in other locations, too. At least four generations of Shatzkins, all with the same florid faces, stippled with large brown and gray freckles, earned their keep from the knishes originated by the maternal founder of that thrifty dynasty.\n\nOther women came by frequently with trays of sesame candies and the like, which sold for two pennies apiece. Some early evenings in spring, summer, and fall, a hearty black woman would appear in the street and in the courtyards of the summer bungalow colonies\u2014a street singer singing Yiddish songs with accurate Yiddish pronunciation. If we were upstairs, my mother invariably would wrap a few pennies in a scrap of newspaper and toss them down from the window, as she did with others who arrived to serenade us with accordions or violins. My mother had the same keen appreciation for food that I am blessed with, though not nearly my capacity. She was particularly fond of certain salty, smoky flavors. Toward the final years of her life she surreptitiously came upon bacon and instantly found the taste delicious. Who wouldn't? She adored smoked whitefish, too.\n\nSo do I. I look like her, though I'm taller. High forehead that is broad and flat, large face with prominent cheekbones, a determined, sometimes surly mouth. Not long ago, my friend Marvin, who lives a distance away, exclaimed on the resemblance after we hadn't seen each other for a couple of years. My sister and brother grew more and more to look like each other as they aged. Their wide eyes were a clear, bright blue. Mine, like my mother's, are brown.\n\nALL OF US in Coney Island did whatever we legally could to earn what money we needed, and somehow everyone I know of managed to fare pretty well. The fathers all worked, as did the older brothers and sisters as soon as they had liberated themselves from high school by graduating. Almost none of us then thought seriously about going to college or wanted to go, or could have afforded to. (My brother did want to go, would have given anything to have been able to, my sister, Sylvia, tells me.) For me, years before the time for decision, Lee was sending away for catalogs and applications to colleges such as MIT, Oberlin, Harvard, Yale, and others of that elevated level for which I could not possibly have paid and to which I could not then conceivably have gained admission. At New York University after the war, when I was selected in my junior year for membership in Phi Beta Kappa\u2014as much for success with the publication of a few short stories as for classroom distinction\u2014I didn't know what Phi Beta Kappa was. But Lee did and was flushed with pleasure in the pride he took in me. \"Some Phi Beta Kappa,\" was his happy comment on that ignorance of mine. But for him it was already too late for college, and I couldn't be sure whether a longing for a university education was another painful disappointment he suffered or merely a whimsical reverie in which he indulged. He owned a tennis racquet, which he kept in a wooden press in a closet and which I never saw him use. I don't know where that came from, if not from a few summers when he was away as a camp counselor. He had a Red Cross badge for lifesaving which he earned in those days. At times as he aged he could be arbitrary, critical, and argumentative over very small matters\u2014what bread was best for what kind of sandwich. But he was instinctively obliging and well-mannered, especially with strangers.\n\nFor a while, a very short while, when I was just eighteen, in a concession to respectable conformity I did accede to the plan of applying for admission to night school at Brooklyn College. My high-school transcript was better than average, and I was accepted. However, I decided impulsively one evening before term began, while sleepily registering for classes, that I much preferred my nighttime social life, unremarkable as that was, and I dropped out before attending. When the time arrived that I was able to go, felt realistically that I _could_ go, to college, I wanted to and did. I was twenty-two when I started, and I enrolled like a million or two other recent American war veterans, with the federal government paying a monthly subsistence allowance and just about all my educational costs.\n\nMost of the fathers I knew of had salaried jobs in Manhattan in what was called \"the garment center,\" performing one specialized function or another in the sequence essential to the manufacture of clothing. None advanced to salesmen. But a number of friends in the expanding circle I acquired as I grew up came from families with small businesses of their own right there in Coney Island, mostly stores: Louie Kessler, Solly Mirror, and Lenny Karafiol owned bakeries. Esther Dessick's family owned the fish store\u2014none of these retail shops on Mermaid Avenue filled premises roomy enough to be called markets. Lily Dashevsky came from fruits and vegetables, Murray Singer's father was the butcher. Louie Berkman's father owned a lucrative junkyard. Marvin Winkler's father prospered as a bookmaker and eventually was able to move his family into the richer milieu of Sea Gate. In the flat just below our apartment lived Irving Kaiser, a year younger than I but a friend from early childhood who was one of the three people I grew up with who were killed in the war, and just below him on street level was the tailor shop owned by his father. And the father of Danny the Bull was a barber.\n\nLOOKING BACK, I find it something of a miracle that from such a beginning the four of us in my family separately and independently eventually found ourselves through most of our lives with enough money to satisfy our needs and our material wants. Our expectations, while varying considerably, were disciplined. We did not want what we could not hope to have, and we were not made bitter or envious by knowing of people who had much more. The occasional neighborhood Communist proselytizer got nowhere with us. Neither, I must record, did the dedicated anti-Communist ideologue, not then or later. We worked at what we could because we never doubted we had to work, and we felt fortunate indeed that we could find work.\n\nIn time, both my brother and sister with their spouses were able to retire comfortably to modest dwellings in West Palm Beach, Florida, with savings and pension benefits from companies with which each had been working many years, Sylvia from her employment with Macy's as a minor executive, a sales supervisor in one department or another, my brother as head of the mail room at MCA, the thriving talent agency that eventually acquired the Universal Pictures motion-picture studio. People I've run into who worked with my sister invariably speak of her with tremendous affection. Men I've met who worked for my brother describe him as a gracious, generous, helpful, and kind boss. It has proved impossible for me to give either one of them anything. Once I tried to buy my brother a better car than the one he was driving in Florida, and was not allowed to.\n\nRight or wrong, I'm convinced that no one in the family lied to the others about anything, or to anyone else. If they did, it would only be to say they were feeling all right when they weren't, or that there was nothing they needed when there might be something they did.\n\nFollowing the success of my first novel, published when I was thirty-eight, there was a considerable financial return from my second, _Something Happened_ , and I was able to retire from my own salaried position, which was with the English Department of the City College of New York, where I had spent the previous four years. I went on writing, of course, but I thought of this work think of it now, at this very moment!\u2014not so much as working for money but as a challenging and eternally and increasingly harrowing (and remunerative) application of the mind to leisure, in much the same way I imagine a rock climber or mountain hiker contends with his pastime or an amateur bridge player or golfer tussles with the frustrations and adversities of his particular obsessive recreation. I make a living from mine.\n\nELSEWHERE DURING MY CHILDHOOD, in the world and in this country, there was turmoil. There were violent strikes. Blacks were lynched, and photographs of these heartless crimes seemed invariably to picture among the lynchers men wearing the American Legion field caps of veterans of World War I. Labor organizers in rural communities were beaten, jailed. A bonus army of veterans descended on Washington, D.C., with demands for a promised payment and was forcibly dispersed by military units commanded by officers soon to be honored in World War II. In the weekly newsreels in movie theaters we watched infuriated dairy farmers spill into streams milk they couldn't sell at a profit; countless people who would have wanted the milk lacked money to buy it. There were no jobs for huge and growing numbers. For the evicted and other homeless there were shantytowns across the country called Hoovervilles, so named for the sitting president, Herbert Hoover. Men stood on breadlines, families were fed in soup kitchens. Banks failed.\n\nSomehow, we, on that minute parcel of seashore at the lower tip of Brooklyn that was home to separate but overlapping neighborhoods mainly of Jewish and Italian families, managed to escape the worst of the consequences of the stock-market crash and the Depression. And so, it seemed, did most of the nearby districts of Brooklyn, one of five boroughs in New York City, which, with approximately two million residents, had as it does now a population greater than all but the few largest cities in the country.\n\nI don't know how that happened or why we were so lucky.\n\nI do know that the prevailing sympathy in our locality was always automatically for all strikers, and for the poor and the downtrodden. This meant we were not Republicans. Chanting with others \"Hoover, Hoover, rah, rah, rah\/Put him in the ashcan, ha, ha, ha!\" in a torchlight parade on election eve in November 1932 was my first political action, taken at the age of nine years, six months.\n\nTHE HEALTH OF the four of us was generally very good. I remember no illness of significance striking any of us until well past the age of fifty. It would have been hard to tell if our health hadn't been good, since no one in our family made a fashion of ailments or talked much about the distress they brought. My brother, even in his last years, even with one excruciating foot infection that swelled the tissues until the flesh seemed ready to explode, would consistently attempt to minimize his condition; he put off going to a doctor _for anything_ until further postponement was no longer humanly, humanely, possible, until symptoms or someone _forced_ him to go.\n\nLate in my mother's life, however, there was one accident of permanent and drastic consequence. While I was away in preflight training at aviation cadet school in Santa Ana, California, she, at home alone, tumbled from a stool while hanging kitchen curtains and broke a hip. She dragged herself to the kitchen window and, spying Jeannie Goldman, a girl my age who lived in a facing apartment just across the street, shouted out to her for help. Jeannie rushed upstairs\u2014apartment doors then were never locked in the daytime, there was no need\u2014and telephoned for the ambulance.\n\nPerhaps it was that crawl across the floor that did it: Emergency treatment and surgery as a ward patient in Coney Island Hospital left her with one leg shorter than the other, and she was reduced to walking in one heavier, built-up shoe and with a limp and a cane.\n\nShe went on doing everything in the house she had done before, including shopping on Mermaid Avenue and climbing the stairs to our apartment two floors above street level, but the cane and the observable limp were humiliations over which she never stopped grieving for as long as she lived. She had my vanity, or I inherited hers. If ever she needed assistance for anything unusual or just wanted to talk, she would bang with her cane on the floor, and Mrs. Rose Kaiser would come up from below to accommodate her. When Mrs. Kaiser, by then also a widow, died and unknown new tenants moved in below, my mother's spirit seemed to ebb, and she lapsed more and more into that hopeless, emotionless state of resignation we recognize so often in the aged. But from her, there was never a plea or complaint. In my fifties I grew friendly with the novelist James Jones, whose mother was alive and ailing, and one time in answer to his question I told him that both my parents had long since passed on. Grimly, he responded: \"You're lucky.\" Grimly, I understood him.\n\nBUT FARTHER BACK, in better days, I can find a deeply satisfying episode that bonded us closely to each other; this was the time when I, so much younger than the others, was nevertheless able to cooperate with Sylvia and Lee to help teach my mother sufficient English to qualify her to vote.\n\nShe voted for Roosevelt, of course, for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as did everyone else in the neighborhood, if not, as it felt to us, the world. And then, for the office of New York State governor and later of U.S. senator, for Herbert Lehman, who possessed the double virtue of being not only a New Deal Democrat but also a Jew. These candidates always won. I couldn't vote until the election of 1944, while still overseas in the service, and I voted for Roosevelt by absentee ballot. He won again. I wasn't wounded in the war. I wasn't killed, either, or taken prisoner, and those were the good old, gone-but-not-forgotten days when the candidates I favored most had the best chance of election. That never happens anymore. Even now, though I know this is an illusion, it feels improbable to me that there should have been any such curious things back then as Jewish Republicans, and perhaps there weren't any. The brass ring seemed good as gold.\n\n# 2  \nConey\n\nCONEY ISLAND, with its beaches, crowds, commotion, and couple of hundred entertainments, has always been magical to children and a gaudy magnet for adults. People came from everywhere. Early in this century, even Sigmund Freud dropped in for a look on his trip to the United States; the Russian author Maxim Gorky was a sightseer, too. The milling crowds through the 1930s included soldiers on leave and sailors in port, crewmen in the American and foreign merchant marine. Whole families, sometimes clans of extended families, would journey from Manhattan and the Bronx and other parts of Brooklyn to spend the day and early evening. Those who eschewed the lockers and other facilities of the bathhouses would make camp on blankets under the boardwalk, changing in and out of bathing suits, eating from tubs of cooked foods prepared at home before setting out. The place was better known than we who lived there realized and had been a famous, and notorious, playland and summer resort far longer than we could appreciate\u2014at its most wicked when its first recreational community was established at Norton's Point just after the Civil War at the western tip of what later came to be called Sea Gate. Visitors came by ferry. So infamous for vice did Norton's Point grow\u2014for pickpockets, prostitutes, gamblers, hoodlums\u2014that numbers of tough and cunning rogues with schemes of their own began moving eastward for safety into what eventually grew to become Coney Island proper.\n\nThe founding of Luna Park and George C. Tilyou's Steeplechase Park dates back to the last years of the 1890s. Both had been long established and were already in decline by the time I grew aware of them. Although I didn't know it until I began this history, at one period there were three prominent horse-racing tracks in the area: one in Sheepshead Bay close by, another in the district called Gravesend, to which all of Coney Island is joined; and another in Brighton Beach, closer still.\n\nNotable stake races of the present day like the Suburban and Futurity Handicaps were features of the season and were better known nationally than the Kentucky Derby; the Preakness for its first fifteen years was in Coney Island too. Prizefighting also: The first contest in New York State for the world heavyweight title took place at the Coney Island Athletic Club (in 1899, between Bob Fitzsimmons and James Jeffries. Jeffries triumphed, though a three-to-one underdog). The racing season brought socialites with names like Whitney, Vanderbilt, and Belmont into this home area of mine, as well as big spenders of lesser pedigree. The socially correct visitors preferred the sedate environment of Manhattan Beach and Oriental Beach at the eastern end of what was then called the Island. But the trainers and jockeys as well as the touts, gamblers, and other raffish drifters who followed the horses, and the prizefights, too, also came in thick crowds and brought business and action into the lively center, to the hotels and eating places and to the beer gardens with their singing waiters and female entertainers, to flirtatious beer-hall waitresses hustling customers to drink more, and to freelance prostitutes as well, of whom, I now learn, there were continually growing numbers. A New York State antibetting law of 1909 put an end to Coney Island as a center of horse racing in the East. All three tracks were gone by the time I came along, and the only horseflesh we knew belonged to the iceman, the milkman, and the man at the reins of the Brighton Laundry wagon.\n\nSurviving into my time was the spacious, elegant German beer garden Feltman's, a famous meeting place for fun-loving celebrities of the Gay Nineties, but it was on the way out by the time I discovered it. It was the original Mr. Felt-man himself who is credited with inventing the frankfurter, a small boiled sausage that he served on a roll. Also in operation in my time as a Coney Island amusement was an exhibition of premature babies in incubators. I swear to God it's true! I now find out that the facility was the enterprise of a European physician of some international reputation, staffed with nurses, containing up-to-date equipment, and devoting more effort to preserving the lives of these infants than hospitals at the time were inclined to do. Nonetheless, it does seem grotesque.\n\nCONEY ISLAND WAS generously extolled in hit songs that are still sung: in Rodgers and Hart's \"Manhattan\" and \"The Lady Is a Tramp,\" and in Cole Porter's \"You're the Top,\" in which a night at Coney is up there with the Colosseum and the Louvre museum, the Tower of Pisa and the Mona Lisa. In film, too, the place was celebrated. Year after year, those weekly newsreels typical of the 1930s never failed to highlight the opening of the season each Decoration Day weekend with a shot of a flat-bottomed boat accelerating down the watery slope of the Shoot-the-Chutes in Luna Park, and another of one of the circular rides in operation in Steeplechase Park, or of a woman's skirt blown above her head by an unexpected blast of air from a hidden jet in the floor. In the movie _Manhattan Melodrama_ of the early thirties, characters played by William Powell and Myrna Loy go to Coney Island on a date. In _The Devil and Miss Jones_ , Robert Cummings and Jean Arthur join the Coney Island crowds for pleasure on a day off from work, accompanied by Spring Byington and Charles Coburn. William Powell and Myrna Loy and Robert Cummings and Jean Arthur might all well have gone there as their natural selves, too, for celebrities were continually reported by people who knew people who swore they had spotted them.\n\nCelebrity sightings were most common after the Labor Day holiday during a series of nightly parades called Mardi Gras, which were contrived to signal the close of the season on the one hand while, on the other, prolonging it by several days. Oddly, this postseason celebration also claimed the high moral purpose of providing money to rebuild the Coney Island Rescue Home, a shelter for wayward girls that had burned down. Predictably, the effect of those parades was to attract hopeful floods of yet more wayward girls to the area.\n\nIn the 1920s, lawmakers finally began bringing about reforms that eventually transformed Coney Island's character. These changes were accelerated by improvements in electric trolley-car service and in the extension of the subway system into the Island itself, right to a busy crossroad on Surf Avenue. For a fare of only a nickel, rapid transport brought in multitudes of people seeking safe and inexpensive varieties of recreation, and by the thirties, my era, the sinful prestige of the notorious beach resort was unearned and all but gone.\n\nAt the Mardi Gras parades from then on, for those of us quickly bored by the marchers, the greatest joy consisted of nothing more exciting than throwing handfuls of confetti into the faces of girls, who appeared flattered by these attentions. It was not much fun. In rowdier days, I've read, rougher sports would stuff the confetti down and up their dresses and into their mouths. That doesn't seem like much fun either.\n\nNoticeable in almost all the sophisticated tributes to Coney Island I've cited is a more than faint aura of the patronizing, of people going slumming for fun. They are making a fashion of the unfashionable, in much the same jaunty spirit in which chic and adventurous New Yorkers would safely voyage up to Harlem before the war, my war, for the music and the food (mainly spareribs) and also to buy marijuana. I don't know where those Coney Island addicts on the needle like Danny the Bull, Raymie Glickman, Philly Penner, George Weiss, and others went for their heroin after the war, for I had married shortly after my discharge and moved from Brooklyn, and that was not something I could have found out from my mother.\n\nIt didn't take long for me or any of the others migrating into the broader world to learn that one widely used way of deprecating a place was, and still is, to scoff that it is just like Coney Island. And, for the record, no one I've known from Coney has ever referred to Coney Island by just that abbreviated term \"Coney.\"\n\nBY 1920, soon after the BMT subway company extended four of its lines into Coney Island, huge masses of people were arriving\u2014first, tens of thousands on summer weekends, then hundreds of thousands, finally a million and more. Most came now from the working classes and the newly emerging lower-middle class. Many belonged to immigrant groups recently settled in the East, especially from Eastern Europe (Jews) and Southern Europe (Italians). The Irish were already there, as were the Germans and Scandinavians. Witness the names of enterprises already established: Hahn's Baths, Scoville's, Feltman's, Stauch's, Paddy Shea's Saloon, Shannon's. A man named Handwerker, first name Nathan (a nephew went to high school with me), had fortuitously opened a small hot-dog stand on Surf Avenue just across the street from the corner on which the terminal of the new subway station arose, selling his savory product from a griddle for only five cents, in contrast to Feltman's costlier boiled ones for ten cents. Feltman may have invented the hot dog, but Nathan's perfected it, and soon customers stood in packs five deep, clamoring to be served.\n\nProbably it was about then, with the subway now granting convenient access to just about anywhere else in the city, that the wood bungalows, brick homes, and apartment houses I knew began to be built and immigrant families to move in. As early as 1921, a progressive reformer, Bruce Bliven, was complaining in the progressive _New Republic_ about a new population that was displacing \"native American Stock.\" He had noticed that just about all of the people he saw on the Coney Island beach now seemed to have \"black hair.\"\n\nEVEN AT THIS LATE DATE, people I meet with a large stock of memories of visits to Coney Island still express surprise upon hearing that I grew up there, that families lived there, and still do, and that children were brought up there, and still are.\n\nThe single image they retain is of a gigantic, sprawling, fenced-in amusement area with an abundance of games and rides, of sideshows and food stands, that is closed down and locked up at the end of each season until the following spring. In fact, though, the amusement area was perhaps only fifteen blocks long, on a strip only one block deep from Surf Avenue to the boardwalk, in a seaside community that is about two and a half miles long and about half a mile wide and which, by contemporary suburban standards, was densely populated with year-round residents. Even back in 1929, when I entered kindergarten, there were sufficient families with young children living in Coney Island to overcrowd the two elementary schools there\u2014and each of these stood five stories high and a full block wide. One was in the Jewish area, the other in the Italian, but this division into Jewish and Italian was anything but absolute. There were Bartolinis, Palumbos, Salimeris, and a Charlie Anderson in my school, P.S. 188, and a Klineline (German) and Bannon on my street, and there were Mandels, Goldbergs, and Kesslers in the other school, P.S. 80, which rose near both the Catholic church and a synagogue of yellow brick on Mermaid Avenue that was perhaps the largest of the several in Coney Island. A Julia Revelli was in my class all the way through elementary school.\n\nThe second apartment house in which we lived was owned for a few years after we moved in by the Provenzano family. They dwelled on the second-floor front, opposite the Kaiser family across the large landing, which sometimes served as a play area. Tony Provenzano was a year older than I, proportionately larger, and probably stronger. I never had to find out. Tony was disconcertingly rigid in his unwillingness to cooperate in automatically allowing me to take the lead in deciding the games to be played or to assume the captainship of the team, as all the others of our approximate age group in the street were inclined to do. There was in the Provenzano apartment a player piano with a wealth of piano rolls. I was endlessly fascinated and would listen as long as they would let me. Tony had a large collection of lead soldiers, too, the first I'd seen, and we played with them also, although there isn't much one can do with lead soldiers except stand them up and look at them and try, without much gratification, to play at war. Across that first-floor hall in Irving Kaiser's apartment was an early phonograph\u2014a Victrola, as all phonographs were then called generically. It was wound up and powered by a hand crank. The favorite record, preferred even to a couple by Enrico Caruso, was one called \"Cohen on the Telephone,\" a comic monologue by a man with a Yiddish accent attempting with ineffectual desperation to place a phone call. The records, like those in our cellar clubs much later, were made of shellac; they were played with a metal needle, and they shattered if dropped. There was a complete set of volumes in the Kaiser apartment called _The Book of Knowledge_ that held our interest for hours. (For a short while, the Kaisers had a summer boarder who also held my interest: She was a snappy young lady from Pennsylvania who walked about freely in a half slip and brassiere, and I would drop downstairs and hang around casually with Irving in the hope of again seeing her half undressed. In a week or so she had a man of middle years as a gentleman caller, a man who owned a concession in the amusement center. And a week or so after that, she was removed by the police.) _The Book of Knowledge_ contained not only simple information about almost everything in the world; it also provided instructions for making and doing things. Howie and Henny Ehrenman, brothers in an apartment house on Surf Avenue just around the corner, still remember that I ruined their mother's best frying pan one afternoon, demonstrating how to make perfect butterscotch from _The Book of Knowledge._ They remember I ruined the butterscotch, too.\n\nWhen Nettie, one of the two Provenzano daughters (the other was Rosemarie), had her church wedding, the Hellers attended as a family, possibly excepting my brother, who tried to avoid all such ceremonial events as assiduously as I attempt to avoid them now. That was the first time any of us had been inside a Christian church of any kind. I wouldn't bet that any of us felt we had a right to be there.\n\nAfter the Provenzano family surrendered ownership of the apartment house, they moved down into the Italian section of Coney Island, on Surf Avenue just about opposite one of the several stretches occupied by Steeplechase Park. I went at least once to visit them in their new quarters. The next time I passed that way, Tony had a food stand in the building and we waved. The last time I passed, the food stand was gone. So was Steeplechase Park, all but the framework of the defunct Parachute Jump, which still towers as a mournful landmark, presumably because the cost of demolishing it would be higher than anyone might wish to spend to be rid of it. And Irving Kaiser, as I've said, was killed in the war, in Italy. If, as I've heard, his life was ended by an artillery shell, it could be that he never knew what hit him. In that one respect, just that one, it might be said he was lucky.\n\nToday, the Italian neighborhood remains; the Italian restaurants best known then, Gargulio's and Carolina, are still functioning. But the Jewish section, right up to the barrier gates of Sea Gate\u2014which are guarded more vigilantly today than ever before by a private security force\u2014has given way almost wholly to a population mainly Hispanic and African American. There are fewer stores; possibly no supermarkets; and, I am given to believe from newspaper reports, a higher crime rate than in my day. When last I looked, the storefronts on Mermaid Avenue still stood, but most were boarded up at the windows and had nothing going on inside. I wondered then what residents did for a convenient drugstore, tailor, or shoe-repair shop. People in Sea Gate today must drive a good distance to a mall for all their marketing. At Surf Avenue and West 31st Street, where my two old apartment houses had been, two tall modern units of a housing project stand.\n\nConey Island is, of course, in lower Brooklyn, at the lowest tip, lying laterally along the southern front of that borough like an inverted anvil facing the Atlantic Ocean just outside the mouth of New York Harbor. It is attached to Brooklyn at the Gravesend section and runs from Norton's Point at the western end of Sea Gate, which it includes, eastward in a descending order of numbered streets that now contain the city's Aquarium at West 8th Street and end at Ocean Parkway. There Coney Island terminates at the beginning of a contiguous locality called Brighton and\/or Brighton Beach. Past Brighton is Sheepshead Bay, thriving in past days with seafood restaurants and flotillas of public, party-fishing boats. And on the south side of the bay along that same unbroken stretch of shorefront lies the smaller community of Manhattan Beach. Manhattan Beach was once prized for its formal hotels and upper-class residents and vacationers, who came mainly for the horse races in Sheepshead Bay. In a later life it had a pair of fancy casinos; these were not gambling places but dance halls presenting famous bands and singers of the time. Brighton Beach was known for its handball players and handball competitions. Manhattan Beach was considered the most well-to-do section; Sea Gate was next; then Brighton. Coney Island was the lowest in income level but by far the best known and most exciting. People from the other sections frequently came to ours to dance at our social clubs and ride the rides. We did not often go to theirs.\n\nWhile certainly not a slum, Coney Island was in my time a depressed area for its year-round dwellers, except for Sea Gate, and this is even truer today than in the past. It appears to me today a rather squalid scene, and it must have seemed so back then to others better off than we who weren't living there. The older my mother became, the more she detested the place for its harsh and rowdy intrusions, especially in summer, when the streets were constantly filled with people and noise, often late into the night. Screened apartment windows were open at night, for this was before the days when air conditioners were ubiquitous. My mother liked the bathing and, before the accident of the broken hip, would go to the beach on sunny days, taking along an empty milk bottle to fill with ocean water for washing the sand from her feet when she returned. But she was distressed and angered by the vulgar turmoil and ceaseless, turbulent motion, the sheer volume and activity, of the crowds everywhere. Bitterly she would denounce our part of the world as a _\"chozzer_ mart,\" a pig market. I might feel secretly chastened when I heard her, but I was also secretly unsympathetic, for I was part of the restless commotion and, once old enough for membership in one of the local social clubs, thoughtlessly helped contribute to the din and disorder of the street with our late-night banter and our club room's outdoor loudspeakers blasting away with \"jump\" music from the unrelenting record players within.\n\nWe were children from poor families, but didn't know it. I don't think I have ever in my life thought of myself as underprivileged, as unfairly deprived of something I might reasonably wish to own and didn't. Although incomes were low, everyone's father did seem to have a job, and later everyone's older brother and sister; finally, we, too, were out of school and working. It was a blessing of our childhood to be oblivious of our low economic state and of how others might regard us. We had our beach and our boardwalk, our safe streets, the food and clothing we needed, and I don't believe the circumstance of moderate poverty was too upsetting to our parents either. Nearly all were immigrants and living on a roughly equal level. This was the nature of life; they had learned that in Europe. It was not stylish to bemoan. They expected life to be hard, and most were living better than they had been able to in the Old World. I doubt that many had known the luxury of running water, central heating, and indoor plumbing before they arrived in America. Until my mother and my brother, the latter a child of six, set out on the sea journey to New York from somewhere in western Russia\u2014they sailed separately on different voyages, for my father's first wife was still alive, and he and my mother had not yet met\u2014neither had seen an orange. My brother was offered his first one on the steamship carrying him across the Atlantic. Because it was an object alien to him, he refused it. The next day, after hearing from others how wonderful the flavor was, he was eager to try, but the supply was exhausted; there were no more.\n\nThat was life, too.\n\nThe elders in our families worked hard, both the men and the women, and did not often quarrel. Quarreling was not how things got settled. They didn't drink to excess and seldom divorced, and, unless they were more artfully circumspect than my own generation, they didn't fool with the wives or husbands of their friends and neighbors.\n\nI once heard George Mandel, an early friend from Coney Island and the first of the people I knew to succeed in becoming a novelist, present in a television interview a description of Coney Island I wouldn't try to improve upon: If a person did have to grow up in a slum (he used that word _slum_ for comic exaggeration) he could imagine no better one.\n\nTHERE WERE apartment houses on just about every side street in my section of Coney Island and on every block of the avenues they crossed. All of the larger ones were brick buildings with three or four landings of apartments above the ground floor, which might contain a row of stores like Mr. Kaiser's tailor shop downstairs and, for a while as in mine, a corner grocery store, later remodeled into another couple of apartments. On every street were narrower, lower houses made for the most part of dull yellow brick, with porches up a stoop of stairs and basements below street level, and these could be dwelling places for two or three families, though many were owned and occupied by single families. Of the larger apartment houses, none but a few of the newer ones provided elevators. These were self-service, and for a while were baffling contraptions of great interest as well as places for restful, occasionally mischievous, play on rainy days. Pressing all the buttons to slow the passage of the elevator and irritate the next passengers was one of our tricks. A scene from this time I still preserve in my memory is of aging men and women (eventually the old men and women were our fathers and mothers, and my own mother was among them) laboring up the steep flights of stairs, the women usually with arms filled with brown bags from the grocer or butcher. Anyone in our family going downstairs from our second-floor domicile was reminded to \"take down the garbage\" to the covered metal pails always waiting in the alleyway of our house. There were wooden houses, too, some with small yards in front and back, meager gardens, with an architecture of clapboard walls and sloping, shingled rooftops instead of the flat tops with the clotheslines and radio antennas of our building.\n\nScattered everywhere about the Island, mostly in neighborhoods near the beach, were complexes of bungalows and frame buildings called \"villas\" or \"courts\" or \"esplanades,\" which might all have been there before we were. Certainly, they were already in place when I came along to notice them, and were still there after the war when I married and moved away to attend college. These wooden structures of various sizes would lie silent and shut for nine months of the year and then teem with families who rented the cramped bedrooms and housekeeping units for the summer and came crowding into them excitedly with their bedding and baby carriages\u2014almost all of them arriving, it seemed, in the same few days. They would pour in from other parts of Brooklyn such as Williamsburg and East New York, and from Manhattan, the Bronx, and New Jersey, to pass the next few months in a bustling proximity to each other that would have been intolerable to people more cultivated and less sociable, and likely _was_ intolerable to the generation of young they reared. The summer renters would for the most part spend their months in these quarters happily, for the same families returned with bedding and growing children to the same rudimentary \"villas,\" \"courts,\" and \"esplanades\" year after year. Some of the boys came to be summer friends; their return was awaited and they grew acceptable enough to play in our card games for pennies or soda-bottle tops, or to qualify for a position on the Surf Avenue punchball team of West 31st Street, especially when we were short of players.\n\nA small summer bungalow structure of two stories with a center courtyard stood on my side of the street between my apartment house and a lesser one at the corner of the Railroad Avenue trolley stop. This other apartment house had a candy store on street level, in which Mr. Moses and his wife and daughter worked; they lived in an apartment in the back. He sold newspapers, too, both Yiddish and English, and for a long time the telephone in the public telephone booth inside his store was the only one on the street and was used by every family, both for making calls and for receiving them. In those days, an unseen telephone operator was still on duty at what was called the switchboard, a woman who said \"Number please?\" Any of us hurrying to summon anyone to the candy store to receive a phone call could expect a two-cent tip, the going rate. My sister recalls now that any boy calling her for a date had to do all his courting and preliminary kidding around on the telephone in Mr. Moses's candy store.\n\nAcross the street from my house was an expansive facility called the West End Villa\u2014a row of one-family bungalows. Off-season, we would play our games of tag on the porches and over the railings. Behind these, inside a development on two levels similar to those in today's motels, were strips of adjoining summer apartments, and it was due to one of these, probably, that my brother met the girl who would in time become his wife. Perhaps he didn't actually meet her there, but her family rented one of these apartments summer after summer, and I was familiar with her parents and her brother, Ben, before they became his in-laws.\n\nHer name when we met her was Perle; then, for some reason, for one or two seasons she changed it to Lynn. There was something of a fashion then among young women\u2014though in that period we said girls\u2014for changing names. I remember seeing a girl named Gertrude whom I'd known all through primary school suddenly pointed out to me as Gail when she showed up as a potential date for one of the fellows in the \"senior\" group of a social club of which I was already, and only, a junior member. She was then in my French class in high school. The club was in a store with a back room on a side street two blocks away from my house and was called Club Alteo. What was unusual about the Alteo was that it was already second generation; many of the members, then in their twenties, were the younger brothers of the original organizers, who, maturing into full-fledged adults, had outgrown the social and athletic activities of the numerous \"SACs\"\u2014social and athletic clubs\u2014always flourishing in Coney Island and in Brighton Beach, too. I was one of a group of neighborhood boys in our mid-teens already organized into the Alteo Juniors. We were permitted to use the club room for our weekly meetings and as a place to hang out during the day and into the early evening to listen to music, listen to the tall stories told by the older guys, and learn how to dance the lindy hop. We learned as well to distinguish between the very good music of bands such as Jimmy Lunceford's, Duke Ellington's, and Count Basie's, and the more popular \"commercial\" stuff of Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey, with Benny Goodman preferable to the latter two but not nearly as enthralling as the best, who without exception were black. In the evenings, when their own social activities got going, our elders showed us the door, outside which we often loitered awhile on the sidewalk just to watch.\n\nGertrude, now Gail, was brought to the club room by an older, pretty sister, and Gail was wearing lipstick and mascara, done up in a way none of us had seen her before. In short order she became the girlfriend of twenty-two-or-three-year-old Murray Beckerman. It was conceded by his peers that he was the best lindy hopper in the club and, along with a nonmember named Curly Klein, good enough to take the floor without shame at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. In all other ways he seemed unremarkable to us teenagers when compared to the George Mandels, Roy Roycemans, and Danny Rosoffs who were also members: George and Roy could talk of Beethoven as well as Basie; and it was from the lips of Danny the Count that I first heard the names Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Dos Passos, all uttered without a given name, as though they had long been familiars of his. He spoke to me about them because he knew I was already writing short stories (short stories that were spectacularly immature and inept). I confess that even back then I began to wonder whether Danny had actually read these authors or had merely read _about_ them. I wonder still.\n\nNeither Gertrude nor I could ever be at ease with each other after exchanging glances in the club room. She was Gail there and Gertrude in the French class. But she, with a nubile bosom dauntlessly accentuated by the tight sweater and uplifting undergarment cups then in style, could note with confidence that she was attractive to older men in their twenties; whereas we, poor things at fifteen, didn't know of any girls our own age who might be attracted to us. Young people then were slower to mature socially than they seem to be today; at least that was true of many of the teenage boys in Coney Island.\n\nIn a little while, my sister-in-law, Lee's wife, reverted to her original name of Perle, to the confusion of my mother. (I don't know what eventually happened to Gertrude\/Gail.) When I got married, which I did at twenty-two, in October of 1945, it was to a young woman named Shirley. As my mother aged, the distinction between Perlie and Shirley was not always easy for her to preserve. With increasing frequency, and with exasperation, too, for she was always sufficiently alert to recognize her slip as she was making it, she would use one name when calling or referring to the other, much the same way that I now, as I age, occasionally blunder with my second wife by addressing her by the name of my first. This is not a sage thing for a husband to do.\n\nJUST ABOUT AS NUMEROUS as the bungalow dwellings for summer renters were the bathhouses for people who came just for the day. There were bathhouses down the length of Coney Island, almost all of them between Surf Avenue and the boardwalk and beach, and on just about every street. Most of them were simple facilities with lockers and showers, such as Hahn's Baths just down the block from where we lived, and Ward's baths across the street facing it. The strongest appeal they exercised was their immediate access to the beach and the ocean. My sister remembers working at Hahn's one summer as the locker girl in the female section; while still a schoolgirl, she worked other summers at one of the many soft-ice-cream stands on the boardwalk\u2014we called it \"frozen custard\"\u2014and intermittently as a \"shill\" at one of the games of skill or chance, pretending to be playing as a paying customer in order to draw others to witness how she fared and thus be enticed to play, too. There was little need for kitchen services in any of these humble bathhouses, for an abundance of food stands on and underneath the boardwalk provided almost everything that might be craved in the way of fast food and soft drink.\n\nHere and there, extending right up to the boardwalk, were a number of elaborate swimming establishments featuring outdoor pools with water slides and diving boards, together with a few simple sports activities like Ping-Pong, shuffleboard, basketball shooting, and, highly favored by those who knew how to use them, punching bags. Raven Hall (named after one of the prominent early developers, Ravenhall, I've just found out), which was far down in the amusement area and functioning long before I was, seemed by far the largest. Later on, Steeplechase augmented its myriad features by installing a pool that might have rivaled Raven Hall in size. Washington Baths seemed to have the most loyal following: People I've met through the years say they bought season tickets summer after summer. McLaughlin Baths, right in our neighborhood, drew its patrons from the Scandinavian, mainly Norwegian, and Irish populations in Bay Ridge, an area distinguished for a brawling toughness and the predictable anti-Semitism then generally common in America among groups that were not Jewish. The younger, high-spirited, rougher ones at McLaughlin's took occasional pleasure in loudly mocking the Jews on the beach by whom they found themselves surrounded, and once or twice each summer there was a report of some fracas brewing that, as far as I know, never did erupt into anything of large consequence. The war seemed to put an end to that kind of local friction.\n\nThe swimming pools at most of these establishments were located right up against the boardwalk and always lured spectators from the throngs of curious strollers, who paused to watch through the openings in the enclosing fences. These were, after all, the only swimming pools ever seen by any of us except on the screens of movie theaters. It was good to have proof they were real. The swan dive and the quick jackknife from the low and medium diving boards were the favorites; perhaps they were also the easiest. Likewise, the men adept with the rhythms and variations of the punching bag happily worked up sweats performing for admiring viewers assembled on the boardwalk. On the beach, athletes who stood on their heads balanced on the abdomen and knees of supine girlfriends were so prevalent as to hardly command more than a glance. A disappearing species of beach gymnast was the athlete who stood on his hands and walked about a bit in jerky strides. I haven't seen any of these clumsy jokers perform that stunt in years, and I hope I never see one again. Pinochle games played by elderly Jewish men with vigorous gestures and impassioned discussions were more exciting spectator sports as we tried to learn the subtleties of the game and figure out what these characters from the Old World were gloating and disputing about. Portable radios made their appearance with huge batteries in large cases that seemed to weigh half a hundred pounds. Ukulele and banjo players abounded. It was on the beach in Coney Island that I first heard western ballads such as \"Clementine\" and \"Red River Valley.\"\n\nBACK IN THE EARLY THIRTIES, some shrewd speculators decided to erect a luxury hotel right at the boardwalk on West 29th Street, the Half Moon Hotel, and soon afterward they were tormented by shadows of insolvency. The Half Moon, so christened after Henry Hudson's vessel, remains the most majestic building in Coney Island, and I think I remember watching it going up from the window of my apartment. I knew nothing about Henry Hudson and his fatal voyage then, but I would have thought someone more knowledgeable might have proposed a name auguring better prospects for the venture than the end met by that seafaring explorer.\n\nIn retrospect, it's hard to guess what in the world it was that led those crafty real-estate operators to suppose that, with the charisma of Coney Island already fading among the swells, people with enough money to go somewhere else would choose to come to Coney Island. The Half Moon Hotel achieved a brief flare of notoriety in about 1940 with the death of one of the few figures acquiring some measure of fame through association with Coney Island, a man named Abe Reles. Although he never lived in Coney Island, Abe Reles, who hailed from Brownsville, a fiercer area of Brooklyn distinguished for its gangsters and a prizefighter named Bummy Davis, was secretly sequestered in the hotel in protective custody as a material witness while waiting to give crucial testimony at the trial of some men involved with a gang known as Murder, Incorporated. Reles broke into public notice with a fatal splash when he either fell, jumped, or was thrown from the window of his hotel room before he could testify. At the time very few people other than the police authorities knew he was there, and although it was never proved, the rumor existed, and still is believed, that he was helped out the window by the very policemen to whose protective custody he had been entrusted. Eventually, after the war, during which it was utilized by either the coast guard or the navy, the hotel became a Hebrew home for the aged, and this metamorphosis, though somewhat somber, was an apt symbol for the old and faltering Island itself, which had certainly seen more vital days. My mother in her last years spent some time there as a resident, following emergency surgery for a strangulated hernia from which she never regained her strength. The surgery also revealed that she had become diabetic. No doubt she would have greatly preferred living with one of us, provided her presence was welcomed warmly and no source of conflict; a cynical realist, she knew that wasn't possible and didn't expect it to happen, and, to my knowledge, she didn't ask. Consistent with modern convention, none of the three of us, all married by then and living in confining apartments, felt we could have her. The subject never arose, but I would guess that each of us secretly suffered at least some remorse. In our family, we did not often talk about sad things.\n\nEVEN BEFORE WORLD WAR II, the Island as diversion and playground had been fading in verve and enterprise, its amusement area persistently shrinking. And since the end of that war, in 1945, with the exception of a few government-financed public housing projects, there has not (to my knowledge) been a single new residential dwelling of size constructed. The amusement area, once as up-to-date as any in the world and with a reputation for being just about the best, has not provided a spectacular new attraction since the Parachute Jump from the 1939\u201340 New York World's Fair was installed by Steeplechase.\n\nConey Island still presents a boardwalk that seemed then, and probably still does, the longest, widest, and most splendid boardwalk in the whole world. It has a wide beach of fine sand its entire length, a beach that continues well beyond Coney Island into Brighton Beach and Manhattan Beach. One has only to stumble with shock and lacerated arches upon the shorefronts of Nice or the English Brighton\u2014and remember with a sense of affront that these are also called beaches\u2014to begin to fully appreciate the spacious shorefront of Coney Island as a truly distinguished natural treasure.\n\nAnd Coney Island also had for us those long, paved streets, almost entirely free of motor traffic except in summer, that were better playgrounds than any recreation engineer has ever devised.\n\nOur favorite street game in spring and summer was punchball, a variation on conventional baseball played with a springy rubber ball\u2014the \"Spaldeen\" was best, but it was costlier than the others. The ball was propelled from home plate by a fist rather than by the shaft of a broomstick or any other kind of bat, hence the name \"punchball.\" In fall, we played hockey on roller skates and also a game with a football called association, involving passing, dodging, and tagging, with no tackling or blocking. In this I excelled as a receiver. Then, once we learned how, we played real football on the sand beach. The first time we played a team on hard ground, and that was in Sea Gate, I was astounded at just how hard the ground was when you fell and struck it. We wore no padding or helmets. Earlier, when we were still more juvenile than adolescent, there were games like \"hango-seek\" (hide-and-go-seek), tag, and follow-the-leader on the beach and around the empty summer bungalows, with me almost always the leader. For follow-the-leader on the boardwalk summer evenings, I originated a variation based on guile and impishness rather than agility. I would excuse myself with winning politeness to people standing in conversation, step between them, and move on. The second fellow was obliged to do the same. With the interruption from the third, suspicion was aroused, and by the fourth or fifth, the victims broke off to stare and caught on, usually with good-humored surprise. The longer the line, the broader the laughter. In barrooms, waiters and bartenders didn't tolerate us with such good humor. I, the leader (in follow-the-leader, one almost always remained the leader; if I fell in jumping from one porch railing to another, I insisted the others would have to fall, too) would enter innocently, make my way around as though in search of someone, and exit through another door, while the second young fellow was already coming in as though looking for me, and after him a third, innocently trailing both of us. It was the fourth or fifth who would be roared at and shooed out. And the one after him would hesitate to go forward and unhappily have to move to the end of the line, while, I of course, was always spared.\n\nA typical Saturday morning in spring and summer found us playing a punchball game against a team from another block\u2014which more often than not we won\u2014then coming home triumphantly for a well-earned glass of cold milk and hungering for lunch. Saturday early afternoon saw us going to the movies with a dime for admission and a nickel more for candy to see a double feature (two movies), the latest episode in a cowboy or Tarzan serial, a newsreel, and a Mickey Mouse or Betty Boop cartoon or travelogue thrown in, and then walking home afterward in serious discussion of plans for the rest of that day. Sunday usually was simpler, with most of the morning spent eating breakfast and perusing the colored funny papers and the advertisements of toys we'd like someday to own, such as two-wheel bicycles, and trips we'd dream of someday being able to take. From the beginning of time we had two large movie palaces to attend\u2014the RKO Tilyou and Loew's Coney Island. Then, on an empty lot on Surf Avenue around my corner one block away, a new one, the Surf Theater, was constructed, and we had three. The opening of the Surf Theater was an event I remember. The picture was _One Night of Love_ and starred the opera singer Grace Moore, who was killed in an airplane crash not many years later. Much of the music, including the title song, was based on melodies of Puccini, and my mother went, too.\n\nTHE AMUSEMENT AREA of Coney Island\u2014that stretch encompassing the rides and the games, the food stands and the penny arcades\u2014was of greatest interest to us in the cooler days of spring and late summer, or to break the routine even on hot days when one of us would get hold of some free passes to Luna Park or Steeplechase. These were the only two true amusement parks then existing, each charging an admission price and incorporating attractions exclusively its own, in name if not necessarily in originality: The slow boat ride through darkness was in one of the parks called the Tunnel of Love and in the other (I believe) the Red Mill. All the individual attractions required a specific ticket of admission or a separate fee, and at Steeplechase everyone had to pay extra for the Parachute Jump. Stauche's indoor arena, one of the original large restaurants early in the century, was still standing, but now it was a place where prizefights were occasionally held and where marathon dance contests were for a while in vogue. For half a mile between Surf Avenue and the boardwalk, past Steeplechase almost to Feltman's, there was (and is) a pedestrian thoroughfare called the Bowery, the name appropriated, of course, from that earlier boulevard of fabled excess in lower Manhattan. Almost every inch of it was consecrated to some kind of attraction, and even the cross streets were crammed with sideshows, games, rides, and food stands, with the cries of barkers and ticket sellers, the sputtering of engines and the rolling turmoil of wheels, and the maniacal bedlam of amplified mechanical laughter crashing incessantly from the various spook rides. And famous Feltman's was still in business, though inexorably expiring, still large and garish but waning from neglect now that Diamond Jim Brady and other bigwigs from the Gay Nineties had themselves passed on.\n\nAt one point on the Coney Island boardwalk, a Howard Johnson's ice cream stand suddenly surfaced, with many very bright lights and twenty-six different flavors. Having overcome our surprise, we stared with wonder at this oddity and scanned the names of the flavors, musing on why, with vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry standard, and burnt almond and butter pecan available, and then pistachio for the plain novelty of color rather than for any particular excellence of taste, there was a need for so many more flavors. And who in hell was Howard Johnson, of whom we had never heard? On the boardwalk we preferred our soft ice cream, our frozen custard, to the true ice cream we normally enjoyed at home or in our street, and Howard Johnson's was soon gone. Twice there were bold ventures with outdoor bowling alleys on the boardwalk. These were exotic gambles, too. Bowling then was still _goyisheh naches_ , (Gentile pleasure), and these didn't last long, either.\n\nWe learned early on that a boiled frankfurter anywhere is not as good as one broiled on a grill to the point of splitting\u2014you only had to ingest a boiled one in a stadium at a professional baseball game to know you were tasting only hot water and mustard; that the Wonder Wheel with its rolling, swaying gondolas, which is one of the two mechanical attractions from our antiquity still in operation, was obviously superior to George C. Tilyou's Ferris wheel in Steeplechase Park, but that both were for sightseeing squares or for adults with children who were squares and still too young to be exposed to the terror of anything but height; that the Cyclone, which is the second old-timer still extant, was far and away the best of all roller coasters; and that it was futile to search anywhere in the universe for a tastier potato knish than Shatzkin's when they were still made by hand by old women who were relatives or friends of the family. (Although I still run into mulish people, hogs, who didn't mind the thicker, yellow Gabila's, and to people brought up in adjacent Brighton Beach who still salivate at the mention of Mrs. Stahl's, the queen of potato knishes there.)\n\nAll of this was practical, worldly knowledge that taught us always to look for fair value for money. We also learned at an early age a fact of capitalism that directed us toward the antithetical principle that it is usually impossible to obtain fair value. The difference, to Aristotle as well as Karl Marx, is known as profit. We learned this first of all from the Coney Island barkers who offered to guess your weight, guess your age, guess your name or occupation, the country you came from or the date you were born, guess anything at all about you including the color of your underwear, for a dime, a quarter, a half dollar, or a dollar, the prize at stake improving with the increase in the amount bet. The fact was that the barker could never lose. He knew no more about the tricks of this trade than you do, but he always came out ahead, right or wrong, because the customer could never win. Phrased more nicely, while the customer might walk away with a prize, the proprietor could never lose, because the prize at stake invariably cost him less, considerably less, than the patron had spent to win it. Of course, the customer also walked away with the satisfying emotional reward of having outsmarted the expert, while the proprietor in turn enjoyed the emotional reward of knowing he had just pocketed another piece of small change as profit.\n\nBut honest to God, a kid could win a whole coconut for a penny at the penny-pitch game and, once having acquired the know-how, knock a hole through the soft spot in the head of the shell with a hammer and nail to get at the milk, then smash the whole coconut into fragments to be distributed liberally to everyone around. The trick to winning a coconut was not to toss each penny at one of the metal button targets that would set off a ringing to announce a winner but to aim it into a patch of losing pennies already lying there and set several of them vibrating down the incline onto one of the buttons.\n\nThe catch to winning a coconut was that nobody really enjoyed eating coconut or drinking coconut milk. But we all had to pretend we did in order to savor the victory.\n\nTHERE WAS A COMPETITION between Luna Park and Steeplechase that dated back to the founding of both at the turn of the century. I forget the names of the two men involved with the spectacular opening of Luna Park a few years after Steeplechase, but Steeplechase the Funny Place was solely the creation of an individual named George C. Tilyou. Tilyou was a born entrepreneur. As a boy, he began accumulating capital by selling vials of Coney Island sand and bottles of Coney Island seawater to wide-eyed visitors. Even people from places with beaches of their own returned home with precious souvenirs of Coney Island sand and ocean water. His idea for a Ferris wheel, the first in Coney Island, came from one he saw while on his honeymoon at the Exposition in Chicago in 1893. He undertook construction of a copy half its size and ballyhooed it from the day he broke ground as the largest in the world. When the first of his amusement parks burned to the ground in one of Coney Island's periodic fires, he promptly began recovering his losses by charging people ten cents to enter and see the smoking ruins. \"If Paris is France,\" he is reported saying, \"then Coney Island between June and September is the world.\" This was not wholly true. Tilyou died in 1914, nine years before I was born, and is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, and all that any of us knew about him was that his name was on Steeplechase Park and on one of our two capacious movie theaters, and that there was, or had been, a family home on Surf Avenue across the street from the amusement park. It was a wooden affair of a couple of floors set back from the street, with that family name, TILYOU, carved on the vertical face of a stone step at the bottom of a small entranceway with the letters already sunk almost halfway into the ground at the edge of the sidewalk. We would note the marker and the house on the way to his movie theater. It didn't occur to us then that he was already dead. It didn't cross our minds that he had once been alive. We never thought of him at all as somebody human, or thought of his name as any more of a family name than the equally improbable one of Loew.\n\nOf the two amusement parks, there seemed to be a near unanimous preference for Luna Park, and we were inclined to be contemptuous of anyone, usually someone from someplace else, who raved about Steeplechase. The most we could feel about Steeplechase was that it was \"all right\"\u2014we couldn't honestly say, \"It stinks.\" Once we got inside Luna Park, there seemed to be a good deal more open space in the middle in which to meander and more interesting things to look at. The architecture was a fantastic, almost nightmarish corruption of the Moorish and the Byzantine in circus-clown colors of chalk white and cherry red with ornamental stripes of black and bright green on minarets, spires, and onion domes. Every few hours Luna Park offered a free circus in a small tented ring to everyone already inside the park. Its commencement was heralded by a short parade of a few listless elephants and other performers to the beat of a drummer and the notes of a trumpet and trombone. I remember a high-diving act outside in public view, I'll take my oath I do\u2014someone diving from a tall platform into a thimbleful of water; and I'll swear to this one, too: a man or a woman shot from a cannon into a net a good distance away, maybe four or five times daily.\n\nLuna Park began with the Shoot-the-Chutes, which was a pretty good ride to go on and to watch, a flat-bottomed boat sliding down a high incline slippery with water into a bouncing splash in a large pool at the bottom and coasting to a stop. The best part, sadly, was waiting for your turn. It also had the Mile Sky Chaser, the highest roller coaster in Coney Island. God, it was high. And something to stare up at from the ground, that long pull of the cars to the top of the first descent. With wonder and dread, I mustered enough nerve to approach it as a customer for the first time at the age of eleven or twelve. It was taken for granted that as a step toward maturity every boy would sooner or later have to ride the Mile Sky Chaser, as older ones already had; this was another in the progression of rites of initiation. I contemplated this looming challenge with the pragmatic and stoic frame of mind that has stood me in good stead in other perilous situations since then and with which I long ago came to face the necessary act of dying itself: If others could go through it and survive, I could, too.\n\nAs it turned out, the Mile Sky Chaser was a cinch\u2014after the first time. Though high, it was tame, not nearly as fast or as twisting and jolting as the Tornado or the Thunderbolt, or, grandest of all, the Cyclone, which was reserved by everyone for last, the consummation of the roller-coaster agenda. I worked up to the big event of the Cyclone over one or two summers by growing used to and scornful of the lesser rides. The easiest of all the roller coasters was the rather childish one in Steeplechase. It was nothing much, and not intended to be in that rather mannerly playground, and except for a series of rapid bumps at the conclusion\u2014they were bumps, not dips\u2014it provided no surprises. Luna Park had a better, minor one, called the Dragon's Gorge, which, inventively, was partly indoors and partly in darkness. I'm not sure how much later I mastered the Tornado and the Thunderbolt; these were speedy and rattling variations of each other, with women screaming in true or pretended fear and men with their mouths gaping, pretending to grin. But first came the day of my induction to the Mile Sky Chaser, accompanied for morale, as was usual, by a couple of friends who had already been and guaranteed that it was nothing.\n\nAs it turned out, it was not only a cinch, it soon proved a bore. After experimenting over time with a seat at the very front, the back, the middle, I could anticipate accurately every dive and turn of the Mile Sky Chaser with my eyes closed better than, years later, I was ever able to read an aerial map in the air corps with my eyes open, or am able even now to read a road map. As a matter of fact, we often would take this whole ride, and others, with our eyes closed in attempts, mainly futile, to amplify our sensations of thrill and fright. Soon the only excitement the Mile Sky Chaser yielded was the chance to display to marveling strangers how coolly we braved its apparent perils.\n\nNone of us, then or afterward, was ever able to be that casual about the Cyclone or to chance the same liberties. I was discharged from the army in May of 1945\u2014the war against Japan was still on when our government began demobilizing\u2014and found myself back home during a spell of beautiful weather in spring with little idea of what to do with myself during the day. My cellar clubs had passed away from attrition. In an ardor of liberation, I went hurrying down Surf Avenue in civilian pants and my army field jacket, looking for any old friend to rejoice with. Through a coincidence of good luck emanating from bad, I was among the first to be released from the service under the point system newly in effect. The bad luck was that I had lost most of my pocket money in a dice game or card game on a base in San Angelo, Texas, and thus happened to be on hand that weekend when an order arrived to discharge a certain number of officers. That last part was the good luck. Back home, it seemed that just about everyone I knew from the neighborhood was still away. Suddenly, on Surf Avenue, I spied Davey Goldsmith, whom I hadn't seen in three years, home on furlough and doing the same thing I was, looking for someone to pal around with. We embraced each other jubilantly and then hurried, almost running, down into the amusement area in search of old times, our receding childhood. I was better at schoolwork than Davey, but he was smarter and more self-assured than I was in just about all other ways. (The last time I saw him he was prospering as the owner of a division of a hatband manufacturing company for which he had worked since finishing high school.) At Nathan's Famous, we gulped down some hot dogs and a couple of bags of their unrivaled fried potatoes, and that indeed was exactly like old times. It was _better_ than old times, because we now had cash in our pockets for everything we might feasibly want. (As an officer with flight pay on combat duty overseas, I had been able to send home plenty.) When we went on the Parachute Jump, I was tense again for just the few seconds of suspense that preceded the unexceptional drop along protective guide wires. But coasting down, I had to wonder why anyone would want to ride it a second time. The Cyclone, it turned out, hadn't diminished with age\u2014its age or mine\u2014or with familiarity. We rode it once. I don't know what Davey was doing, but I was holding on for dear life through the racing plunges and veers, and I tottered off with a thumping ache in my head and a wrenched neck. And all at once I understood without needing to put anything into words that this was a part of my life that was definitely over. After sixty missions overseas, I was now selective in my adventures, and I had no doubt that I would never want to ride that or any other roller coaster again. Davey Goldsmith might love to, but Joey Heller wouldn't. I was twenty-two and would soon be engaged to be married and I was too old. And like someone very much older, for I have crossed similar thresholds of loss since, I felt with sadness that something dear was behind me forever, but I also felt that loss with tremendous relief. It is often pleasing to be free of even good things, and childhood is one of them. Youth is another.\n\nFollowing the Cyclone, Davey guided me by trolley car to a fantastic clam bar in a Sheepshead Bay restaurant called Lundy's to teach me how to eat raw clams on the half shell. I had never before even looked a clam in the eye. I didn't think it could be done. Davey showed me it could, and I've been eating them ever since.\n\nWHILE STEEPLECHASE, \"the funny place,\" was also always the lesser place, it was not all that bad. Much of it was indoors under a vast roofed pavilion, away from the sun, shielded from rain. For ten or fifteen cents you could purchase entry to the park but not admittance to any of the rides, and many wise people did just that. There were food stands inside\u2014cotton candy, frankfurters, ice cream\u2014and games of skill and chance, like the penny-pitch for the coconuts. There were people to watch, and of best value were those people who had bought tickets to all the rides and used up very few of them; if asked, they might give you the rest of their tickets as they were exiting. There was, without fee, a theater with comfortable seating for about three hundred, on whose stage unsuspecting patrons who had just taken the Steeplechase ride and were exiting on foot suddenly found themselves in the spotlight as spectacles before an audience. They would have to cross that stage to escape, braving the pranks of two or three jesters in wait for them, one a stunted clown; the second costumed as a farmer, or a New Yorker's stereotyped image of a hick farmer; and the third as a rangy cowboy. There were several shaky vertical columns of painted barrels strung along ropes, and these might abruptly begin to move, as would various shuttling sections of the floor. Also waiting to surprise them were mild electric shocks and upward gusts of air to raise the skirts of women and blow off men's hats. Those were the days in which men still wore hats, even to amusement parks in summer\u2014straw hats and panama hats. One of the costumed figures sported a long wooden clapper with which he threatened to whack fannies, another brandished a metal wand at the end of a wire cord connected to an electrical outlet, openly threatening shocks. People coming upon them onstage without warning and with an audience watching must surely have been stricken, if only for a second, with the bewildering terror that they had somehow dropped into a chamber containing some of the milder tortures of the first level of hell.\n\nFor twenty-five cents in Steeplechase you could buy a circular pink ticket with numbers 1 to 25 that entitled you to twenty-five attractions. The tickets came on a loose white string that went about the wearer's neck to protect against loss. For fifty cents you bought a blue ticket that allowed you thirty-one attractions, the added six being the premium rides that were judged the best of the lot. Our practice was to get inside any way we could and then to politely ask well-dressed ladies and gentlemen moving in the direction of the exits if they were leaving and if so, could we have the remainder of their tickets. There was little reason to refuse us. Many of the elderly would use hardly any of their tickets, sometimes riding only on the elegant carousel\u2014created originally for some German king by a master bridge-builder in Leipzig\u2014on which they could smoothly circle for several minutes seated on the benches in one of the ornate gondolas. And in this way we could accumulate enough tickets to go on any ride as many times as we wanted, with the result that we soon didn't want to go on any.\n\nLUNA PARK, as I've said, seemed to us much the better of the two competitors. Yet Luna Park closed first, a few years after the war ended, following a few fires and some desperate and futile attempts to arrest the critical decrease in customers. A housing project of complex design built by private developers for people of middle income now stands in its place.\n\nSteeplechase held on gamely into the sixties before it gave up the battle and closed shop.\n\nA few years before that, I went there one afternoon with my friends George Mandel and Mario Puzo on what proved to be a final trip. Mario had by then published two novels, _The Dark Arena_ and _The Fortunate Pilgrim_ , but not yet _The Godfather._ George had published _Flee the Angry Strangers_ and _The Wax Boom._ My _Catch-22_ had appeared shortly before, in 1961. I had met Mario years earlier through George. It was a lazy, drowsy day, and the three of us had come from the city with our children, I with my two, George with his two, and Mario with one or two of his five.\n\nThe very qualities that had disappointed us in the past made Steeplechase now ideal for languid fathers in their forties there with young children. It was clean, it was orderly, it was safe. While the children chased about in gawking exploration and enjoyed themselves first on one ride that moved slowly around in a circle, then on another that did exactly the same thing, the three of us could rest calmly on a bench and talk quietly about such things as publishers, book advertising, advances, and royalties, and that lousy Book-of-the-Month Club that had paid no attention to any of us. Luckily for us, the kids didn't want to go on many rides that would have necessitated our going with them, and we weren't really eager to go on any. Coming in, Mario, who was not from Coney Island and was rather portly, had chanced the Magic Barrel. He sank down slowly to the revolving floor and was unable to right himself, presenting a ludicrous picture as he rolled around there helplessly for a minute, laughing, with an unlighted long, long cigar in his hand, until finally the attendant in crimson coat and green jockey cap walked in and helped him through. After that he wanted no more. The place was very still and rather empty that bright afternoon. After a couple of pleasant hours, we prepared to leave, and a thought about the passing of generations occurred to me as we walked toward the exit: It struck me that if a kid like the one I used to be approached and asked for our tickets, he would have gotten from us three blue ones that were just about complete, except for the number-one ride punched for Mario. The next time I visited Coney Island, Steeplechase was no longer there, and only the red skeleton of the old Parachute Jump marked the spot, like a funereal obelisk.\n\nEACH YEAR AFTER LABOR DAY, the traditional end of the summer season at most American resorts, there was that week of parades on Surf Avenue quaintly mistitled Mardi Gras by promoters who didn't know or didn't care that the title was traditionally connected with spring and Lent. If you hate parades as much as I did then and still do, you would have loved to hate the ones at the Coney Island Mardi Gras, for they represented everything about parades that is sordid, tawdry, and synthetic. They were long and they were tiresome. They were intended to draw crowds to the Island for that extension of the summer's business, and this they did. Celebrity attendance was most prevalent during Mardi Gras, and the city's daily newspapers, which then numbered about seven, often printed smiling shots of someone from the movies who had been snapped there the day before as though having a good time.\n\nNegative as we felt, we nevertheless would go to the Mardi Gras just about every night, more for the rides and the food than the parades. Merely mixing with the crowds was diverting. Every night it was just about the same parade. One might be called \"Firemen's Night,\" another \"Policemen's Night,\" and so forth, but the floats were mostly identical, the same marching bands with honking brass and clarinets would go clumping by, and there was a goodly sprinkling of the ladies' auxiliaries to almost every group that marched. (Just about everything that marched had a ladies' auxiliary, and I'm still not sure what they are.) And we always had a nickel for at least one hot dog. The droves of people moving on the sidewalk in both directions and for the most part paying little heed to the marchers were potentially more interesting than the parades. On Saturday afternoon there was a different kind of procession called the \"Baby Parade,\" an utterly grotesque competition for which mothers prepared their helpless offspring for weeks in advance and paraded them along in strollers past judges in the passionate hope of winning distinction and a prize for their efforts and their tot. I doubt that the first prize was a scholarship to West Point.\n\nOne night I did see Mayor La Guardia ride by in a car in the Mardi Gras. He was wearing a brown fedora with the rolled brim of a cowboy hat. I confess I was thrilled. I was young and I was thrilled and I'm glad, for our vision of Fiorello H. La Guardia as a figure of exceptional integrity for one holding political office endures. Except for FDR, I cannot think of many since then I've felt worth a second look.\n\nBack when the area's permanent residential and seasonal population was almost entirely white, it was standard campaign procedure for political candidates for local or national office to make a stop in Coney Island. Then as now, the purpose for a politician was less to hobnob with voters than to be photographed with a frankfurter while on a leisurely stroll along the boardwalk, always smiling as though merry, introducing himself to people easily excited by the prospect of seeing their picture in a newspaper. Even before I turned impenitently cynical about all American contenders for elective position, I began to feel that this was too much of a condescending insult to impose on a low-income neighborhood already distressed with signs of unmistakable and irreversible decline. One of the more offensive images I still hold in memory is a newspaper picture of Nelson Rockefeller, campaigning either for himself or in support of some other Republican, sinking his good-natured teeth into a Coney Island hot dog. And one of the more ridiculous memories is of Henry Cabot Lodge, patrician scion of the impeccable New England line of Lodges, lending himself to that same demeaning ritual\u2014demeaning to himself and demeaning to the local electorate he was humoring. Because of his innate good taste, one\u2014this one\u2014can still take sadistic pleasure from the thought of the piercing abhorrence he no doubt was suffering and pray, with abiding malice, that some of the mustard dripped off his hot dog and ran down into his shirtsleeve. I remember remarking at the time that it was sufficient to have people like these in public office without having to put up with their fellowship as well, and that they wouldn't be walking through Coney Island smiling if they had to live there.\n\nTHE YEARS OF MY CHILDHOOD were the years of the Great Depression, although in childhood we didn't have a firm idea of everything that term signified. In our wonderful streets, we could play our games. Also wonderful was that our street was right outside the doors and windows of our apartment houses. We could see in an instant which of our friends were already out there and what kind of game was about to start. If in doubt, we could call down and ask. Possibly the most valuable of our resources were all the other children. Almost always there were enough children nearby of all ages to organize any kind of activity and field any kind of team.\n\nThis, then, was the block\u2014a section of a street between avenues that teemed with all the companionship we young ones needed, both boys and girls, and in the beginning our interests were centered almost exclusively on the block (not the whole street) that was our own. Our closest friends in school might be from other blocks on other streets, but outside school we didn't have much to do with them unless it was to challenge _their_ blocks to a game of punchball or hockey. When a family moved from one street to another, the children almost invariably attempted at first to maintain affiliation with the old block and resisted assimilation into the new. Occasionally, two blocks would decide to have a fight; when that happened, we would mobilize our respective forces a safe distance apart, throw stones at each other for a few minutes, and then break off to return to our customary diversions without antagonism, which probably hadn't existed in the first place.\n\nThe beach as much as the street exerted a strong influence on our daily activities. In summer we were there much of every warm day. What better place to be? In autumn we played football there, which meant we were spoiled and tenderized by the soft sand and unconditioned for the real game when the time came to play on standard terrain. I take it as a cause for some negative pride that not a single one of the fellows I grew up with ever amounted to much as an athlete, or tried to.\n\nThere was a rhythm to our sequence of play activities that was both seasonal and intuitive. One mild day in early spring the sun would be out and suddenly the kids on every block were punching grounders to each other in the middle of the street, and the punchball season was awakening. The girls were skipping rope on the sidewalk or playing hopscotch on numbered grids marked out in white chalk. There would come a certain moment after Labor Day when every boy seemed to understand that summer was definitely on the way out and it was time to start tossing footballs. The same was true of hockey\u2014sooner or later everybody roller-skated: All over the Island, on virtually the same day on every block, the flocks of flying footballs would thin and the grinding of steel-wheel roller skates would be heard in the land. At the beach in the summer, of course, there was the swimming, along with the occasional games of tag in the water and fetching things up from the bottom and the sunbathing out at the end of the mossy rock breakwater, over which we trained ourselves early to sprint with eye-catching agility across the irregular crags of massive stones. At night the busier streets were much too cluttered for games, and we would drift to the boardwalk to roam for hours, enviously watching the gaudy, kaleidoscopic world of grown-ups, until our big brothers or sisters were sent to find us amid the sauntering throngs and pull us home to sleep.\n\nConsidering how loosely we were guarded, the late hours we kept, and the vast influx of strangers into the Island each summer, it's surprising how little harm befell us. Where we lived, as I've stated, there was practically no crime and few serious accidents. I can't, for example, recall hearing of a single murder (other than the one occurring long before, outside a poolroom) in Coney Island up until the time I left to enlist in the army. I was not aware of any incident of child molestation or domestic abuse of any kind in any combination. One time, a strange male attempted to lure into his automobile Norma Goldman, who lived across the street with her family in the apartment we had formerly occupied; the street buzzed with that one for a day or so, and the net effect was an emphatic caution impressed upon all of us, boys and girls, against ever going off with a stranger. While still in my earliest grades of elementary school, a classmate who lived in my building, Jackie Keshner, was struck by a car at the corner and was out of school for a while with a leg in a cast; I would spend part of most afternoons keeping him up to date on our schoolwork, particularly on geography, which proved the easiest and most rewarding subject to transmit. In geography, I remember, we were gravely taught that bread is \"the staff of life.\" We weren't taught what the phrase means, and I still don't know. (Sadly, I sense that geography as a subject for early study is probably obsolete everywhere. It surely is needed: While planning a family trip to Italy in the summer of 1966, one of my two children, a middle-class teenager midway through a costly private school in Manhattan, wanted to know why, instead of journeying by steamship, we couldn't travel there by car.) Robbery? I heard of just one: An armored car at the Rubel Ice Company, off a good distance from where we lived, was held up by armed robbers who made good their getaway across Gravesend Bay by speedboat. But that still sounds like an industrial crime and, like most others of that class, had nothing to do with us. An interesting sidelight in our chronicle, though irrelevant, is that the Schechter chicken company, also a distance away, which supplied the freshly killed chickens that are still unmatched for flavor and texture by anything frozen or refrigerated for transport, was the small concern whose complaint against prevailing federal rules was the basis for the U. S. Supreme Court decision declaring the New Deal's NRA unconstitutional. The gangster Abe Reles, the Rubel Ice Company, and Schechter's chickens\u2014the historical high points that brought newspaper fame to our realm at that time.\n\nOne summer when I was just into my teens, a younger boy from a family in my building drowned. A nonswimmer, he had ventured, it was reported, out along the safety ropes into water over his head and was swept away when his hold was broken by a wave unexpectedly large. I knew his sister, a girl two years ahead of me in school; before the season had passed, he seemed to me almost forgotten. He had another sister substantially older, mature. She was a slight, black-haired girl with dimples, and I remember her face more distinctly than the others, although I don't recall that we ever exchanged so much as a nod of recognition. She had a boyfriend, and because of her boyfriend I was too bashful to meet her eye. His name was Jack, and at the beach the two of them were always lying entwined in each other's arms on a blanket or the sand, dozing, talking, kissing, under the boardwalk mostly, separating themselves from others in her family group, which also was not the custom. Strolling there and back, they always held hands or walked with their arms around each other. In the Club Alteo was a boy named Herbie with a girlfriend named Teddy, and these two were always to be seen there lying on a couch, in the back room or the open one. And next door to my own Club Highlight later on, there was a member of the Club Amo Pharmacy named Arnie with a girlfriend called Bobbie, and these two also were always either dancing sensuously cheek-to-cheek or lying together in a sweethearts' embrace in full view on one of the couches. I have no idea what happened to any of this trio of ardent and loving couples. Did their unembarrassed affections endure? Did they marry and remain constant? If they're alive, they are older than I am and they are strangers I'd rather not meet. I can picture them only as young and still interlocked in their devoted snuggles and, with much misgiving, I succumb to temptation to repeat some stanzas from A. E. Housman:\n\nWith rue my heart is laden  \nFor golden friends I had,  \nFor many a rose-lipt maiden,  \nAnd many a lightfoot lad.\n\nBy brooks too broad for leaping  \nThe lightfoot lads are laid;  \nThe rose-lipt girls are sleeping  \nIn fields where roses fade.\n\nRhymed lines about death or the lachrymose march of time are about as far as I ever was able to get in a struggle to like poetry, and I long ago gave up trying. Besides, of those three couples I've cited, just one of the performers, the girl Bobbie, had golden hair, while another's was honey brown. I cannot swear that the boys were lightfooted. I didn't often see them standing.\n\nALTHOUGH I DID NOT at the time fully appreciate the degree of danger, at least three times before leaving home I came close to dying young, to being killed accidentally: once, for a kite; again when swimming out too far; and a third, by an automobile while being chased by my brother one night after refusing to come upstairs to bed when called from a window by my mother. I was swift on sneakers and dodged away from him in play, not fear, and I was still giggling to myself like a dimwit when the car squealed to a stop in the nick of time, as they say, and I found myself in sudden headlights, resting against its grille. I had turned the flight from Lee into a game; I had done the same thing several years before on the day of my father's funeral. Then, older boys on the block, who well knew what was taking place that day after I had succeeded in convincing myself I didn't, had to chase me over the railings of the porches and surround me in order to take me in hand and conduct me into the automobile carrying us to the chapel, which I remember not at all and from which, because I was just past five, I possibly might have been kept away, and then to the cemetery, which I recall only vaguely. In the military, I came close innumerable times to dying young, too, but didn't appreciate that either until I saw blood pouring from a man wounded in my plane. I expect my war experience in this regard corresponds to that of every infantryman, marine, paratrooper, etc., going into modern battle for the first time. I, luckily, was spared that dreadful recognition until I was far along in my tour of duty, on my thirty-seventh mission. But after that, I was in a state close to panic as we took off from the landing strip at the start of every one of those missions remaining.\n\nAs for the kite: Older young men at the beach with unlimited funds would sometimes send batches of kites aloft on strings tied to each other, with the result that the central cord eventually developed quite a strong pull, and the ancillary ones, too. Watching these grown-ups by myself one time, I saw one string of kites tear loose and drift inland. I moved up the street after them and saw them descending limply above my apartment house. I bounded up the staircases to the roof. There I found that the end of the string to which they had been attached had caught on a radio aerial wire strung a couple of feet out beyond the low protective brick parapet around the roof of our building. The closest one was dangling there by its cloth tail, but it wasn't close enough; it was out of reach. I couldn't see that at first. I set myself on that low wall of old stone and began carefully stretching out toward it as far as I could, inching myself out nearer and nearer the edge (while my mother sat downstairs talking to some neighbors in front of the house; what a ghastly surprise she might have received!). I still couldn't take hold of the string or the tail of the kite. Then I glanced down along the side of the building and saw myself perched very high up above our alley and the garbage cans below. I felt no fear. I went on leaning out farther, as though I hadn't caught on that I was putting myself at precarious risk. A moment's reflection could have reminded me that had I asked my mother, sister, or brother for the nickel or dime for a kite of my own, I probably would have had it; if not, I could have pilfered still another coin from the secret cache of my sister's I had discovered. But I wanted _that_ kite. It was a wish grown into a lust. I kept stretching and craving, craving and stretching. And then, for whatever obscure reason, I stopped; in an instant I decided to give up. I turned yellow, as they say, and, thank God, I simply quit. I straightened up carefully and inched back from the edge as cautiously as I had moved out, more frightened of a mistake in retreating than I had been in exposing myself to danger just a few seconds before.\n\nI feel now that I risked injury, could have been paralyzed or perhaps even killed, every time we played tag in an empty bathhouse and I vaulted from the top of one row of empty lockers to the top of another. And I _know_ now that I was almost killed every time I swam out to the bell buoy off our block, even though nothing really threatened me the several times I did.\n\nThe summer would begin officially for us, I suppose, on that day in late June we called \"promotion,\" when we would come running jubilantly home on that last day of school, waving our final report cards, me with my A in classwork and B+ in deportment, calling out to everyone we flew by that we had been promoted. \"Over the ocean\/tomorrow's promotion\" was a refrain we chanted. Another was \"No more classes\/no more books\/no more teachers'\/dirty looks.\" By that day, we were already brown enough from the sun to be envied by every pale working adult and summer renter, for we would have been swimming in the ocean and capering in our bathing trunks for more than a month, since May. The Coney Island beach, then as now, was packed inhumanely on Saturdays and Sundays, but that didn't bother us as children, for we were almost never in want of a place to sit. Instead, we were always in and out of the water, jumping off the wooden jetty leading to that breakwater of large rocks or skipping nimbly out to the end of the rocks to rest or watch the strange adults who fished for hours with sinkers, reel, and rod and never seemed to catch a damned thing except an orange crab. We could catch crabs at will by cracking open a mussel torn from the rocks and lowering it into the water on a string through one of the openings. But once we had the crabs, we didn't know what to do with them. Only when an Italian family moved onto the block across the street did I discover with amazement and a momentary nausea that mussels and crabs could be eaten.\n\n\"Where are you going with those?\" I inquired of Dolly Partini one day, when I came upon her returning from the beach with a pailful of black mussels.\n\nIt was many, many years before I could muster the courage to try one, and today I well up with optimistic cheer whenever I spot them on the menu in a new restaurant, offered either in a white Normandy broth or in red marinara.\n\nWe learned to swim in shallow water by the age of seven or eight. The waves in Coney Island are seldom very high, and even when rough are never very rough, in comparison with other Atlantic beaches. The shore is shielded in part on one side by Sandy Hook projecting out from New Jersey and by Rockaway Beach jutting out from Queens on the other, and isn't fully exposed to the sea. From the day we found nerve enough to try the \"dead man's float\" and discovered we could remain bobbing for more than a stroke or two, we began preparing ourselves for the swim to \"the third pole.\" This was not really to a pole but to the heavy rope connecting two of the poles farthest out and boxing in the protected swimming area at its outermost limit. The distance of each of the parallel lines of upright, sturdy wooden poles extending into the water from the first one, at the shore, to the farthest, third pole was at most between forty and fifty yards. At low tide we could walk more than halfway and, when we dared, pull ourselves out along the ropes for most of the rest. At the second and third poles, where the thick ropes of hemp were fastened above the waterline, we would have to let go and swim past the pole and take hold of the rope where it dipped down again. But the day we did get out to the third pole for the first time\u2014no matter how\u2014was a day on which we had accomplished a noble and heroic feat. To be able to swim there regularly back and forth without fear was to possess definite status in the young male community. After that, the only sea challenge left was the bell buoy, rocking and ringing about half a mile out, perhaps a quarter of a mile, maybe five hundred yards, past the rope at the third pole.\n\nThe buoy was of vivid red and bobbed and clanged so unremittingly that we soon turned deaf to the sound, as we did to the reverberations of the electric trolley cars rolling by on Surf Avenue practically in the apartment next door and on Railroad Avenue not much farther away. Relatives who came to spend a night for the first time would tremble in shock at the volume of the various noises they had suffered and to which our whole family had by then grown selectively deaf. All of us in our innocence and ignorance spoke freely of that bell buoy as a \"bellboy.\" Not until after I had my degree in English from New York University and a master's degree from Columbia and after a year more in English at Oxford on a Fulbright scholarship and two years teaching English at Pennsylvania State University, then a college, were my eyes opened upon meeting my friend Marvin Green, who then was selling artwork for slide shows at a time when I was commissioning some as a writer in the promotion department of _Time_ magazine and who had loved sailing since a child: The letters \"buoy\" were not pronounced \"boy\" as in _buoyant_ but more properly \"boo-ey,\" as in no other English word I know of. I laughed scornfully the first time I heard him say it and thought he was crazy. Of course I rushed to a dictionary to check. It still sounds better my way.\n\nThe swim to the bell buoy was not especially dangerous if, first, one knew how to swim, and, next, knew how to go about reaching it. There was really no way to work oneself up to the attempt through preparation. A day would simply arrive when one of us who hadn't yet been there felt certain enough that he could make it, and he would just tag along tensely with a group of other boys who had been to the bell buoy and survived. Valiant as we might prove, and young, we were nevertheless too craven and too maturely wise ever to try it alone.\n\nBlack-topped harbor poles far out in the water tilting left or right would tell us which way the ocean was flowing. We would move three or four blocks up or down the beach in order to have the tide carry us toward, rather than away from, the small, floating buoy with a circular platform for a rim that was our destination. The tide was usually powerful that far out; and if we had ever miscalculated and missed the bell buoy, I think we would have drowned when exhausted. We were too young and not nearly hardy enough to make the trip out there and back without a rest.\n\nStarting out, we would swim in a group directly to the safety rope at the third pole and there dawdle awhile to catch our breath, build up morale, and replenish what little energy we had expended. Then, with a unanimous nod, we would start swimming, not toward the buoy but heading straight out, banking on the flow of the tide to convey us horizontally toward the floating object that was our target. We would move leisurely, alternating a dog paddle with a comfortable variation of the sidestroke. We would talk in fragments of conversation as we progressed\u2014conversation that had no purpose other than to tacitly supply mutual reassurance\u2014and we would make sure we kept close together as we advanced outward. Gradually, we would find ourselves nearing the bell buoy. It was not a strenuous feat, really; it was more a matter of patience than endurance\u2014cool patience. You simply kept paddling calmly and talking calmly, and after a while you could begin making out the markings on the red paint and were nearly there. The only moments of anxiety might arise when you looked back at the dwindling, now miniature shore and realized\u2014if you had a haunted imagination like mine\u2014how very far away help was. Suddenly, everything normally large there was so _small!_ (Today, a mere revisit in memory to that Lilliputian picture is sufficient to chill.) But, of course, help of a sort was always near in the friends we were swimming with. And all the while, the tide was bearing us closer. When we found ourselves only fifteen or twenty yards away, we would turn over dynamically into the fashionable Australian crawl, as we then called it, and swim the rest of the way rapidly, to arrive in a racing splash. Once there, we would haul ourselves aboard onto our feet and, seesawing in tandem from one side to the other, clang that bell triumphantly to capture the attention of everyone on the beach. It was a revelation to observe the pressure with which the tide foamed against the base.\n\nThe swim back never had that keen thrill of drama that is often striking to a young boy taking a manful chance, mainly, I suppose, because each minute brought us closer to safety rather than away from it. And this time our target was a few miles of beach that would have been impossible to overshoot. One time, though, one boy in a group of four, tired badly and exclaimed that he didn't feel he could make it back. Without urgency, without even a sense of danger materializing, each of us simply took hold of a piece of him and cooperated in hauling him gently in, close enough to the rope at the third pole for him to manage the last few yards alone. It was not an occasion for exultation. I don't think we felt then that we had just saved a life; we didn't really believe he'd been in danger of dying.\n\nBut I don't recall that I ever set out on a swim to the bell buoy after that. I doubt that he did either. His name was Irving Kaiser, the same Irving Kaiser who lived in the apartment directly below ours\u2014a year younger than I, he was thinner, too, and I was thin\u2014and the same one who was killed by an artillery shell in Italy six or seven years later. I am more saddened by his death as I write about him now than I believe I let myself be at the time the news reached me, and even when I was back living in Coney Island and seeing his mother frequently. I believe I had by then already trained myself defensively to stifle painful emotion. I am walking proof of at least part of Freud's theories of repression and the domain of the unconscious, and perhaps, in writing this way here and in other things I've published, of denial and sublimation, too.\n\nToday, I wouldn't try that swim for a million dollars, tax-free, although I don't doubt I could make it there and back. It's this haunted imagination that's mine still.\n\nMy brother had no recollection at all of the episode of the chase and the car when I brought it up some years ago during one of our infrequent spells of hesitant family reminiscence. With the benign revisions made by time in his perceptions, to his ungrudging mind I had always been \"a good kid\" and, though past sixty, still was. He was proud of me and proud of his son, Paul, who was doing well first as a talent agent and later in television production. Together, we had been fulfilling the dreams of accomplishment that he had no doubt nourished for himself.\n\nBut I remember vividly. It was nighttime and dark, and when I saw Lee emerge from the entrance to our building to take possession of me and lead me upstairs to bed or the bathtub, I instantly and recklessly transformed my disobedience into the street game of a pursuit. He was faster, being so much older, but I was swift on sneakers and tricky, and I dodged and faked and led him in an exasperating race back and forth from one side of the street to the other, laughing uncontrollably each time I twisted away to elude him again. And suddenly there were headlights blinding me and a tortured screech of automobile wheels braking, and my merriment ended with both of us stretched out on the bumper of a car that had squealed to a stop against us just one moment before.\n\nI'll mention one other occasion when, speaking metaphorically now, I thought I'd come close to putting two of us in the family away for good, one of them me. This was a prank that none of us ever forgot, but even today it makes a lesser impression on me than it did on the others.\n\nRising on the sidewalk outside our building, near the curb, was a telephone pole, with spikes sunk into opposite sides on escalating levels to serve as steps for the serviceman to climb to the seat at the repair box about two stories up. They weren't difficult to mount once you attained the starting point at the bottom, a sturdy wedge of wood hammered into the pole for a first foothold about three feet from the ground. I found out how easy it was one day when, given a boost to that bottom wedge by a friend, I began going up the spikes, hand over hand and leg after leg. At the top, when I was at the seat, I discovered with happy surprise that I was gazing right into the open window of our kitchen. And I saw my mother there, busy at the stove inside just a few feet away.\n\n\"Ma, can I have a glass of milk?\" I asked in my most innocent voice.\n\nThe look of bewildered amazement and then stark horror that struck her face when she turned and saw me poised in air just outside the window was so extreme that I feared I, too, might die of fright at just that moment. It could have been about then that my mother made for the first time the remark about my idea of humor that she would repeat many times afterward in maternal surprise and tribute, though often with a dismayed shake of the head:\n\n\"You've [He's] got a twisted brain.\"\n\nOne time I saw on her face a look of outrage and astonishment even more distraught, when, while glaring squarely into her eyes during one of my occasional infantile outbursts, I called her a bastard.\n\nMy belief, erroneous, was that inasmuch as her command of English was poor, she had not heard that dirty street word before and would have no idea what it meant, no more than I accurately knew then what it meant. At once I saw with terror that I was mistaken. She gasped with incredulity, and staggered back a step. And I knew in instant reflex that I never wanted to see her again with such an expression of deep hurt. I prayed she would never tell anyone.\n\nONE OTHER TIME about then I had a secret I wanted to guard. Prowling about the kitchen by myself, with a rapacious appetite starting to agitate me as always, I found in the cupboard a bulb of garlic with several of the cloves already broken loose. I thought surely that if I ate one or two, nobody would know. They soon knew. Everyone knew. For the next few days, people even half a block away knew.\n\n# 3  \nSea Gate\n\nSEA GATE, on the western edge of a sliver of Brooklyn oceanfront scraped up and discarded by the receding glacier of the last ice age, remains historic in these annals for two later and more striking occurrences: a fire and a feel\u2014and for an alleged business connection with a dignitary named Alfred E. Smith, a noteworthy summer presence there in the third decade of this century. An earlier celebrity dweller in Sea Gate was one John Y. McKane, political boss and self-appointed police chief on the Island, who saw to it that all things there ran in the peaceful mode he fancied until he himself was scrutinized by a higher authority, indicted, tried, and imprisoned.\n\nThe rumor of the involvement of Alfred E. Smith in the development of Sea Gate might be groundless, but he himself was real. Al Smith, formerly the very popular Democratic governor of New York, became the first Catholic candidate\u2014he was defeated\u2014for the presidency. A rarity in office for his unwillingness, I've read, to make use of his public service for his private enrichment, he was later made use of for his prestige and contacts by others more farseeing who were absorbed in the profitable formation of various real-estate properties. One of these was the Empire State Building. Another undertaking vaguely ascribed to him in local folklore was the formation of the \"Sea Gate Association\" for the purchase and consolidation of land on the western rim of Coney Island and the conversion of that tidy, choice tract into an elite residential seaside community poking unassumingly out into the entrance to New York Harbor, with the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the tranquil inlet of a bay washing the other. It was a community of homeowners forbidding admittance to nonresidents, with its own uniformed police force guarding the gates at each of the two entrances and a tall chain-link barricade rising on its boundary between the limits of its private property and the rest of Coney Island.\n\nSea Gate begins where the Coney Island boardwalk and avenues end. The chain-link fence extends all the way down across the sand into the water's edge at both low tide and high, a rampart manifestly differentiating those inside from those outside. No doubt it extends that far in violation of federal law, which conventionally holds beaches to be a public part of the national seashore. In summertime, about a mile and a half away at the opposite end of Coney Island, beat the heart of the respectably notorious amusement section, with its billions of electric lights at Luna Park and Steeplechase and hundreds of other attractions. The newer community of Sea Gate reposed as far from the hurly-burly of the crowds and their seasonal pleasures and as far from the immigrant subcultures evolving in between as it was possible to be without backpedaling away into the water itself.\n\nThere, as in other places we know of, the organization of an \"association\" suggests the dictates of proprietary covenants among the earliest settlers to restrict the ownership and rental of properties to those exactingly approved by the governing body already in place. Probably Jews were not admitted at first, or Italians either. The fence spanning the beach and avenues, and the Sea Gate policemen at the gates, were of course intended to keep curious wayfarers out rather than insiders in. They contributed, as well, to a constant and none-too-subtle semiotic reminder of class distinction. A ban against stores of every kind, apart from aesthetic considerations, implies additionally a rather frigid determination of the early settlers to distance themselves from just about everything else in Coney Island and to persist there independent of the service facilities to be found in the community outside. There were still no stores in Sea Gate, not one, when I, like Columbus in the West Indies, or stout Cortez on his peak in Dari\u00e9n, grew old enough to \"discover\" this new world, and the inconveniences to families I came to know were many and often strenuous. God knows what these early inhabitants did for their headaches and haircuts. Aspirin could be toted in a pocket, but pockets couldn't hold barbers, and the inhabitants of Sea Gate certainly wouldn't have elected to wander deep into Coney Island to have their hair trimmed by Max the Barber, the father of Danny the Bull. They must have counted on conveying many of life's necessities with them when they came there, for summers or as year-round residents, and they didn't come by subway and trolley car. Before the construction of superhighways and the Brooklyn\u2014Battery Tunnel, the journey by automobile from Manhattan and places still farther would not have been swift.\n\nTheir aversion to collegial fellowship with those outside the fence is readily explained by the reputation borne, and earned, by Coney Island as \"the playground of the poor.\" The poor are despised even by their brothers, teaches the Bible in more than one place, and circumstantial confirmation of this truth can be found in the tendency of just about all of us to move out of Coney Island as soon as we could manage to. In general, though, we didn't move far. And we continued to return for our diversions more often than we went to any other place and to focus our social life on our friendships with those still living there and on the remaining social clubs with their phonographs, couches, back rooms, and card tables.\n\n\u2022 \u2022 \u2022\n\nTHE FIRE I SAW inside Sea Gate was my first fire, apart from those regulated small ones, with broken fruit crates for fuel, strung out like signals along the Coney Island beach Tuesday nights in summer acknowledgment of the fireworks shot aloft from the boat anchored off the end of Steeplechase Pier.\n\nAt these Coney Island \"barnfires\" of ours, we ate charred, sandy potatoes, roasted in wood flames and not fit for human consumption, and sizzling burnt marshmallows that blistered the tongue. We called the potatoes \"mickeys,\" although we didn't know why. We cleared our debris from the beach after we had put out our fire and left the spot clean for the next day. We were good little boys when we were good. We were afraid of our teachers, although we liked them all, dreaded displeasing them, and were petrified by the mere possibility of getting into trouble in school.\n\nThe blaze inside Sea Gate was a daytime affair, and the real thing.\n\nIt was big.\n\nAlong with others on our block, I stood on the corner of Surf Avenue and gazed with awe at the broad flush of orange fire and billows of dense smoke, first black, then white, that dominated the horizon of the squat skyline something like half a mile away. What was burning? It was the yacht club, people who were older and wiser kept telling each other. I had not heard those words before. It was, I have since ascertained, the Atlantic Yacht Club, and it was described as \"swank.\" Others are better qualified than I to itemize the traits of what that word signifies in depiction of a yacht club. I didn't even know then what a yacht club was.\n\nNow that I do have some idea of what a yacht club is, I return to the memory of the fire and the presence of a yacht club with a pleased bemusement that never diminishes.\n\nWhat a yacht club was doing in Coney Island at that time remains a charming mystery I would not choose to unravel by reductive research. My surmises are more intriguing. Certainly, Coney Island was at least as appropriate a location for a yacht club as the building between Fifth and Sixth Avenues on West 44th Street in Manhattan currently occupied by the New York Yacht Club. For one thing, it was closer to water. At the back of Coney Island is Gravesend Bay, which, though rather narrow, is nevertheless a body of water. In grade school there were those who bragged they had walked across the bay on the few days it was frozen in winter. Beyond the bay curves the western shoreline of Brooklyn proper, providing one of the contours shaping the enormous, magnificent, and now largely inactive New York seaport. And beyond that, on clear days, one can easily pinpoint the gray structures of certain of Manhattan's skyscrapers.\n\nIn miles therefore, or perhaps \"knots,\" the trip from the city to Sea Gate is shorter by sea than by land, and we know that those oddballs who do enjoy boating, whether by engine or sail, are usually in no hurry anyway and haven't much else they want to do with their time.\n\nBack then there was a company, the Iron Steamboat Company, that ran a regular schedule of shuttle trips from the Battery in lowest Manhattan to the Steeplechase Pier, transporting visitors from the city directly into the amusement area, and these ships seemed to perform prosperously, for they went on operating until Coney Island changed with the war and its alluring mystique of novelty and glamour began irretrievably to wane. From vantage points on our boardwalk and beach we could watch these white side-wheeler steamboats coming and going, and easily spot, as well, the freighters and the giant, international ocean liners, trying to identify the liners by the number of smokestacks as they steamed slowly in and out before us. A luxury cruise ship, the _Morro Castle_ , went up in flames one day not far offshore; that would have been my second Coney Island fire, but I was elsewhere when it happened. However, I did go more than once to view the devastated hulk after it had been towed into Gravesend Bay (by name a fitting resting place, it might at first seem, for Gravesend Bay is compounded of grim English words whose portentous message I did not appreciate until I began writing about it; but, alas, I now know that the term arises in nonphilosophical innocence from Dutch words meaning nothing more sinister than \"lord's beach\"). The journey by water to Sea Gate from some waterway inland was neither treacherous nor long, and it is easy to picture boatmen, and boatwomen, from docking places in the Hudson and East Rivers and even from Westchester, Connecticut, and the shores of Long Island lifting anchor to set course for Coney Island and the Atlantic Yacht Club in Sea Gate.\n\nThey had to bring their meals with them or eat in the dining room at the yacht club, if the yacht club had one, for together with the absence of stores, there were no restaurants in Sea Gate. At that time, probably, Jews were not accepted for membership at the club. But Jews were not sailors then, either, not my Brooklyn Jews, so there was no insult to anything but pride. In those preassimilation days, they did not go golfing, play tennis, or ski. And they rarely divorced; if any wanted to, they would have had to learn how.\n\nBy the time I found myself old enough to wander about Sea Gate, through the courtesy of one or another school acquaintance who lived there, there was no trace of the swanky yacht club I'd seen burning away or of any other. It had been there, it was gone. The salient landmark now was Lindbergh Park, memorable still for the airplane pilot whose name honors it and, to me, for the milestone event of my first feel. The park is a tiny clearing\u2014the land area of all Sea Gate is small\u2014that served as one of several gathering places for green adolescents of both sexes for giggling hijinks on balmy nights. Word went out from other fellows in my Boy Scout troop that two girls there whom I recognized from grade school would permit you to squeeze their breasts if you waited politely in line with the other boys for your turn in the kissing games. One of the girls was petite and pretty. The second was larger and jolly. I waited my turn and drew the buxom one. The gossip proved true. I felt a female bosom, and I learned something\u2014I learned something fast. I learned that once you had a breast in your hand, there wasn't much you could do with it. Not until the initiating days of my cellar clubs not long after did I begin to comprehend that this first liberty beyond kissing was a step, a passport of sorts, that might, or might not, be a prelude to an advancing stage of intimacies more disorderly.\n\nBy that time in Sea Gate, the founding fathers, along with the yacht club, had been removed from the scene by the inexorable stresses of economic and social change and replaced by a different order of landowner with a less demanding ethos. Two-family houses of red brick had sprung up for rental on the idle lots between the capacious wooden summer mansions traditional at seashores. Some years ago, several of these mansions were put to use by the city as dwellings for people on welfare, to the alarm and chagrin of that generation of residents, and this practice may still be in force.\n\nWith the change in population, there was no longer much difference in race, creed, or place of national origin between those living inside the gates and those outside. There did exist a presumed financial disparity, but this was something that in childhood we were slow to comprehend and which was not necessarily accurate. The girls and boys of Sea Gate went to the same public school we did and usually had a longer walk to get to it; there was no talk then of any such thing as a private school. They went to the same parties at graduation and to the same movie theaters for Saturday matinees, to the same secondary school by the same trolley cars or school buses. Those fellows who did join social clubs later came outside to join one of ours. Girls I remember\u2014Hannah Tansman and Gladys Simon\u2014did come to classes in grade school wearing fur coats in winter, but memory hints that they were both, perhaps, from families in the fur business. A blond cutie of nine or ten named June Owitz always seemed to be wearing a bright sweater, possibly cashmere. But if there ever was coolness or snobbishness, I didn't notice it, and no one I knew, inside or outside Sea Gate, ever spoke of it. But parents are parents, and in my maturity, I have the feeling that had I been a parent with a daughter living in Sea Gate, I might not have approved of someone like me.\n\nWhen I entered secondary school, the Coney Island celebrities on the Abraham Lincoln High School football team were largely from Sea Gate: Eddie Mann, Phil Metling, Len Finkleman. When I left, they were from Coney Island streets like my own: Herb Poplinger, Red Goldstein, Richie Wertheim, and others. On my first trip to Lincoln High on a school bus, I had the football lineman Len Finkleman pointed out to me, and with a pang gave up all dreams of even trying out for the football team. He was two years ahead of me in classes and appeared two hundred pounds ahead of me in the evolutionary progression of bone and muscle. In due course I turned out for fencing lessons instead and made the team, but lost interest before even one interscholastic match.\n\nI confess that I loved school, loved both grade school and high school. I loved the vacations and the end of vacations. The thought of playing hookey in grade school hardly ever crossed my mind\u2014I wouldn't have been able to think of a more enjoyable way to spend the time. On days when I was absent with a fever, I would watch the clock until Irving Kaiser from the apartment downstairs and Ira Lopata across the street were due to get home in order to converse with them from my window. Twice in high school I was a truant. I calculated with remorse afterward that I hadn't had as good a time at the stage show and film at New York's Paramount Theater or in Weepy's poolroom as I would have had in the classes, cafeteria, and sweetshop at Lincoln. I had no pleasure in disobedience for its own sake, and I take none now.\n\nI liked school because I was good at it. I took readily to reading, writing, and arithmetic. I even liked the homework, was stimulated to accomplishment by the challenge of each demanding obligation. I liked very much having something to do. I am still less comfortable with unlimited leisure than with the organizing and worrisome feeling that I have something I must get done, like finishing this book, or even this paragraph.\n\nThe elementary school year and classes then were divided into halves, into an A section and a B. In my first grade, IAI, Miss Wolfe one day held up a flash card bearing the word KING. It was our first exposure to an _-ing_ word. I concentrated a moment and raised my hand\u2014I was the first and only child to do so\u2014and when called upon said, \"King.\" Don't ask me how I knew. A day or so later, I was \"skipped\" half a year, transferred from class IAI into Miss Leiberman's \"fast\" IBI. There I found myself among a group of students with whom I was to remain all the way until graduation, and then through high school as well. We, the I class, regardless of grade, were always the \"bright\" class, and we advanced together with very few changes in our membership, most of which resulted from new families moving into the district and old ones moving away. Two (2) was the slow class, and 3, 4, and 5 were in between. I was bright, and so were Ruth Gerstein, Hannah Tansman, Gladys Simon, Albie Covelman, Eugene Dolgin, Seymour Ostrow, Phyllis Ritterman, and maybe as many as a dozen others I could name if I put my mind to it. As early as the fourth or fifth grade, Phyllis Ritterman had made it known that she wished to grow up to be a novelist\u2014this before the rest of us knew what a novelist was. She had inscribed as much with her signature in my souvenir graduation album. Almost fifty years after graduation from this primary school, I was invited to speak at a college in Arizona or Texas\u2014I forget exactly where. While the audience was dispersing afterward, a woman facing me squarely as she sat down beside me challenged: \"You don't know who I am, do you?\" It required no more than a second to summon up the answer. \"Sure I do. You're Phyllis Ritterman, aren't you?\" From that encounter came my formulation of a theory I find to be generally true: Time may age a physiognomy but doesn't otherwise alter it beyond recognition. (On the chance you may care, I'll contribute the unrelated opinion that psychotherapy doesn't change much either\u2014not character, personality, feelings, or even, in the long run, behavior. I speak here from both personal experience and observation.)\n\nI avidly enjoyed our sessions in the early grades in rapid arithmetic; I naturally would, for these were competitions in accuracy and speed, and I was one of the two, three, or four who were always out in front, and I embraced the chance to show my stuff. In algebra and plane geometry later on, with some tips on attitude from my brother, Lee, I was a whiz kid of sorts in the introductory levels, but not, I discovered with resignation, beyond those. My brother was addicted to mystery riddles. I liked to grapple with them, too. In the Lee Heller fabrication, X was not merely an unknown quantity: X was a slippery party to be tracked down and pinned by the pertinent factual evidence contained in the enclosing data. Included one time on an examination in the 7A or 7B algebra class of Mr. T. D. Bartells was a vexing problem of a peculiarly complicated trickiness. \"Only one person in the class got that one right,\" revealed Mr. Bartells, and then looked my way. \"And it had to be you,\" he added, and threw a stick of chalk at me.\n\nThrowing chalk was his mischievous procedure for keeping control of his mischievous students, of whom I inveterately was one, wisecracking, talking, interrupting, and concocting an occasional practical joke\u2014innocent, I was maliciously inclined to believe\u2014on a fellow student; for example, if the correct answer was two and he didn't know it, I might pretend to help him with the whisper \"forty-two hundred and eighty-nine.\" And surely Mr. Bartells would guess what had happened. I had a million of them. We had been tittering about Mr. Bartells as we advanced each year toward the grades he taught, for T. D. Bartells was known secretly in a punning play on his name as \"Titty Bottles.\" I would be most surprised if he didn't know that, too.\n\nI was never in real trouble in school. The few times a parent was demanded, my sister came. My mother would have been frightened, and I would have felt disgraced by her broken English. My sister recalls intervening only once, and that was over an incident I have forgotten entirely. My offense was not misconduct but boredom. I would clearly be musing on other things in apparent distraction and not be paying rapt attention, but each time the teacher sought to trap me with a sudden question, I frustrated her with the correct answer. I would be gazing out the window, at the wall, down at my hands or feet; sometimes I appeared to be talking to myself, mouthing words. If so, they were probably sentences I was testing for the trick ending of a short story I was already contemplating writing someday, or possibly a phrase with which to begin or conclude my next book report.\n\nVery early, I now choose to think, I was exhibiting a pragmatic fixation on making use of my fantasizing and putting my daydreams to work. The early ambition to become a writer of fiction was one of them.\n\nI was generally at home with the logical and at sea with the theoretical. (I coped with matters beyond my comprehension by taking for granted the truth of what I was told and attempting to go on from there.) In biology in early high school\u2014another triumph\u2014the teacher, in discussing bacteria, raised the question of how we could tell that the process of pasteurization did not eliminate all the bacterial life in a bottle of milk. The answer appeared to me so obvious that at first I didn't even raise my hand. When no one else in the class could give it, I did.\n\nBut I lacked innate efficiency when it came to the abstract. My brain went dull with quadratic equations, negative numbers, the multiplication of fractions, trigonometry, beginning calculus. In chemistry, which should have been easy, I often found myself in difficulty with the mathematics of chemical reactions. It was along about this time that certain of my close friends (Marvin Winkler among them) threw in the towel in the struggle with such useless malarkey and transferred out of Lincoln into vocational school. I got by because my memory was reliable and I was able to duplicate through rote the procedures I was supposed to follow. But a logarithm remained unfathomable, and I still haven't solved the eternal mystery of pi (or even understood what the mystery is).\n\nEnglish classes, on the other hand, _were_ as easy as pie. I had a surer grasp of grammar when I was learning it than I have now since I've been writing professionally and since my experience of teaching freshman English on a college level. Correcting freshman compositions, with that terrorizing responsibility of always appearing infallible, did much to undermine my assurance about syntax and spelling. So much uncertainty generated by looking things up to make absolutely sure eventually generated long-lived doubts that still obtain.\n\nReading was exciting, engrossing, and I was doing a lot of it at home on my own. An older brother and sister already working at jobs in Manhattan\u2014it was not a short commute\u2014brought a variety of magazines into the apartment which expanded my mind in a widening radius of common knowledge. There were books, too, from commercial circulating libraries, as contrasted with public libraries\u2014current novels, mysteries, best-sellers that were easy to read, which was not in all respects a very good thing to grow used to. It took a long while afterward for me to relate with patience to literary works in which something more than rapid plots with lots of dialogue furnished the essential components. Magazines like _Collier's_ and _Liberty_ , which dependably published works of popular fiction, invariably contained in each issue a \"short, short story\" of a thousand words or less with a trick ending, and the prospect of writing these successfully stimulated my imagination and ambition at an early age.\n\nWhen I was nine or ten, a visiting cousin on my father's side, Nat Siegel, who might already have completed the course work to become an accountant, brought me the gift of a children's version of the _Iliad._ It was the first work I'd read that truly fired me with excitement and emotion. I could hardly cease reading and rereading it. I couldn't forget it, and I have not forgotten it. It was not only a simplified version but also a narrative version that carried the action to a conclusive finish well beyond the confines of the original. Not until I was almost through high school did I hear that the _Iliad_ was not a fascinating small novel for children but a large epic poem. And not until I read it somewhere along the line in college did the knowledge sink in that the subject of the work is the wrath of Achilles and not the exhausting war against Troy. My disillusionment and surprise were not easily overcome. So deeply affected was I by my first exposure to the work in that small volume that I still find it difficult to accept that in Homer's version there is no Trojan horse, no death of Achilles, no final victory and sack of the city. It may say something about my frame of mind that I preferred Hector to Achilles and felt more compassion for Priam than for any of the heroic Greeks, and that in Shakespeare, I liked Hotspur better than I did the prince, and still do, more even than Falstaff\u2014and I like to think that _everyone_ of right mind feels the same way.\n\nI wrote my next book report on the _Iliad_ , to my delight and to that of my teacher. I decorated the cover with tracings of drawings from the pages of the thin volume. And the month after that, I wrote another, completely different book report on the same work, submitting it with other illustrations. As gently as possible, the teacher took me aside to stress something I had missed: that reading rather than writing was the objective of those assignments and that more than one report on a book was not the practice. It could have been about then that I moved on to _Tom Sawyer, a_ work that didn't really please me at all.\n\nThe tendency to be unaware of matters that should be obvious has stayed with me. Going for a master's degree in American literature at Columbia University after the war, I worked for more than a year on a thesis on the Pulitzer Prize plays, a trivial, unfruitful subject that I'm surprised now was approved, without bothering to find out what a thesis was supposed to be. Not until long afterward, when I was asked in conversation what the thesis of my thesis was, did I realize I'd had none. It was accepted anyway. Some time after that, while occupied with writing the latter portions of _Catch-22_ , I applied for a job of minor executive status in the advertising-promotion department of _McCall's_ , then a women's service magazine with a huge circulation, and was required to submit to a battery of psychological tests that included the Rorschach. I found myself dilating at almost inexhaustible length on each of the whole blots on each of the cards, less volubly on the color ones, barely remarking on any of the details. I scarcely noticed them; I could see only one big picture. If God is in the details, as more than one contemporary authority continues to maintain, I think I've passed Him by in everyone's work but my own. I think it was with intuitive good sense that when I finally applied myself seriously to the writing of fiction, I skirted the requirements of convincing detail fundamental to that genre called realism.\n\nI have one more classroom achievement I'm eager to boast of. In one of my schools, either primary or secondary, we read _Treasure Island_ and were assigned to bury a treasure of our own somewhere on a map entirely of our own devising. In my map\u2014inventively, I must say\u2014I marked the various sites with the names of well-known people of the time. I had a Rudy Valley, a W. C. Hill (a well-known radio commentator), a meadow called W. C. Fields, and a forest called Lefty Grove (a famous baseball pitcher on the Boston Red Sox). I would have had a Veronica Lake, if it hadn't been too soon. Certainly I had a Grace or Victor Moore, and other geographical features with place names of that kind. A landmark was a racetrack called Steeplechase. Outside a woods called Helen Twelvetrees (a former screen actress), my treasure was buried in a meadow named Luna Park. It was all in the region of Pancreas, and on the Isle of Langerhans, one in that body of pancreatic cells whose name I had come upon adventitiously in some mystery novel brought into the house shortly before by my brother or my sister. You entered the territory through some mouth or other\u2014I might have used \"gorge,\" too, but I doubt I was that clever\u2014and made your way downward through the alimentary canal. The teacher\u2014named Miss Perks, I remember, a substitute who came for a day and remained for the term\u2014was greatly impressed. I had guessed she would be.\n\nHIGH SCHOOL AND PUBERTY brought significant changes\u2014to our attitudes, responses, and social behavior\u2014and so, as might be guessed, did Hitler, Mussolini, and World War II. We reeled into adolescence with different increments of biological experience and velocity, the girls, naturally, maturing sooner and evidencing signs more prominently: A girl named Sonia showed the fullest bosom in the seventh or eighth grade, whereas a Sea Gate girl named Ruth, whom I had a crush on, slender, dark, and slightly taller, was showing hardly anything at all. But all of us who went on to Abraham Lincoln High School rather than to Brooklyn Tech or to a vocational school began our secondary school education on the same day.\n\nThe school was some distance away, and for the first time in our young lives we found ourselves associating closely in classrooms with strangers from other parts of the world, even if those other parts were only contiguous parts of Brooklyn. There were the boys and girls from that second, Italian section of Coney Island, whom we now came to know much better; along with them were pupils from those bordering territories that at first were as alien to us as Alaska would have been. The pupils from Brighton close by, who were Jewish, too, were most like us\u2014the girls on balance a bit better groomed, but the boys no less rowdy and ill-mannered than we were, better at sports because better coached. Naked swimming in the school pool one gym period a week was an indefensible oppression. The only guys who didn't seem to mind were those with very big dicks. The school was just over three miles from where we lived, too far to walk if we didn't want to, and, except for a few revitalizing afternoons each spring, we didn't want to. Our Surf Avenue trolley line bore us into the amusement area, turned up to Neptune Avenue, and dropped us at a corner almost at the school itself. Those from Sea Gate had a longer way to go, for they first had to make their way out of their enclave on foot or by internal jitney. For a few more nickels a week we could journey back and forth by a private bus that departed each morning from a spot on Mermaid Avenue and returned to that same place each afternoon. These buses were individual personal enterprises; the school, though far away, took no responsibility for getting us there. When last I looked, a neighborhood acquaintance from one of the social clubs, Novack by name, was making a good adult living as owner of one, perhaps more than one, of these school buses.\n\nThe school, though large and relatively new, was already overcrowded, and for the first year after enrolling, all of us in the entering class were obliged to attend classes in an annex. The Lincoln Annex occupied the top two floors of a typical elementary public school of red brick with white stone trim apart from Abraham Lincoln's main grounds. It was packed with students\u2014boys and girls, young men and women, from a strange and somewhat haphazard assortment of ethnic and occupational backgrounds we hadn't encountered before. Taken all together, we were a motley crew. My recollection is that all of us were white. The school was in an unfamiliar Italian residential neighborhood, and we moved about in it cautiously. Fortunately, we didn't have to move far: The Italian grocery store supplying our first hero sandwiches for a nickel with Italian salami, baloney, or ham on Italian bread was just across the street, and the tracks for the streamlined trolley to which we transferred from our own were just a couple of blocks away.\n\nIn the high-school annex and afterward in the main building, we attended classes with students we hadn't, with perhaps a couple of chance exceptions, known before and who hadn't to any fuller extent known each other. Along with the increase in the number of new student-acquaintances, our choice of elective courses further contributed to the diffusion of our Coney Island social sets into the general school population. For a language to study, many of us first chose Spanish in the belief that it would prove easier than French or German; two of us, one the son of the local pharmacist, picked Latin in hopes of becoming a physician, and he eventually did. The boys, with very few exceptions, decided on an academic curriculum, which was meant to guide them toward a college education almost none then desired; the girls, though with many more exceptions, did, like my sister, Sylvia, select a commercial course directing them toward inevitable, traditional jobs as secretaries and bookkeepers. I made room in my program for a class in typing. Although I had no typewriter closer than an old one in Irving Kaiser's apartment downstairs, I felt in my bones that if ever I was to succeed as a hard-boiled news reporter or novelist or playwright\u2014and I expected that to be soon\u2014I might succeed more quickly if I knew how to type. I was one of a handful of boys in a room full of girls I hadn't previously met. I lusted for several who fancied tight skirts and sweaters (I'm afraid I still do, and for those now often pictured in advertisements in slinky shifts) and was in love with none.\n\nIt surprises me today to contemplate my complete lack of interest then in working on the school newspaper, the _Lincoln Log_ , or contributing to the literary magazine, _Cargoes._ Seymour Ostrow, who also was thinking of becoming a hard-nosed journalist and who later, after the war, became a softhearted criminal lawyer instead, succeeded in becoming a reporter for the _Lincoln Log;_ I didn't even try. The few friends I made who also read books and were intensely occupied with the literary magazine spoke effortlessly to each other of writers such as Chaucer, Keats, and Yeats; these were names I don't think I'd heard before. Yet I was preoccupied always, although without remarkable productivity or technical expertise, with the writing of short stories and sarcastic, humorous (I thought) nonfiction pieces. These were works I didn't want anyone connected with the literary magazine to know about. Mr. Grumet encouraged such creative efforts in his advanced English course, and with his assignments I was able to hold my own. My favorite author for a time was not Chaucer, Keats, or Yeats but Damon Runyon, of whom not many people, if they know of him at all, are apt to think highly any longer. My favorite humorists later on (recommended to me by Danny the Count as \"Benchley\" and \"Wodehouse,\" as though every lad in the world routinely knew their Christian names) became Robert Benchley and P. G. Wodehouse, and these were quantum leaps forward to nearly inexhaustible delights. My favorite source for the best in contemporary American fiction was _Collier's_ magazine\u2014until a friend of my sister's, who, upon learning from her that I was interested in writing and reading, presented me with a hardbound copy of Irwin Shaw's collection _Sailor off the Bremen_ , and then my ambitions turned more serious, and my assumptions of brilliant and immediate fame were moderated accordingly. It must have been about then, after Irwin Shaw, that I began my never-ending tussles with the texts in the magazine _The New Yorker_ , where his fiction often appeared.\n\nNotwithstanding a fear of failure at the literary magazine and my facade of indifferent reluctance, in 1939, when I was sixteen, still a schoolboy, and Russia invaded Finland, I wrote a short, short story about that war and a young, heroic Finnish soldier defending his post with ingenious tricks I've forgotten against Red forces overwhelming in mass. I showed this effort to nobody. After hours of hard labor, and with copious erasures necessitated by the constant growth of my vocabulary, I got the story down on white paper on the old typewriter in Irving Kaiser's house. I thought it was great. In fact, I not only wrote the story, I submitted it\u2014I mailed it away\u2014for publication in _Collier's, Liberty_ , and the New York _Daily News_ , our local newspaper of huge circulation that then also published fiction regularly.\n\nIt was not accepted.\n\nThose were my first rejection slips.\n\nNo, I don't still have them.\n\nNor have I kept my first letter or two of acceptance. The first of those came six years later, for a short work written in my tent in Corsica and also tapped out on a borrowed typewriter, this one belonging to a recent replacement pilot who was out flying combat missions while I, my missions completed, sat safely on my ass and wrote stories on his keyboard. The next was for a freshman theme at the University of Southern California\u2014but those can wait until I'm at least out of high school, can't they?\n\nI CAN DIVULGE NOW that during both my early schools, elementary and secondary, hardly a year went by in which I did not for at least part of a term have a secret and serious, nonsexual crush on one girl or another: June, Ruth, Hannah, Gladys, Mimi, Naomi, another Ruth\u2014who can remember them all? Each had what I idealized as an irresistibly pretty face. I used to wonder with dumbfounded amazement why all the boys were not in love with the one I was in love with at the time. Usually, my infatuation was with a girl who sat alongside me at a desk between me and the teacher, so that I could stare at her dreamily, in profile, to my heart's fulfillment. On days these girls were late or absent, I might sink into a miserable dread of disappointment and rejection. These loves were romantic, not carnal, and it was fortunate, so far as I know, that they weren't returned. Otherwise I might have undergone a brief early marriage and a quick early divorce\u2014instead of the long marriage I enjoyed, one of thirty-five years, and the long, unhappy, embittering divorce, which took more than three years to formalize. Luckily, my schoolboy crushes were over by the time I entered college; by then I was already married and spared those heartaches.\n\nOn Fridays, I acknowledge now with some pride and shame, with that indelicate pride _in_ shame come upon too often in confessional autobiographical pages like this one, I wore to school for a while my official Boy Scout uniform. Troop meetings throughout the various neighborhoods were held Friday evenings, and girls who were Girl Scouts came to classes that day in their uniforms of green, too. It was the fashion. My membership in the Boy Scouts was for me a freak occurrence; mostly till then I had obstinately resisted participation in organizations and organized group activities, and I still do. In grammar school I wouldn't once join the GO (our \"General Organization\" to help support student activities) and perversely refused to go along on voluntary excursions to zoos and botanical gardens; in high school I passed up the class trip to the 1939\u201440 World's Fair, and when my team won the intramural softball tournament after a somewhat spectacular outfield running catch by me for the final out with the winning runs on base, I neglected to drop by the athletic office to pick up my PSAL pin, for I knew I would never wear it. I have no idea what happened to my Phi Beta Kappa key or, for that matter, to my Air Medal or bombardier's wings. I never voted in a school election. I don't vote now. I haven't gone to a school or air force reunion and did not attend my college graduation ceremony. For a couple of fruitless years I was enrolled as a voter in the Democratic Party under the gullible impression that I could influence the choice of candidates, an American delusion still besetting millions.\n\nThose two were about my only lapses. But the Boy Scouts for us was more social than spiritual, and I was soon having fun at their games as a patrol leader. In high school, an Italian girl with the shortened name of Mimi was a Girl Scout. She was different from the taciturn others in my galaxy of stately belles. She was of pale complexion, and she was talkative, witty, and forward, likable rather than beautiful. Direct. We kidded with each other a lot, and we were able to make each other laugh. One Friday, both of us in uniform, she suggested that we plan an overnight hike with just a friend of hers and another boy. Because I didn't quickly grasp what she was suggesting, I declined with some faltering evasions. If I had known for sure what she had in mind, I probably would have declined more abruptly. I was backward that way, she was not. Her warmth toward me seemed to lessen. She knew more than I did, and I was too innocent to learn.\n\nALMOST WITHOUT PERCEIVING IT, we were growing up. And many of the resulting transmutations were pervasive and subtle.\n\nEarlier, in grade school, a difference of a year or half a year between us meant merely a difference in class level and mattered not at all in the hierarchy of the block and the street; now, the difference in age brought a difference in school locations\u2014with different classmates and acquaintances, different loyalties, different teachers, homework, enthusiasms. Old relationships loosened as new friendships formed. Those left behind had to feel left out of much that was going on. Friends made friends with people from different parts of Coney Island, and they became our friends, too. Boys from different streets soon were coming together to organize themselves into new and better punchball and football teams and grew as interested in girls as in athletics. More and more we tended to hang out with guys who were friendly with the girls we knew; girls, too, became more interested in themselves as girls, and in boys, too. Jeannie Goldman from across the street joined a social club with girls from down the Island who had gone to the public school in the Italian section. She and I never did get to mingle socially, to the presumed regret of her mother, who'd been fond of me through my childhood, and mine, who'd always liked Jeannie, and later esteemed her all the more after the accident of the broken hip. Geraldine Scharf on the next block joined a girls' club, too, and I never found myself with her at a party again. The boys these girls found were generally older. Our girls were generally a year or so younger. I can remember no strong social ties with Irving Kaiser after I moved into high school one year before he did, although I continued to use his typewriter and we continued to know each other until we each followed our separate destinies into military service.\n\nWhen, while still in high school, a bunch of us finally got together and chipped in for rent, furniture, and phonograph for a social club of our own\u2014my first social club, Club Hilight, was located in the cellar of a two-family house\u2014just about all the members were on the same grade and age level, and close to half were fellows from down the Island I hadn't known in elementary school. And the girls didn't have to be from our neighborhood, either. On weekend evenings they came from Brighton, Flatbush, East New York, and elsewhere and were flattered by invitations to drop down to our club room to dance and neck. In the summer they'd arrive on the Island from everywhere. I believe it close to a fact that until I went into the army, I never took a girl out on a date, and not many of the other fellows did either. It is still a magic of biology to me how the sexually advanced of both genders managed from earliest years to sense each other out, to recognize and acknowledge each other's mutuality of procreative desires and intuitively come together for joint satisfaction. Cliques established themselves on that single basis of sexual headway: Periodically, a special allegiance would form between two or three males who had latched on to a girl agreeable to putting out for all of them in sequence on the same occasion, and they, even when with the rest of us, would cluster together as though in conspiracy and talk\u2014not only about what they were up to with her, but also about everything else\u2014furtively. The dedicated marijuana smokers would cling together, too, as did the heroin users later on. To the disappointment of those who were still too young or otherwise excluded from one coterie or another, the old ties of the block and the street were melting away.\n\nAnd suddenly there were those boys and girls we'd known forever who belonged to no group at all: the boy without personality, the girl who wasn't attractive and couldn't live comfortably with that knowledge, the odd ones, the quiet ones, the nervous ones, even the studious ones, the crippled ones who couldn't play ball or dance the lindy hop. Mursh the Hopper. The stutterer. These were the friendless ones who didn't fit and automatically were being left out of everything, without pity, without attention. It has not been much different since.\n\nLife was turning real in ways we could no longer ignore. In 1939 Germany invaded Poland from the west, Russia invaded from the east, and the big war began. In 1940 our Selective Service Act went into effect, and young men in the neighborhood began to fade from sight and return on furlough in military uniform. George Mandel, a Club Alteo senior while I was still a junior, was called up early, and his gorgeous \"wheels\" disappeared with him. As an illustrator, originator, and writer in the burgeoning field of comic books, he'd been earning very good money while still very young, and he began to show up in a latest-model blue convertible with automatic top and hydromatic transmission, the first we had seen and the niftiest car we had ever been permitted to caress with our fingertips. Henny Ehrenman, closer to me in age though older, also soon went, to an airfield in Colorado to which I was later assigned for a while. Home on furlough, he described only a good time in the western saloons of Denver with women more permissive than any we had known, or known of. None who were drafted or enlisted seemed to mind. At seventeen I didn't think I would ever have to go. Some of the draft-eligible ones, while they waited, found defense work doing things with a metal alloy called monel; not long after, as I was waiting in turn, I had a couple of defense jobs myself. Others bided their time in a factory manufacturing a fabric called chenille. But a cousin of mine who was only slightly older was killed in a motor accident on an army air base. And after Pearl Harbor they were shipping men overseas. After Pearl Harbor, I smugly took for granted, along with a few million other innocents, that once \"we\" were in it, the war would soon be over, before I could be called up. \"Those Japs must be crazy,\" I remember saying to the friends I was with on the afternoon of Pearl Harbor day. \"We'll wipe them right out.\"\n\nIt was known even before I went overseas that Abie Ehrenreich, an aerial gunner my age who probably had enlisted immediately for him to be in battle so soon, had been in a plane shot down over North Africa and was already a prisoner of war. George Mandel went into Europe with the infantry, succumbing to the allure of the action when he had the option of remaining Stateside as a member of a permanent party unit in an instructional capacity. He will not disagree when I say he should have known better. In Holland he was shot in the leg in an ambush. Recuperating in a hospital when hearing of the Battle of the Bulge, he checked himself out to rejoin his unit and shortly afterward was hit in the head by a sniper. This was a wound whose numerous distressing effects have never entirely left him. General George C. Patton would have been proud of him. My George will not be pleased to hear me say that.\n\nLife was real, life was earnest, and it was turning harsh and earnest for several of us in other ways as well. One boy we had gone to grade school with would finally die of the \"weak heart\" that had compelled his exclusion from all physical-education classes; I remember another from the Alteo seniors who passed away early from Hodgkin's disease, the first time we'd heard of it (a closer friend, Lou Berkman, was fifty-two when he finally gave in to that one); a friend from the Boy Scouts died of leukemia. Neighborhood youths would grow up unaccountably mean and vicious and begin hanging around with toughs from other neighborhoods. Izzy Nish could be wicked. Smokey was sweet-natured but could be dangerous. It was best at all times to keep far away from Louie Schwartz, an inordinately pugnacious young prizefighter. The legend had it that when he moved far upward in class for a bout with \"raging bull\" Jake LaMotta, even his mother went to _shul_ with hundreds of others in Coney Island to pray that LaMotta would not knock him out quickly but carry him the distance and pound him mercilessly. Single girls would surprisingly turn up pregnant when there still was massive odium attached to that condition and force boys several years older into unwanted, short marriages to effect legitimacy. One girl of sultry, exquisite beauty and a year younger than I, was so obviously pregnant by the time of her high-school graduation that the administration was of two minds about permitting her to take part in commencement exercises. The kid from Brighton we had teased as a sissy would indeed turn out to be homosexual, before we even understood what that was. Many of us were already working after high-school classes at jobs we liked only a little\u2014I, an exception, got a kick out of mine. Others were dropping out of school as soon as the law allowed, at age sixteen, to go to work at jobs they didn't like at all. We could stay up late now, almost all night if we wished, and in summer in the amusement area we could stay up late enough to view the overflowing trash baskets as the crowds thinned, to see the litter of watermelon rinds and chewed corncobs on the ground amid the ruins of hot-dog rolls, and to comprehend that Coney Island is a rather unclean place when the ticket booths close and the lights go out.\n\nThe aromatic foods that had been fried and grilled turned greasy. In the early hours of the next day the odors in the street already signalled decay. Even the fresh breezes from the sea, which had awakened keen appetites earlier and stimulated the other senses, could no longer bear away those repellent effluvia of garbage. We had already realized that in winter Coney Island was in the main a lonely, dark, and windy place for people grown too old for homework, roller skating, or playing tag. In winter, marijuana smokers I recognized would often huddle for warmth and each other's company in the lobby of my apartment house, which had no doorman, of course, and was open to anyone who wished to walk in. I knew the smell. I knew them by name. Nobody chased them away.\n\n# 4  \nWork\n\nOF THE VARIOUS JOBS I held before going into the army, just one, that of a uniformed Western Union messenger, was exotic by Coney Island standards. My post as a blacksmith's helper was the more surprising, but by the time I became one, at least a dozen other Coney Islanders had gone south to work in the Norfolk Navy Yard in Portsmouth, Virginia. Yet not until I tumbled into this new situation did any of us appreciate that there were such things as blacksmiths still in existence except at a horse track, let alone in an up-to-date, state-of-the-art, vast American navy yard. Others from Coney Island, already working in the Norfolk Navy Yard, were by then in jobs equally remote and unforeseen\u2014helpers to steamfitters, machinists, sheet-metal workers\u2014in an arcane profusion of factory hangars spreading just about everywhere on the level land except the dry docks, and there painters and riggers were toiling continually at the vessels. An \"E for Efficiency\" banner floated above the main entrance to the navy yard. This had been earned even before my arrival.\n\nWe were housed in individual rooms in single-story barracks, in a stretched-out, labyrinthine sprawl of clapboard bungalows that at times seemed infinite. A Coney Island man slightly older than the rest of us, who was already a licensed plumber, drove down in his auto. Better paid than we were and more experienced in such matters as mating, he lost little time finding a girlfriend, a cheerful, plump, blond young woman from one of the soda shops in town. He conveyed her into his quarters in our barrack for a little while one evening, and the very next day was directed to move out. A friend I made from a different part of Brooklyn also fell into some kind of trouble over a girl. Late one afternoon after work, the police came and took him away for questioning; the next day all his things were gone, and so was he, back home, without a parting word to anyone. Our friendship had been founded largely on our corresponding developing appreciation for classical music. On calm nights in Virginia we could tease in music on our little radios even from station WQXR in New York. Novices as listeners, we both took indignant and vociferous exception to more experienced critics who extolled Bach and Mozart at the expense of tuneful romantic compositions like those of Tchaikovsky and C\u00e9sar Franck, which we then preferred. I would guess that his tastes, too, have broadened by now.\n\nI have to emphasize that it was not insurance against the military draft that drew us southward to war work in the navy yard in Virginia, which afforded no deferments to mere helpers. After Pearl Harbor, almost no one I knew of wanted to evade service. Even pudgy Marvin Winkler took himself into the marines as soon as he was old enough to be vulnerable to conscription. (He married _before_ he was old enough, he reminded me recently; because he was under twenty-one, his mother needed to accompany the couple to the marriage bureau at the city hall and with her signature and person provide consent to the union. No such parental authorization was required for the bride.) Nor was it patriotism, either, that led us to Virginia. Neither outside the army nor in do I recall hearing patriotic statements from anyone but our official propaganda sources, and these were issued to us as lessons in \"orientation.\" Rather, we were drawn almost feverishly to our jobs in defense work by the chance of a colossal elevation in pay over what we had been accustomed to making elsewhere: At the navy yard, we would earn a salary of _a dollar an hour_ for an eight-hour day in a forty-hour week. On top of that was the boost to time-and-a-half for overtime on weekends: twelve dollars a day for each Saturday and Sunday if we chose to work, adding up to a total of sixty-four dollars for a seven-day week! In our jobs in the city, we had been lucky to make as much as twenty dollars a week; rarely did any of us make more. Thirty was a fortune, and a fortune befalling only those lucky few with uncles or older brothers or brothers-in-law already prospering at something and in a position to hire.\n\nIn Virginia, naturally, we chose, starting out, to work weekends, for that was where the big money lay. The toil was physical, and that was new. A snapshot of me I sent home after just a few of those seven-day workweeks was (with some puckish intention) pathetic. The photo caused my whole family to wish I would give the job up and come home even sooner than I finally did. In the picture, I'm just back from another day at the navy yard and even skinnier than I was when I departed from home. In my unpressed, oversized work shirt, trousers, and metal-lined factory cap picked out with a superabundance of caution by my brother, Lee\u2014both of us had absolutely no experience with this breed of outfit\u2014I contrived for the camera to look cadaverous, hollow-eyed, and anguished. With a hint of an elfish leer, I was affecting the remorseless exhaustion of a creature on its last legs. The pose was not altogether fake. Work in the blacksmith shop was truly tiring. The heat was high, the manual labor usually hard, and the smudged sweat soiling my shirt and staining my face in the photograph was the real thing.\n\nNot long ago, my sister was reminded of another, much earlier small drama about my clothes, of which I have no recollection. This had to do with a neatly packed suitcase and a two-week trip from home to a country summer camp to which, startled, I found myself being sent away. The camp operated as a charity for underprivileged city children, and I qualified. Probably it was Lee who learned about it and applied on my behalf. I remember the camp well enough but nothing about the suitcase. What amazed and tickled the others in the family was that upon my return after two weeks away, my suitcase was packed precisely in as good order as when I had carried it off. I simply hadn't thought to unpack it. From the top I had taken my toothbrush and comb and a change of clothes for sports the first day, and I had managed with just those and my travel outfit for the two full weeks. My explanation was that, after all, no one had told me to unpack.\n\nAnd no doubt it was so much easier to leave the suitcase alone. All my life it's been the same\u2014been so much easier to let other people attend to all such duties for me. In my book _Closing Time_ I say of a character, Yossarian, that he couldn't learn to make a bed and would sooner starve than cook. _That_ is autobiography.\n\nThis summer camp, supposedly a treat, was experienced by me as a lonely and puzzling ordeal pockmarked by ceaseless physical inconvenience: The cot was not my own bed; I had to make it up myself; we got busy each day earlier than I wanted to; the lake was cold and less buoyant than the ocean I was used to; the footing was slimy; there were insects I didn't know about; and I was scared of bees. The ecology of the woods was mysterious and unappealing. Was I glad to get back!\n\nCoincidentally, as I learned much later, Mario Puzo was following a parallel course at approximately the same age, but with a reaction opposite to mine. The camp he attended was a different charity, sponsored by the _New York Herald Tribune_ Fresh Air Fund. And he reviews his junket into the woods as perhaps the best time in his whole life\u2014until, I surmise, the success of _The Godfather_ was assured (his third novel, by the way). But Mario escaped to country camp from the stifling cauldron and molten cobblestone streets of Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan.\n\nI was from Coney Island.\n\nFLY FORWARD THIRTY YEARS for a possible link between that trip to camp, my first from home, and the leaden gloom with which I have been filled every time I've prepared as an adult for a trip away. There's nothing specific that might account for these emanations of despair. But I do hate packing, the mere thought of it; I loathe unpacking. Weeks before a trip, I find myself brooding in torment over which suit to take, the right shoes to bring for each pair of trousers, the correct tie to match each shirt and jacket, the appropriate shirts. I determine not to take too much and always do. My piercing anxiety when I leave home is that the automobile chauffeuring me to the airport or railroad station will forget to come or break down along the way, that I will misplace or lose my ticket or passport. As a result, I'm usually there at the airport at least an hour sooner than anyone wants me to be, including me. I'm usually prompter than prompt for all appointments. Once aboard a plane and in secure possession of the seat reserved for me, all dread dissipates, and I feel I've already triumphed; whatever venture I am about is already a success. I have no fear of the journey itself, although I will try to make it a point\u2014in a superstition rejected in childhood and thoughtfully reclaimed as a young adult in wartime\u2014to inconspicuously cross the fingers of both hands on landings and takeoffs. I grew very much into the habit of doing this in the air corps as my combat duties progressed toward fulfillment, and I did so in dead earnest on my last flight to Naples for the steamship taking me back. (No one knows I cross my fingers, and I would sooner embrace the tortures of hell than have a single soul find out.)\n\nI suffer none of these forebodings coming home, except perhaps when landing in a thunderstorm, when I am most likely to remember the precaution. But I do hate to unpack, to separate the things to be laundered from those for the cleaners, the medicines from the toiletries, the magazines from the real mail, the real mail from the junk mail. I proceed reluctantly with all this in petite stages spanning at least a couple of days. And I frequently yearn for a mother or an older brother or sister to do it all for me.\n\nPEOPLE IN CONEY ISLAND with work in Manhattan have to travel far to get to it. Not as far as Norfolk, Virginia, but farther than you or I would want to travel today, unless we had to. Then we had to.\n\nFirst, for about fifteen or twenty minutes, there was the Norton's Point trolley ride to the Stillwell Avenue subway station, the trolley stopping at every corner coming and going during the morning and evening rush hours. People from Sea Gate had to spend another fifteen or twenty minutes just to get to the trolley stop when setting out. Obtaining seats on the subway train in the morning was not a difficulty for us: The last stop on the line coming out, we were the starting point going back and the first ones to board. People coming home who caught the train at Times Square, the start and the finish for the three express lines running back and forth between Coney Island and the city, enjoyed the same benefit at the end of the workday, but the crush of passengers was great and you had to step lively to be among the first to sprint furiously into the vacant carriage nearest you and dash for a choice seat, facing forward and next to the window. Just one station down from Times Square, at 34th Street\u2014Herald Square, where Sylvia got on and off for her job at Macy's department store for nearly forty years, finding a seat of any kind was already a stroke of luck. The seats were usually completely taken by the time the doors closed there and the train was on its way toward the third express stop downtown, 14th Street\u2014Union Square. Those who had no seat when the train left 14th Street were condemned to stand in uncomfortable close quarters\u2014uncomfortable especially for women\u2014until the train had rumbled across the bridge joining Manhattan to Brooklyn and was rolling deep into different residential areas served by the separate subway lines. Then, people who did have seats began vacating them to dismount. The subway rides in rush hour between Times Square and Coney Island took almost an hour\u2014the Sea Beach line was most direct and lasted a few minutes less, but we tended to go home on the first train to arrive\u2014and were seldom the happiest parts of anyone's workday. It seemed to me then a perpetual tragedy and a scandalous economic outrage\u2014and this idea was not original with me, I knew\u2014that to have to travel so long just to get to work, or even, for that matter, to ever have to go to work at all, was a dismal and unjust fate for enlightened mankind to suffer.\n\nIn the mid-1950s, when at _Time_ magazine, I discovered without commiserating and with some surprise that many even of my outwardly affluent colleagues faced a journey of some length to their place of labor. I was past the age of thirty but still callow when I began my advertising sales promotion work there, writing copy and producing related visual aids to assist others in the selling of advertising pages. Soon I made the acquaintance of a family member of one of the cofounders of _Time_ magazine, the initial venture in what had flourished to become the universally respected publishing megalopolis by which we both were employed. A young man named Britten Hadden, who died very young of a streptococcus infection, had been a partner of the young Henry R. Luce in the creation of _Time._ I was mildly bewildered to find that my contemporary Hadden, Peter, had his home by preference outside the city, in Long Island, in a place called Locust Valley, whence he undertook to travel daily to his work as a space salesman at _Time_ , going by automobile to his train station, by train to the terminal in Manhattan, and by taxicab from Pennsylvania Station to the Time-Life Building (which then rose facing the ice-skating rink in Rockefeller Center), submitting himself with free will to a daily commute whose total time was probably close to the one from Coney Island to Times Square. I wondered why he did that. I learned also from our Research Department, which relied to a heavy extent on statistical information released by the government's Census Bureau and several allied agencies, that there was an established group in their taxonomy known as a Class A suburb, and that Locust Valley was definitely one of them. I, together with my wife and small family (a daughter, Erica, and a son, Ted), was already comfortably ensconced in Manhattan and could get to work easily by subway or on foot, in ten minutes one way and twenty the other. I ultimately accepted the fact that many corporate executives on very high income levels, there and in other companies, _chose_ to spend a considerable allotment of their daily hours traveling back and forth to work rather than live in the city. The publisher of _Time_ then, James Linen, was among them; so was just about every other person of exalted position there whom I can think of now. I thought it bizarre that people of such means should live where they did when they could easily have afforded to live where I did, in an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and get to the office or back as quickly as I could. I felt none of the pity for them I had once experienced for my Coney Island workers of old, and for myself. In fact, I could only think they were nuts.\n\nI soon found one other respect in which I thought them berserk\u2014an obsessive and near-addictive passion for golf. The buoyant enslavement to golf-playing was epidemic in the business departments but mercifully sparing of all us writers and the commercial artists in the Promotion Department (perhaps because we couldn't afford it; it was bruited about, maybe even accurately, that the company picked up all the costs of golf club membership and related expenses for the space salesmen), and it affected me then as a token of some psychological disorder. Today, of course, everyone knows that men drawn to golf are unhappy at home and have difficulty bonding with women.\n\nTHE MEMORY I RETAIN most strongly of Pete Hadden hasn't to do with advertising work, mine or his, but with a perfect baseball game pitched by a Yankee named Don Larsen during a World Series\u2014no hits, no errors, no bases on balls, twenty-seven batters faced, twenty-seven batters retired. Such a feat was without precedent in a World Series game\u2014it has not been repeated\u2014and it has been extremely rare anywhere else. In many of the Time Inc. offices each fall during the World Series there were personal table radios brought in and installed for the duration, to enable people to go on listening to every game at work when they could no longer do so at the bars in the nearby restaurants in which they had spent their long lunches. About half an hour after that perfect game had concluded, I recall watching Pete, for whom I was at that time preparing a project, drift as though stunned into the open office in which we in the sales-presentation department worked and draw near me with a reverent expression of awe. \"Today,\" he said, in a hushed voice, \"we saw history being made.\"\n\nIt appears to me today in a sentimental mirage that, at _Time_ magazine in that golden age of the 1950s, and at _Life_ , too, and maybe even at the arid business publication _Fortune_ , the World Series no sooner ended in early fall of each year than the Christmas office parties at once began. Or perhaps it was the commencement of Thanksgiving festivities. It doesn't matter. No holiday was needed to replenish the _joie de vivre_ that prevailed during business hours in those corridors in those days. There were always sufficient birthdays, anniversaries, retirements, transfers, and whatnots to suffice as a good reason for a party somewhere on our floor. The liquor would flow, the canap\u00e9s would appear, the socializing would spill over after business hours into small groups in one nearby bar or another. Small wonder we were often reluctant to hurry home. The women at work there were lively, educated, and bright; the only sad faces normally to be found were those on people with a hangover from excessive drinking the night before, or that same day at lunch, or on some man at last drearily aware, in a mood of inescapable self-discovery, that he did in fact have a serious drinking problem and was in truth an alcoholic. It was a rumor then, possibly no more than a rumor, that the company maintained an ongoing arrangement with the Payne-Whitney Clinic at New York Hospital for the discreet admission and treatment of important employees in that predicament as well as of those with various other types of serious depression. There was another rumor that when the company first instituted its most liberal medical benefits program, one that in its introductory phases provided reimbursement for psychiatric care, it transpired that more than 10 percent of the total number of our freewheeling, easy-living Time Inc. employees around the world were receiving one form of psychotherapy or another. The Time corporation was a prodigal and indulgent workplace in which people often broke down (and one of the people teetering nervously on the brink was the character Bob Slocum in that excellent novel _Something Happened)._\n\nAn old friend from _Time_ , Gerald Broidy, helpfully recounted to me not long ago a business occasion of that period in which he was peripherally involved\u2014organizing a dinner meeting at which a number of highest top-management executives of Time Inc. met with a number of management officials of equal status at the _New York Times._ The dinner was held in the New York apartment of one of the dominant figures at Time, whose wife was a member of the family owning the _Times._ Broidy did not attend. Of course, drinks were served beforehand. Early the very next morning, he learned by telephone from his exasperated counterpart at the newspaper that one of the imbibing nobles from Time Inc. passed out as soon as the meal began and slept soundly through the remainder of the meeting with his head on the table, to the surprise and consternation, I'd guess, only of those dignitaries from the _Times._\n\n\"Which one could it have been?\" the man at the newspaper indignantly demanded.\n\nAnd Broidy, with the habitual laughter that is still his, answered, \"Any one of them!\"\n\nI believe that it was for a sales call by Pete Hadden that I inventively blended my recent literary education with the immediate business need and devised an opening for his easel presentation that was soon in demand by other space salesmen and is remembered to this day as something of a classic. I forget which product or company was the prospective customer for new or increased advertising, but on the opening board of the easel demonstration, I offered an enlarged copy of the Tenniel illustration for _Through the Looking-Glass_ showing the Red Queen skimming over the ground at top speed with Alice in tow, and with her explanation in a caption: \"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.\"\n\nOther salesmen were soon requesting this picture as an introduction for their own sales calls. From me personally there followed new written presentations with this opening, one attempting to persuade the Simmons mattress company to forget consumer publications for a while and employ our newsmagazine to sell mattresses to the hotel and motel owners who subscribed in disproportionate numbers, and another to convince the space buyers for H. J. Heinz to use _Time_ to advertise their individual and miniature customer servings of ketchup to the proprietors of diners, coffee shops, and hotels.\n\nIt was through such inspired ideas that I received a $1,000 raise at the end of each of my first two years, climbing from my starting salary of $9,000 to $11,000 (if memory serves me correctly). After my third year I received an explanation but no increase: There was a company-wide salary freeze imposed as a consequence of the starting-up costs of the new magazine _Sports Illustrated._ I did then what I had done twice before since coming back to New York City from my teaching position as instructor at Pennsylvania State College. I purchased a new hat\u2014a gray fedora with a dark band; bought a new white-on-white shirt with French cuffs; dug out my cuff links; and roamed about secretly, exploring for a better-paying job. I soon found one doing the same work at Look magazine at an annual salary of $13,000. A friend from _Time_ , Arky Gonzalez, who earlier had left for more money at _Reader's Digest_ , cautioned that things were very different in the rest of the business world from what they were at _Time_ , and that I might soon miss being there.\n\nI still do.\n\nAt one of the annual sales conventions, to which I was taken to assist with the projection equipment for the assortment of slide shows presented, I witnessed Henry Luce himself sternly notify his audience that, to his mind, the business of the Time-Life corporation was publishing and that he was not going to fold _Sports Illustrated_ merely to assuage the doubts of the investors on Wall Street or allay internal concerns about salary increases and the size of continuing company contributions to the employee pension plan.\n\nAt the festive Time Inc. conferences I attended at deluxe resorts in locations like Florida, Nassau, and Bermuda, on a table immediately inside the entrance to the dining room for breakfast each morning were huge glass vats of Bloody Mary and Brandy Alexander mixes standing ready for all arrivals; and at the golf course every afternoon, I was told, always close to the tee at each hole was a large drum of ice with chilled bottles of beer to fortify the thirsty Time Inc. sportsmen as they braved the challenge of the next fairway. A young space salesman with a name good enough for John Cheever or F. Scott Fitzgerald, Seth Bidwell, was head of an out-of-town office largely, I had heard, because he was a three-handicap on the links and would cut an estimable figure with the customers he played with. Another space salesman with a great name was Royal Peterson II; slender, tall, courteous, clad always in suits well chosen and well tailored, he fit his name to perfection. Yet another salesman, I'd been told, had thrown up into the swimming pool at a sales convention I did not attend. With the company so paternalistic, he probably wasn't discharged; more likely, the accident was overlooked, or else he was eased sideways into a new position that precluded his appearance at future conferences. Notwithstanding all the foregoing, the company kept growing in one way or another during the three years I was there\u2014 _Time_ proudly hailed the milestone of reaching two million in paid circulation\u2014and continued growing hugely during the forty years that followed, despite my departure. It merged ultimately, against my wishes, with Warner Communications, formerly Warner Brothers, a motion-picture entity psychedelically resplendent in its own size and reputation.\n\nBut sometimes nothing fails like success. The organization multiplied in value and deteriorated in worth. More money flowed in from television shows and ancillary facilities than from publications. The magazines are today without special dignity or significance, even among other magazines, and I suspect it can't presently be as enjoyable working on them for merger-minded businesspeople whose bristling work ethic, one doubtless beloved by institutional investors, can credibly be refined to automatically trigger the feisty comeback \"They're not here to enjoy themselves, they're here to work.\"\n\nIf there are colorful personalities left in management, they are colorful invisibly.\n\nIn what seemed a disgracefully rapid sequence not long ago, perhaps the same week, maybe in the same breath, the news-conscious controllers of the company owning the news-sensitive magazine _Time_ announced in public forum a single payment of some $70 million to a single executive, one acquired in the merger, and the discharge, for motives purely of economy, of some two hundred employees. Such are the generous freedoms afforded by American free enterprise. And such is the character of the enterprise.\n\nAN ADVANTAGE I ENJOYED commuting from Brooklyn to my earliest job in the city with Western Union was that I started for work directly after my last class at Abraham Lincoln High School. At the end of my schoolday I would board the subway at the Ocean Parkway station of the Brighton Line, and since I was already past the trolley ride from Coney Island and the first two train stops, the time of the trip into the city was shortened by some thirty minutes. And in the early afternoon, when I left school for work, the trains were not crowded and I could pick my seat.\n\nAt the first office to which I was assigned, I stored my uniform in a locker in a central changing room for a number of satellite offices in the business districts of downtown Manhattan radiating out from Union Square and from the Flatiron Building on 23rd Street, where Broadway crosses Fifth Avenue. When I was transferred uptown, the uniform hung in a small closet in a single, small office in what was then the General Motors Building, at 57th Street and Broadway. Finally, I kept the uniform at home after I was shifted to an office in Brooklyn not far away in lower Flatbush and worked only weekends. At long last I could sport my dashing Western Union messenger garb right in Coney Island as I rode on my bicycle back and forth between home and office, sometimes even delivering telegrams right in the neighborhood. This never happened, but a hovering dread I forged in my imagination dealt with the risk that sooner or later I would have to deliver to a family I knew a yellow envelope stamped with two red stars. In the days of the telegram, before the facsimile machine and the ubiquitous telephone rendered such swift communications all but obsolete, the two-starred message brought news of tragedy.\n\nIn short order I was able to, and I did, ride a bike just about everywhere without using my hands, even turning corners into streets broad enough to encompass a sweeping arc. My bicycle came as a present from my Aunt Esther as soon as she learned I needed one to keep my messenger's job. The bike emerged from the stock in the toy store owned by her and my Uncle Julius in Williamsburg, which itself was a long haul away. I traveled there by train. I don't remember on whose borrowed bike I had first learned to ride and whose I had used to begin at the new place, but by the time my Aunt Esther came through, I could ride competently, and no one lacked faith that I could accomplish the long ride back to Coney Island unharmed. Aunt Esther, whose personality seemed the dominant one in her family, mapped instructions directing me to Kings Highway, which turned out to be a busier and farther-reaching thoroughfare than I or anyone else but Aunt Esther and Uncle Julius had dreamed it was. They owned an automobile and drove when they visited us. A daughter, Janet, was studying medicine, a stark anomaly then for a woman, and a son, Philip, was soon a lawyer, later a judge. They were relations on my father's side but remained close to us after he died. All of the cousins on both my mother's and father's side were considerably older than I but not older than my brother and sister. That could be a reason I haven't remained close. My brother was distant from them by temperament; my cousin, Nat Siegel, also on my father's side, may already have been an accountant when he gave me the _Iliad._ His older brother, Morris, was already a physician, and that could have been reason enough for Lee to remain aloof. Sylvia, on the other hand, was warm and convivial as always, even to participating with them in a cousins' club when there were still enough of them around. Lee seemed always more outgoing to people he knew slightly than to those he knew well. An unusually modest man, at nineteen or twenty he took off from home without warning one day and made his way as a hobo to California and back over the summer. He didn't perceive anything extraordinary enough in that feat even to mention it to his son, Paul, and seemed genuinely surprised that both of us were impressed when I finally brought it up, after Paul was already grown and married. Eventually my mother confided to me with some bitterness that she had been terribly embarrassed in the past by Lee's habit of remaining in his room when relatives were present. Aunts and uncles conversed with my mother in Yiddish when they visited. Only now do I understand that when they spoke of \"Itchy,\" which they frequently did, they were talking of my father, Itchy being the diminutive of the name Yitzak, which is Yiddish for Isaac.\n\nThe day I got my bike was the day Lou Gehrig retired from baseball, for I remember listening in Aunt Esther's house on the radio to his tearful farewell as I ate the lunch she had prepared for me. Pedaling away on my new bicycle in a spirit of vigorous exuberance, I began the long ride back through mysterious urban regions I had never been in before. Brooklyn is a vast realm, and the trip seemed an unending adventure through fresh surroundings then presumed to be safe. I drank it all in eagerly. At last, after half an hour or longer and with a pervading stir of relief, I recognized ahead the elevated train station I knew at a familiar strip of Kings Highway, a congested shopping area with all kinds of stores and a Dubrow's cafeteria opening at dawn and serving terrific food into the early hours of the next day. Shortly after, as forecast, I arrived at Ocean Parkway. In ten minutes or so I rolled past my high school. In familiar regions now, cycling the final thirty minutes down the broad boulevard into Coney Island and then home was a triumph.\n\nI have remarked before on a congenital unconsciousness of mine about details: Not until recently did it penetrate my mind that Kings Highway in Brooklyn is really _the Kings_ highway and that the adjoining borough of Queens is really the Queen's. I don't know which British king and queen they memorialize and don't ache to find out (you can look that one up yourself, if you care more than I do). I would take an offhand shot at William and Mary, because they alone of the kingdom's royal couples seem to go together (Victoria's Albert was a mere consort), and I would probably be wrong.\n\nI do know that in addition to the bicycle, my Aunt Esther gave me a dollar and, as usual, instructions for my mother to feed me more red meat. Either I seemed anemic to Aunt Esther or she was infused with a fear of anemia and convinced that a diet rich in beef would always defeat it. Aunt Esther never failed to give me a one-dollar bill whenever she saw me. At the cemetery, when my father was buried, I remember she gave me a dollar. I remember little more. It was the first dollar I ever had, and I don't know what I did with it. (At five years old, I couldn't do much of anything.) Others, Freud tells me, often unknowingly associate currency with gold and gold with excrement, and vice versa, whether they want to or not. I associate money with life, and an absence of money with death. I can't help it. I, too, can try a guess at the reason. But I still can't help it.\n\n# 5  \nOn and On\n\nAT THE AGE OF SIXTEEN I was old enough to obtain my \"working papers\" and seek legitimate employment.\n\nFederal legislation governing child labor enacted not long before proscribed as unlawful the official hiring of anyone younger than that in just about any formal capacity. (Shirley Temple, I must suppose, was a cheeky and heartwarming exception.)\n\nAt sixteen one also was allowed to quit school, but I never wanted to do anything like that, and neither did any of my friends. Quitting high school would have been a shame to the family and a scandal in the neighborhood. As it happened, not until I was past twenty-eight and face-to-face with the forbidding requirement of a Ph.D. if I was to continue teaching did I finally back timidly away from further institutional education and take steps to try my hand in the real world. A doctorate in literature is not a simple commitment. By then, I had been married for six years, had one small child, and had served two rather tiring years at very low pay as an instructor in the Department of English Composition at Pennsylvania State College\u2014twelve classroom hours weekly with four sections of Expository Writing, Comp. 5, each of first-year students who, with only a few exceptions, were no more interested in learning the practice of expository writing than I was in teaching it. By then, too, considerably encouraged by the publication in national magazines of a few short stories of mine that were written and had appeared while I was still a college undergraduate at NYU, I had a stronger ambition to write literature than to go on studying it. (I must note here, in an unconvincing pretense of humility, that in 1948, when most of these few stories appeared, Norman Mailer published _The Naked and the Dead;_ Gore Vidal, younger than both of us, had given us his war novel _Williwaw_ and that year _The City and the Pillar;_ and Truman Capote, also younger, had attracted national attention with his _Other Voices, Other Rooms.)_\n\nBut back in May of 1939, while still attending high school (and possibly already typing preposterously and zestfully away in Irving Kaiser's apartment downstairs on my short story, which was aimed first at the New York _Daily News_ , about my youthful Finnish soldier ingeniously and heroically thwarting the invasion of his native land by Soviet forces), I turned sixteen and set aside my creative passions to rush off enthusiastically to apply for my working papers.\n\nEither Sylvia or Lee had a friend who managed a Western Union telegraph office in the Bensonhurst part of Brooklyn, which is close to Coney Island. In that era just about every residential district had a Western Union office. Through that contact, I secured an interview with a Mr. Shotter in personnel at the Western Union headquarters building at 60 Hudson Street in Manhattan. And through him I was hired as a part-time messenger to work afternoons on weekdays after school and half a day Saturdays when needed. Since the five-day workweek was not then standard, I was wanted most Saturdays to help service the many businesses that stayed open. From a Western Union supply department, equivalent to the kind of quartermaster outlet I was to encounter later in the military, I drew my jaunty uniform. The vision has grown indistinct with the passage of time, but I believe it included brown leather puttees of a type recognizable to us from photos of cavalry officers in World War I and the Spanish-American War. (I am almost positive I wore leather puttees at some stage of my life, and I know it wasn't in World War II and not in the Boy Scouts.) A minimum-wage law was already in effect, and I believe I have it right that the minimum at which I started was twenty-five cents an hour, which increased to forty cents while I was still with Western Union. Working, on average, three to four hours each afternoon and four more on Saturday, but not on business holidays, my take-home pay ranged from five to six dollars a week. When I was let go after more than a year, I took my direction from some older fellows and followed the trail they had blazed to the unemployment-insurance office. To my great surprise, I was eligible. To my greater surprise, I received a hefty, guaranteed six dollars a week, the minimum from that source stipulated by legislation, for thirteen weeks. Here was as much or more than I had been earning by working, and without the unavoidable expense of twenty cents a day for trolley and subway fare.\n\nOh, what a wonderful world indeed this was that had such blessings in it, I felt like singing out loud each time the postman delivered my six-dollar check\u2014but for only those thirteen weeks.\n\nBy agreement at home, whatever I earned was my own for allowance. Lee and Sylvia were both already out of high school and working in the city. And at that time my take-home pay of six bucks a week was plenty.\n\nThe assumption in the family when the opportunity for employment arose was that I would be hired for the Bensonhurst office, and it could have been about then that I began training myself furiously on borrowed bicycles. Instead, I was placed in an office in the city, one on East 17th Street just west of Fourth Avenue, a few blocks from Union Square, where I had never been, and a few blocks down from the Flatiron Building, formerly an architectural highlight in the city, of which I had never heard. Manhattan was very different in that period (so was I), and so was the area fronting Union Square. With such bustling department stores as S. Klein's, Ohrbach's, Mays, it was a shopping district second only to the one with Macy's and Gimbel's twenty streets uptown, which in turn was second (if two \"seconds\" aren't unacceptable) only to the elegant department stores on Fifth Avenue in the fifties. Today, all these stores on 14th Street at Union Square have closed and haven't been replaced. Union Square hasn't nearly the same character without them, and without the fiery labor-movement rallies of the past. But Macy's is different now, too, without Gimbel's just down the street. Fifth Avenue isn't nearly the same today, either, and neither is the Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es or, as I found out with sharp pangs of disappointment on a recent vacation trip, the good old Via Veneto in Rome, on which I had spent so many happy, roistering hours during my military service overseas. The spirit of pleasure in which I had luxuriated there during the war and a few times after is still unmistakably the ambience of the city, but it has moved from the Via Veneto to other districts, and I haven't had time to learn where they are.\n\nI believe it was on street level in the Flatiron Building itself that a large, central Western Union office was situated, with a locker room providing space and facilities for forty or fifty of us to change into our work clothes and back at the staggered hours dictated by our different work schedules. I smoked my first cigarettes there\u2014Spuds, then Kools. Prior to my starting work, I hadn't troubled myself to conceive that there might be such things as telegraph offices in the business districts and that there were floods of messengers pacing back and forth on telegraph business. In movies they always pedaled bikes. On the day I began, I walked from school to the subway station as rehearsed, checked in and changed at the one office and reported for work at the other, and my seasoning in the city commenced.\n\nI should explain for out-of-towners that when New Yorkers speak of the city, they often imperiously mean only Manhattan.\n\nI learned a good deal very quickly. I learned first, as already noted, that telegrams were delivered on foot, that those delivered to offices required no signature of receipt, and that we not only delivered telegrams but were just as often summoned by electrical signal and code to specific reception rooms in office buildings to pick up messages typed on yellow forms to be carried back for transmission by teletype to addressees elsewhere. For those who don't know and do care, I will explain that the words of a telegram came out of a teletype machine on unrolling paper strands about half an inch broad; these were pasted onto yellow forms that were folded into envelopes by the operators and handed to the people working the counter, who assembled them in groups by destination and then handed them for delivery to the next one of us in line on the bench or at the counter. I detected in due course that, as a consequence of our guaranteed hourly minimum wage, there was no longer any real incentive to hurry, unlike the way it worked in the previous epoch spoken about by old-timers, during which they were paid by the number of items handled\u2014piecework, so to speak\u2014and might earn more, if lucky, or might earn less.\n\nI learned, with disgusting effort, to overcome the revolting tastes of cigarette smoking inevitably afflicting the amateur and to acquire the habit. (Sixteen years later, past thirty, I kicked the habit in a squall of pique when the price of a pack rose another penny to twenty-six cents the same week the first of the lung-cancer reports appeared.) I learned that Fifth Avenue neatly divides the East Side of Manhattan from the West Side, a handy detail that once learned is never forgotten, and that the streets and avenues are nicely numbered in consecutive order, until the numbers decline to zero, where streets begin carrying names and the trials to memory begin. Years later, I stumbled across an exception to the methodical numbering of streets, a tangled and astonishing intersection in Greenwich Village where West 4th and West 10th Streets cross as a result of convoluted determinants that, once understood, are forgotten instantly. I never learned what most of the offices I regularly went into and out of produced to justify the cost of their maintenance. A carpet company was a carpet company, but many of the others were confusing. The American Woolen Building, about the biggest and busiest in our sector, was an enigma to me for the longest time, for it was impossible to believe that all the companies I called on there were in some way connected with the woolen textile business.\n\nOne time on service at another office for two days I discovered the Washington Market, of which I had never heard, situated then on Manhattan's Lower West Side and the transfer center for most of the fruits and vegetables shipped into the city. Thus began my first contemplations of the nearly countless transactions implicated in the movement of vegetables and fruits from the far-flung acres in which they had been nurtured into Lily Dashevsky's family's fruit store on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island, where my mother could purchase what she needed to bring into our apartment for us. Another time I worked a bit farther uptown in a quarter alongside the Hudson River in which there were establishments committed, believe it or not, to the slaughter of pigs. I did not believe it, even while there. This was as startling to me as it was to everyone I told, but I know it was true. The odors were thick and repugnant, the workers looked grim as jailers, I soon comprehended what the squealing noises deep inside the buildings were about, and I was thankful I didn't have to work there a second day.\n\nMy closest acquaintance in this first Western Union office was a short and slightly older part-timer who lived in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, where Jews did not live and would not have lived comfortably if they had to. Through him, one sweltering summer afternoon after work, I saw how a nervy, experienced kid his age could go confidently into a saloon and come out with a cold and sweating silver pitcher of beer and a couple of glasses. That day I learned also that few things are as lusciously refreshing as ice-cold beer on a sweltering summer afternoon after half a day's Western Union work.\n\nRiding back into Brooklyn with him on the West End subway line, the only line carrying people to Bay Ridge, I would often witness a mass cultural phenomenon that calls into question the complacent dogma with which we mislead ourselves into believing that we arrive at our biases rationally and independently. At a major express stop, all the people traveling into Bay Ridge and environs left the train for a shuttle extension, and all the copies of the afternoon Republican newspapers, principally the _World-Telegram_ and _Journal-American_ , got off the train with them; while the liberal, Democratic newspapers like the _New York Post_ , and later on a newcomer called _PM_ , continued onward with their readers into the Jewish regions of Borough Park, Bensonhurst, and Coney Island.\n\nExcitements and surprises in the telegram-delivery business were few. With one part of my brain I played at walking about my routes at an unvarying pace that would carry me from street to street without halting for a traffic light, adroitly varying my sequence of calls when I beheld the tide of traffic turning against me, and I became quite good at that. There was a thrill one lucky afternoon when, passing the Players Club on Gramercy Park South with a telegram for delivery nearby, I spied and instantly recognized the figure descending the outdoor steps and moving across the sidewalk to hail a taxi: it was Charles Coburn, a character actor familiar on sight from movies like _The Devil and Miss Jones._ There was no mistaking him. The office buzzed with excitement when I hurried back with the news, and I couldn't wait for the day to end and the trip home to Coney Island to be over to tell everyone in my family and on the street that I had seen Charles Coburn in the flesh. I prayed they would believe me.\n\nAnother day, an older, full-time messenger\u2014older meant that he was out of high school, about twenty or twenty-one, and would start worrying about military conscription after the Selective Service Act was passed in 1940\u2014returned to home base from a call to an apartment near Gramercy Park with the juicy tale confided to the rest of us that he had been admitted by a man and woman and been requested by the man to engage in sex with the woman. He revealed nothing more, other than that, of course, the woman was good-looking. It mattered not one whit to me whether he was speaking the truth: In my per-fervid, young imagination, here was another glittering reward lying in wait for me as I continued into my maturity.\n\nI am still waiting.\n\nSix years farther on into my maturity, as a sophomore of twenty-three in my fiction-writing course at NYU, I made use of the incident in a short story called \"World Full of Great Cities\" that never attained publication in a periodical but has several times been printed in anthologies. The last time, I recall, it was taken by a Japanese publisher for publication in English for pupils in Japan studying American ways and literature. For that story, I fortunately hit upon a point of view that proved apt. By then I was familiar with Sherwood Anderson's \"I Want to Know Why\" and Ernest Hemingway's \"My Old Man,\" and I was deliberately imitating them in kind: a young man's discovery of something disagreeable in the adult world which he had not expected. There was this difference, though: In those works, the reader knows what the uncorrupted and inexperienced young narrator does not. In mine, the reader has no more insight into motivations than I, the narrator-as-Western-Union-boy, had when I first heard of the incident, had when I wrote the story, or have to this day.\n\nTHE UPTOWN OFFICE to which I eventually was transferred lay on a low floor of the General Motors Building, occupying the whole Broadway block of West 57th and 58th Streets, near the active traffic crossings of Columbus Circle, and allowed the three of us there to window-watch the systematic creation of a tall apartment building in the days when construction workers still used red-hot rivets tossed by tongs from the small furnaces ascending punctually with the scaffoldings, glowing bolts that were caught by others in metal cones for hammering into the junctures of the orange-crusted girders hoisted by cranes. The apartment building was at 240 Central Park South, and I know people who are comfortably quartered there today. The trip from Brooklyn to this new place of work was somewhat longer, two local stations past the last express stop at Times Square. But riding home, I was always sure of a seat.\n\nThe new office was small, a single room, and served only companies located in the same building, an arrangement chiefly sustained, I judge now, by the volume of business generated in the few uppermost floors entirely occupied by divisions of the General Motors Corporation. Here, too, I worked only half days, changing after school into and out of my uniform in the gentlemen's lavatory on the landing outside our office. I can't remember if I worked Saturdays as well.\n\nThree of us proved enough to handle the work. In charge of the office was Miss McCormack, a blond, pretty woman of small stature, who was enduring repeated problems with a boyfriend about whom Tom Fitzgerald, who'd been there with her awhile full-time, teased her with a friendly, gentle irony. She was the sole operator of the teletype machine, processing incoming and outgoing messages. There was no real need for her at the counter; Tom and I could by turn easily take charge of the telegrams and electrical requests for pickups and organize the routes through the different floors of the building ourselves. Tom Fitzgerald was a tall, equable, taciturn young man of upright posture who moved calmly and was wise, very wise, beyond his years, which were about twenty-one. Soon, certain events outside the office, for which he bore no responsibility, would be causing him to worry about the draft, for the Selective Service Act of 1940 mandated the registration for active duty of all males between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-six. And before the attack at Pearl Harbor, people did worry about the draft. If they worried after Pearl Harbor, they did so covertly, and males of eligible age still in civilian dress were prompt with apologetic explanations they frequently felt obliged to give.\n\nI'm sure I was there through that summer of 1940, because I easily recall the torrents of telegrams to multiple addressees gushing out from the executive floors of the General Motors Corporation to delegates at the Republican National Convention championing the selection of Wendell Willkie as the candidate to run against FDR for the office of president. Willkie won the nomination and lost the election. Originally from Indiana, Willkie, like Roosevelt, favored support to Britain in the war and opposition to Hitler; in addition, Willkie accepted many of the New Deal programs and therefore had little ammunition to employ against Roosevelt other than the two-term tradition going back to George Washington. That was an election in which employees in Woolworth's stores were compelled by their employers to wear WILLKIE FOR PRESIDENT buttons. He lost anyway, and I was not surprised. A devoted reader by then of liberal newspapers, I couldn't see why anyone would resist Roosevelt for a third term, and later, a fourth. I couldn't believe then, because at the time I hadn't heard of any, that there were such things as human beings of good intention who were Republicans, and I'm still not sure. By now I have the same doubts about Democrats.\n\nThe ages of eligibility for the draft expanded progressively in both directions, upward and downward, as our immersion in combat grew greater, and when the government, in 1942, announced the lowering of the draft age to nineteen after I had already passed eighteen, I and a few friends from Coney Island concluded that the time was ripe to enlist. A persuasive enticement was the promise of picking the branch and the division of the service we preferred. It was a promise kept for those of us choosing the U.S. Army Air Corps; no one I knew personally who chose the air corps was subject to any staggering shock of the kind suffered later by such as Kurt Vonnegut and Mel Brooks, who both were wrenched from one military specialty, for which they were in training, and thrust into the infantry for shipment overseas as combat replacements, for which duty they received no training.\n\nIn this new office with Miss McCormack and Tom Fitzgerald the work was more interesting to me because there was so much less of it. I had time for my homework, for extended conversation (which remains a favorite personal recreation), and, by copying Tom, for reaping the fruits of a surprising preoccupation with calligraphy. Working like an artisan of old, Tom was fashioning an elaborate handwriting for himself. Seated beside him as he concentrated, I awaited his decisions on each capital and lowercase letter in our alphabet and labored intently at duplicating his choices when he made his final judgments. By the time I was transferred into the Brooklyn office the following spring, his handwriting had become my handwriting. In time I let myself forsake it, embarrassed by the flamboyant cursives implying deliberate effort and suggesting affectation, and today from Tom Fitzgerald's new handwriting of 1940 I preserve only the long looping sweep under the J in my signature and modified vestiges of the same below my y's, g's, and j's, and in my capital H.\n\nI don't know what happened to Tom in the military or afterward, or to his handwriting, either. He had a Jewish girlfriend he alluded to occasionally. He was friendly with a young, mild-mannered, redheaded, Irish elevator operator who lived near him in the Bronx, and I was friendly with him, too. I was on good terms with all the elevator operators\u2014they recognized me as a fellow workingman. A way to remain in their good graces, I had learned very quickly at the first job after one gruff rebuke, was always to walk down to the lobby from the second floor rather than force an elevator to stop for you there, and always to use the staircase in either direction for a single floor. Today, from the social vantage point I enjoy, and probably from yours, too, it seems almost antediluvian that well-brought-up young white Americans would settle in contentedly to such occupations as full-time elevator operator or messenger; but that was then, and the social world you and I know today is only one aspect of the real world, a single facet, and the rest of today's real world is one more reality from which we, with our privileges, strive to remain safely insulated, and of which we definitely wish to keep ourselves securely ignorant.\n\nI FOUND OUR NEW SETTING in the city more congenial than my first. On the thoroughfare just behind our building, on Eighth Avenue, was a spacious Horn & Hardart Automat. The Automats were favorite eating places of mine then and\u2014a year later\u2014even more so, when I found myself by pure coincidence back in a more exalted job in the same building, with my preferred meal their succulent chopped-sirloin plate, which included any two vegetables and a roll and butter for twenty-five cents. Their baked beans were an exceptional treat, too, as all alive today who have eaten them will attest, and so were their mashed potatoes (I wish I had a plateful of that chopped sirloin with vegetables here right now). I also liked their orange and lemon glac\u00e9 cakes for a nickel as dessert. A Nedick's was close by, too, for a hot dog and orange drink now and then, and on the corner of West 57th Street was a Chock Full O' Nuts sparkling with cleanliness, at which for a nickel you could enjoy a nutted cream-cheese sandwich on raisin bread. This was not especially filling, but would serve until mealtime and in that respect was more satisfying than a hot dog, whose savory juices and textures always left me wanting another one, and still do.\n\nInside the General Motors Building was an office run by two youngish men manufacturing formulas for soft-ice-cream machines, and as often as not, when I stopped in with a telegram, they asked for my judgment of a new alteration in the recipe for chocolate or banana which they were seeking to improve. Other times when on that floor I would pop in anyway to offer my help. Another small office, one that functioned largely by telegram, was occupied by a well-mannered and well-dressed horse-race tout. A few times every week he would address the same message recommending the same horse to a few hundred subscribers. I assumed he performed reasonably well, since he stayed in business, but I was too young for bookmakers, and my twenty-five or forty cents an hour didn't yield much room for error. One other venture stood out prominently, occupying virtually an entire floor of the building and called the Manhattan Mutual Automobile Casualty Company. There, a very beautiful, dark, buxom, married, mature woman known as Miss Peck or Miss Beck never failed to greet me with a smile and thank me each time I stopped in on telegram business, and I looked forward to calling there just to experience her welcome and to hear her speak to me again with such genuine, feminine warmth.\n\nWhen about a year later, through statistical chances long enough for a whopping prize in a state lottery, I reported to Manhattan Mutual from an employment agency to work full-time at the more distinguished job of file clerk, she didn't know me and didn't recall ever having laid eyes on me before.\n\nIt must have been the debonair figure I'd cut in my messenger's uniform that had caused her to notice me before.\n\nClothes do make the man.\n\n# 6  \nAnd On and On\n\nTHE TRAFFIC LIGHTS on Ocean Parkway were staggered, our first encounter with this stratagem for allowing automobiles to proceed steadily at a restricted rate of speed. Separating the six or eight traffic lanes were two attractive pedestrian islands. Benches sat every twenty yards or so beneath the foliage of modest shade trees, and these trees and benches and tended pavement walks ran from the lower end of the parkway in Brighton to its farthermost point at one of the grand entrances to Prospect Park. The sylvan aspect of Ocean Parkway, already established by the time I first saw it from my bicycle, likely was a halcyon dividend from one of the public works programs of FDR's New Deal. Ocean Parkway was perhaps the most handsome of the numerous major traffic routes in the borough, if not in all the city, and possibly it still is. A lane for bicycles ran the length of the pedestrian walks from beginning to end, and I was soon making use of it for my telegram business. Stops were dictated only by traffic lights wherever avenues crossed the parkway, and these were mostly a good way apart. To help cope with the predestined boredom that has proved twin to the confidence arising with my successful performance in most jobs I've held\u2014in just about all of them, propelled by anxiety going in, I've done my best work at the beginning\u2014I set my mind to work constructing a diverting challenge: riding the full stretch of Ocean Parkway between the office and home without having to stop for a single red light. That proved easy; much of the time I did better than the mass of automobiles, whose restless drivers were habitually tempted to speed faster than the staggered lights programmed them to do. Because that challenge, once mastered, grew boring in turn, I introduced the daring innovation of performing the same unbroken bicycle journey without using my hands. Frequently I had to veer into the questionable tactic of decreasing speed to allow a traffic light ahead to change before I got to it and could burst safely through. That was permissible under the rules; I made the rules. Soon I was maestro of that undertaking, too, and capering on my wheels, I basked in the admiring scrutiny of the women on the benches\u2014the mothers and grandmothers with children in strollers and baby carriages\u2014as I show-boated past them, my arms swinging at my sides or, in a more peremptory bid for attention, clasping my hands across the crown of my Western Union messenger's cap, arms akimbo.\n\n\"Look, Ma, no hands!\" I shouted silently, heaping laurels on myself as I sped along.\n\nEven after all this while, Brooklyn remains to me a vast, unexplored territory, now enormously more complex culturally than it was, with the surging and discordant infusion of Asian, Russian, African-American, Arabic, and other peoples, together with Hispanic, brown and black, from Latin America and the Caribbean. I am still awed by newspaper accounts of violent happenings in neighborhoods I've been hearing about for a lifetime and am still unable to pinpoint on a map: Red Hook, Bath Beach, Gowanus, Greenpoint, Sunset Park, East New York, and even, to underline the point, Midwood, which when I was in high school and at the Western Union office just off Kings Highway, was close at hand\u2014but where? I delivered telegrams in Midwood, but with the confused notion that I was still in lower Flatbush, and for all I know now I could have been correct.\n\nWhen Lee married, he and Perle lived first in an area called Crown Heights. With my mother and sister I visited there several times but have only a nebulous idea of its location. I do know, from the newspapers, that Crown Heights at present is home to a large black community and a large Hasidic Jewish community, who live side by side antagonistically. Certainly, my worries about these two communities would be different, but one group would be no less intimidating to me than the other, and I'm glad I live here now and not there. Take Bushwick. If I were to trouble myself at long last to find out just where the Bushwick section of Brooklyn is, I don't doubt that I'd succeed. But I also don't doubt that I'd soon forget.\n\nI DON'T KNOW what we did at my new Western Union office just off Kings Highway when it rained\u2014I have a dim impression of olive slickers issued by the company, but I wouldn't bet my life on it, or yours\u2014and I can't recall bicycling at work in winter. I have no bad memories of this last, brief tour of Western Union duty. I have no memories at all of the people there.\n\nFrom this office I would blithely go wheeling off with my telegrams into familiar neighborhoods, even on occasion my own, as well as areas surrounding the office and my high school that were totally new to me, places with names like Flatlands and Canarsie. Small discoveries still titillate me. I knew that Bedford Avenue was beyond the right-field fence of Ebbets Field, the stadium of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and was the place where baseballs struck over that fence for home runs presumably fell. Yet I was really surprised to find Bedford Avenue extending all the way down into residential lower Flatbush bearing its own name, instead of its equivalent, East 25th Street. Coney Island Avenue, so denominated despite its running into the eastern end of Brighton and nowhere near Coney Island, was East 11th Street, and Ocean Parkway I was finally able to fix into place as East 6th Street. Till then I knew only the streets of Coney Island, which were \"Wests,\" and these went reticulating away backward in a contrary direction, my own.\n\nThe longest avenue in Brooklyn is probably Flatbush Avenue, extending from the Manhattan Bridge, which indeed connects with Manhattan, down in a straight diagonal through the borough almost to the seashore across the border of Queens. I discovered the long, lower part of Flatbush Avenue on my bicycle; the upper half I traveled ten years later when I lived in Manhattan and drove across the bridge into Brooklyn for visits to Sylvia, Lee, and my mother. Sylvia and Lee, each married, then lived close to each other, near the subway stop at Kings Highway. This was near the Western Union office in which, while finishing high school, I had worked ten years earlier. I liked best of all, after my first odyssey along Flatbush Avenue, the long routes out, sometimes all the way into the distant settlement of Gerritsen Beach, a small cluster of one-family houses standing along canals that connected the waters of whatever inlet comes in from the sea or bay there. I hadn't heard of Gerritsen Beach before and I haven't heard of it since. There the names on the telegrams were not Jewish and not Italian and neither were the faces on the people, who tended to be fair-haired. I never failed to experience a thrill each time I pedaled past the military air-base installation of Floyd Bennett Field, at a time, in early spring of 1941, when nobody I knew had ever been up in an airplane or ever expected to be.\n\nAnd just three years later, a mere three, in early spring of 1944, I was able to thrill again to Floyd Bennett Field shortly before going overseas, when I landed there in a plane with a flight of B-25S on a training flight from our base in Columbia, South Carolina. (The revisionary idea arises that it could have been Mitchell Field on Long Island we flew to, but the time elapsed doesn't change, and the point is the same.)\n\nOnce on the ground we had some time, and I led two surly bombardier acquaintances of mine (I couldn't call them buddies, for we weren't that close), Bowers and Bailey, who'd come in on other planes, into the city for a meal at the famous Lindy's restaurant, then on Broadway and about 50th Street. I had been there before on furlough (and as something of a glorified, though anonymous, serviceman celebrity) right after receiving my bombardier's wings and commission as a second lieutenant. They were both from Chicago\u2014along with the _Chicago Tribune_ , their favorite newspaper, they were fervid isolationists and hated FDR, and England, too\u2014and hadn't seen anything like Lindy's before, and they weren't entirely at home with its raucous splendor or mainly Jewish menu. (I forget what they ordered, but my habitual meal there in daytime was a chopped-liver-and-smoked-turkey sandwich on rye bread, along with a sour pickle and sour tomato or two, and strawberry cheesecake for dessert.) They had both read Damon Runyon, though, and one of them commented that all the men there (including me?) fit the description of Runyon's character Harry the Horse, by which he meant, I was aware, that they all looked Jewish, and of course we did.\n\nIn the Italian homes at which I stopped with my telegrams while still with Western Union as I waited for an adult to acknowledge receipt with a signature or to return with a tip for me, I inevitably encountered a strong, pungent odor unmistakably different from the one in my own apartment, although of that one, through natural adjustment, I was scarcely conscious. Only lately have I come to realize that the special pervasive aroma of which I speak is Italian and that it was ingrained in wallpaper, rugs, plaster, and upholstery impregnated for years with the steaming fragrances of olive oil, garlic, and tomatoes.\n\nIn those Western Union days I often received a tip in return for my telegram. On birthdays and Mother's Day there was frequently more than one telegram for a single person, and so, too, at the catering halls for weddings. The amount of the tip was most often a nickel, occasionally a dime. My biggest windfall could not have been foretold. Late one afternoon outside a house on Bedford Avenue, returning to my bike after a delivery, I was spotted by a frantic young man who pounced at me as though I were a compassionate angel appearing in answer to a desperate prayer. If he gave me a dollar, he wanted to know, would I go into another house close by and sing \"Happy Birthday\"\u2014that is, deliver, as a freelance independent contractor, what was officially called a singing telegram\u2014to a girl named Phyllis at a party inside? I said sure, and I did ring the bell, did enter when bade, did advance inside toward a partying group, and did, standing perfectly stationary with shoulders squared, sing \"Happy Birthday\" to Phyllis, from Eddie. My audience was thrilled and applauded. Returning outside, I signaled to Eddie that the job was done and that his way was clear. I abstained from confiding that an older woman there, likely a mother or an aunt, had tipped me another quarter for my singing telegram.\n\nI found singing \"Happy Birthday\" easy work\u2014lucrative, too\u2014and regretted that I wasn't able to make a career of it.\n\nIn late spring of 1941, with FDR securely back in office, I was scheduled to finish at Abraham Lincoln High School. I had terminated my work with Western Union by the day of graduation. If there was such thing as a prom then, I didn't hear of it; if I had, I wouldn't have gone. To this day, I am leery of group participation and all formalized group activities, and every time I relent I have cause to repent. In protest against the Vietnam War, I went on a march in New York, one in which I was first grouped with other literary people and then ranked in alphabetical order. As a result, I found myself shoulder to shoulder with two literary critics who had already made known their disapproval of me and could correctly adduce, from that circumstance if none other, that I didn't think much of them, either. I was wary of other marches after that and attended only one more, that largest one in Washington, D.C., to which I went in a plane with a group of friends. Erica, my daughter, was there, too, traveling with a busload of high-school classmates. Also on that march was a group of young Catholic college students, all of them females, and the accompanying Sisters from Marymount College in Westchester, where I went to speak about my work as an author the following week, and they were victims of tear-gassing while waiting innocently at a curb for their chartered bus to arrive. I did not even think of going to my college commencement exercises. I did go to my high-school graduation; my mother, Lee, and Sylvia went proudly, too. We had an early dinner together at a restaurant, and after that I took the subway with some friends to a jazz club on 52nd Street to listen to Billie Holiday. We had our own social club by then and knew how exceptional she was.\n\nMy first club, Club Hilight, began in a cellar and then moved to a more palatial home, in a storefront on Surf Avenue, just a block and a half away from my house. One day my brother dropped in unexpectedly to summon me home. I was smoking a cigarette. I had kept my smoking secret from the family, and I couldn't say now which of us was the more flustered. I was caught; he had caught me. Each of us was supposed to do something. Neither seemed sure what that something was.\n\n\"How long have you been doing that?\" Lee finally asked disapprovingly, when we were walking outside together.\n\nI had crushed out the butt. Both he and Sylvia smoked, and I could have retorted by asking how old he was when he began, but I can't be glib when it counts. With a most innocent voice and a most guileless face I can tell convincingly the most far-fetched lie to the credulous, but only when the point is humorous with nothing real at stake. With pressure on, I stammer, I'm dumb.\n\n\"As long as you're doing it, you might as well do it at home,\" he decided. \"You should try not to do anything outside the house that you wouldn't want us to know about.\" And after a pause, he added: \"Here, have one of mine.\"\n\nThis was censure that had a positive effect, and a year afterward helped buttress an inhibition already planted in my conscience, one that I credit with vitiating all the narcotic effects of smoking marijuana, apart from a false appetite. Smoking marijuana the several times I did left me with a sore throat and feeling very hungry. Smoking marijuana was something I definitely would not have wanted my family to know about. I couldn't get the least bit high the times I tried, not then or later, a little while after the war, when I puffed only to accommodate close friends while in their company (I didn't want to abuse their friendship as a \"drag\" or \"bringdown.\") From lessons learned afterward through that eventual, and inconclusive, couple of years in psychoanalysis, I surmise that I couldn't get high because for reasons nestled deep in my unconscious I simply didn't really want to. In truth, I didn't want to be smoking pot at all.\n\nAs for the graduation itself, the festivities had nothing special to do with me. I was not valedictorian (thanks be to God!), won no prizes, and was not singled out by name for any honors other than my diploma. Probably, though, I was the sole possessor of a singular distinction that passed unrecognized. It's more likely than not that I was the only male member of that graduating class named Joey who had received, or was then still receiving, unemployment insurance, raking in my beefy six dollars a week.\n\nThere was nothing more by way of celebration than I have related, no thought of anything even remotely like a bonus or vacation. I don't think anyone I knew of then\u2014not Lee, not Sylvia\u2014had ever gone anywhere on vacation. On Saturday morning, I rested. On Sunday, with Lee and Sylvia counseling over my shoulders, I read the want ads, and on Monday morning, I set out by subway to call on employment agencies and seek my fortune in the city.\n\nMY FIRST EMPLOYMENT AGENCY, the Wall Street Employment Bureau, with a downtown address in the Manhattan financial district on an oblique side street named Beaver Street (it fascinates me that such details take enduring root in the memory), vectored me right back uptown to the General Motors Building for my first interview and onto the payroll of that Manhattan Mutual Automobile Casualty Company, whose comely, maternal, and properly married, dark-haired Miss Beck (or Peck) was unable to believe she had seen me before and signified with a shrug and an unconcerned dip of the head that it hardly made a difference. A new and about-to-be more appropriate crush at the reception desk up front conducted me deep into the back part of the office, where I had never been before. I was spoken to first by Miss Sullivan, secretary to one of the higher executives; she questioned me in kindly fashion, mainly, I judge now, to verify whether I could hear and understand English. After that, her boss needed no longer than five minutes to approve my appearance, I suppose, and I was taken on right then and there to work as a clerk in the file room. My starting salary was sixty dollars a month, which seemed okay. I was elated to have any job at all. I gathered fairly soon that the same wage would be my final salary, too, as long as I remained a file clerk. Had I thought about it, I would have sensed even then that there wasn't much else at Manhattan Mutual that I could quickly learn to do capably, or would want to.\n\nAt the time, age eighteen, I doubt I had any inclination to think so systematically. Like my friends of the same age, I was all but oblivious of the future. None of us knew seriously what we wanted to do or would like to become. Descriptive terms for jobs \"with a chance for advancement\" or \"maybe a good future\" meant little to us, for we didn't plan; we weren't in a position to. The war was continuing, the draft was a stimulating prospect, and we took what we could get. If one of us ever did receive a promotion, bettering himself with a move from one menial level to one less lowly, we construed the event not as one of destiny or reward but as an astonishing turn of plain good luck. I don't remember how much of my sixty dollars a month I gave to the family to contribute to the general upkeep, but I did give some, whatever amount was requested by my brother or sister. They wouldn't have demanded much.\n\nThe file room itself was a spacious cage of chain-wire fence that rose from floor to ceiling and projected into the center of that part of the office floor, a fence through whose square gaps those of us inside could see outside, and people outside could hear and observe us. Because we could communicate freely by voice through the barrier, it was seldom necessary for others to enter our cage, although they often did stroll in.\n\nI learned quickly what the company did: It issued liability insurance to taxis, to fleets, and to independent owners, for claims resulting from accidents, claims for PD's (property damage) and PI's (personal injury), and to limousines as well. I learned quickly, too, and impressed people back home with the knowledge, that at that time the license plates of all taxis in the city began with an \"O\" and those of the private car services with the letter \"Z.\" Each time a cab or one of our insured limousines was involved in an accident\u2014and in New York City at that busy period when cruising taxis were numerous in all five boroughs, there were collisions of varying degrees of seriousness every day and night\u2014a report was made, and a file containing the report was opened and then filed in one of our numerous file cabinets, to be retrieved and filed again each time a document was added. What we did almost exclusively\u2014and there was a bunch of us to do it\u2014was locate and deliver the file to the right desk each time it was requested and return it to be filed again when it was done with. After a case was closed, usually through negotiation, the file traveled downstairs to a storeroom for dead records and into a place in one of the walls of cabinets there. The file cabinets upstairs were metal; these were of paperboard. After a suitable period, these records were transferred to a rented space in a Manhattan warehouse for dead records that were even deader. One of these dead records, too, would come back to life occasionally, and one of us would be dispatched to the dreary catacombs of the warehouse to fetch it.\n\nThere were five of us doing this work full-time, and I became friendliest with Stanley Levy, some two years older than I, who lived far out in Brooklyn near Coney Island, and had, with his black hair and cleft chin, a perceptible resemblance to Cary Grant, and, I conclude from people who knew Cary Grant, was much the wittier. Lou, who'd been there longest, was a slim, friendly Italian from the Bronx; Jerry was Jewish and lived in the Bronx also. Ralph was boss of us all, a spry, springy, hurrying, short young man still under thirty with waxen, wavy blond hair. Ralph, if one went by appearances, always appeared to be doing at least twice the work of any of us, of _all_ of us combined\u2014for he sped about to and fro at least twice as fast, always with a sheet of notepaper in his hand, and then one day he was abruptly let go. We were not told why. That slip of paper, Stanley Levy joked after his exit, never had anything written on it.\n\nEntering the file room as boss of us all came Miss Dunbar from another, distant part of the floor, from around a dogleg where the adjusters, legal, and sales people were quartered and tended to keep largely to themselves. Miss Dunbar was a woman of formidable build of about fifty, with a knowing, disdainful look and a derisive half smile. Things were going to be different from that moment on, she firmly let us know when she entered to take charge, and necessary changes would be made. None of us knew what she was talking about; we had no idea what had gone wrong. And, in effect, things were in no way different. We went about our work as before, untroubled and in good spirits, kidding with those girls who kidded back and with the men who encouraged banter\u2014George Schwartz, Mr. Spiese, Harriet Jackman, Miss Beck, Virginia, Eunice. Miss Dunbar's sardonic half smile and knowing look proved to be no more than that: It was just her look, and the only change occurred when Lou's number came up in the draft and he was forced to depart for military service. There was a farewell Italian dinner in his Bronx home for the other three of us in the friendliest atmosphere (a hell of a long subway ride for Stanley Levy and me), prepared and superintended by a beaming, affectionate mother, affectionate to all of us. This was my first Italian home-cooked meal, and I rashly misjudged. Too polite back then to inquire and make sure, I took the meat balls following the soup and spaghetti to be the main course and prudently (better safe than sorry) helped myself to one, maybe two or three extra; and I thereafter had difficulty with the chicken and vegetables and the sausage stuffing that followed before the fruit and cheese and cake for dessert.\n\nThe storage room for dead records one floor below us, with its couple of old desks end to end and several discarded swivel chairs, was anything but dreary. For us it was a kind of playground. There was one key, and the file room had it. I ate lunch there with the others whenever I brought sandwiches from home, which was often. My mother would prepare and pack my favorites, along with an apple, orange, or banana: On two seeded rolls, always two and always rolls with poppy seeds, there could be canned salmon with grated onion and sliced tomato or kosher salami or baloney, with plenty of mustard. Another treat of fractionally my own design (I liked to think) was sliced chicken\u2014white meat vigorously preferred, then as today\u2014with lettuce and\u2014this was the magic\u2014mayonnaise lathered on the inside of one of the halves of roll and ketchup soaked into the other. I was on the very threshold of Russian dressing and didn't know it.\n\nThere were occasional rubber-band and paper-clip fights in the storeroom or dice games for pennies and nickels or \"underleg.\" (In \"underleg,\" the player swiftly skidded a coin beneath each shoe, so swiftly that neither player could note which side was up. The second player then slid coins of equal value underneath after them. If the coins matched, the matching player won. When they didn't, the first player did. Most times, they split.) You could kill time down there comfortably alone while pretending to still be searching for a file you had already found and go on with the morning's crossword puzzle or complete the entry for the contest in one of the two tabloid newspapers to pick the most winners of the coming Saturday's college football games. Now and then I would choose a file at random to search inside for matters of special interest. I couldn't find any. The storeroom was also a secret trysting place for hasty sexual encounters, for more than one of us, as two of us inadvertently discovered the day I left. So were the two flights of stairs between the floors for even swifter ones. I learned much about office romances from my special friend Virginia, a cheerful, humorous flirt, and exceedingly pretty, too. She was four years older than I and had been through college. Once we were friends, she confided freely about dates with one lawyer there and one adjuster, each of whom threatened to put her out of his car if she didn't prove more accommodating than she chose to be. She lived in New Jersey and did not say she walked back. She also had a sweet and sad nonphysical relationship with a quiet, almost elderly married man, which was confined to a drink after work now and then and an occasional dinner. Nothing could come of this, and neither of them wished that anything more would.\n\nI went to my first opera from the office one Saturday afternoon, a matinee of _Carmen_ at the old Metropolitan Opera House downtown somewhere in the West Thirties. I went alone. My choice was a good one. Through weekly and nightly radio broadcasts presenting short sections of classical-music favorites, I had grown familiar with some of the score\u2014the Toreador melody, the \"Habanera,\" the spirited overture (two of them were already popular in our streets through corruption by doggerel lyrics: \"Toreador\/Don't spit on the floor\/Use the cuspidor\/That's what it's for\" and \"I lost my shirt\/I want my shirt\"\u2014I've forgotten the rest; this last was taught me by Lee, from whom I had also learned all of the stanzas of \"Ivan Tzivitsky Tzizar\"). At the performance of _Carmen_ , I was exhilarated by the dances, the acting, charmed by the amazing entrance of real horses drawing coaches out onto an indoor stage in the colorful procession introducing the final act. I told everybody\u2014real, live horses!\n\nThen I pushed my luck. As part of a naive and eventually futile agenda to initiate my friend Lou Berkman into the peculiar bliss of musical appreciation, I purchased two tickets to my second opera, an evening performance, and brought him along as my treat. Lou was already working in his father's junk shop in Brooklyn, an arena of enterprise far more lucrative than the name suggests, and one that supported two or three of the Berkman families rather well for as long as was necessary. After work, he came uptown by subway to my office and kidded with my perky friend Virginia at the receptionist's desk until I was ready to leave. He paid for my dinner of chopped sirloin, mashed potatoes, and baked beans at the Automat across the avenue, and we proceeded downtown by subway. My tickets were, of course, the cheapest, and we finally found our seats very high up along the side and in the topmost row, from which point we could not see perhaps a third of the stage. My choice this time was unfortunate: _Tannh\u00fcuser._ I was misled by faith and inexperience: The melody of the \"Pilgrim's Chorus\" had been appropriated for our Thanksgiving song in music class in elementary school; it is also the melody with which the overture begins, and I naively thought that such recognition would make it easier to connect with the rest of the musical score. For those who may not know Wagner or may not know _Tannh\u00e4user_ , there is a large difference between that one and _Carmen_ , a large difference and a lo-o-ong one. Because of that evening, Lou never attended another opera as long as he lived, and I have never wanted to hear _Tannh\u00e4user_ again.\n\nBack at work, with the other Lou gone from the file room and Miss Dunbar, unlike mercurial Ralph, forever stationary and watchful, the atmosphere inside our workplace suffered a gradual shrinking of levity. Lou's replacement did not mesh perfectly with the well-knit camaraderie in which the rest of us had previously flourished. And when Stanley Levy's number came up in the draft, too, and he gave notice of his intention to leave, I gave notice with him. We left the same afternoon. Stanley would be going into the army, I would be going to the navy yard in Virginia. On the day of our departure, there emerged through an amusing coincidence the secret that more than one of us had been making use of the storeroom for dead records on the floor below for speedy, romantic alliances during office hours. There was only that one key to the storeroom, and two of us wanted it. Ever pliable, I deferred to seniority and collected my own farewell cuddle on the staircase halfway down, where once again I could not obtain all that my heart wished for in the way of an amatory send-off. Virginia, as customary, wore a good deal of bright red lipstick, and we couldn't even kiss passionately without smearing both our mouths with inculpating evidence. I was deeply in love with her, which was good. I was no longer in love with her the minute after we parted, and that was better.\n\n# 7  \nAnd On and On and On\n\nIN A FAR SECTION of the long shed of our blacksmith shop, into which I never had occasion to go, a huge sea anchor under construction curved a pointed shank into the air. I couldn't imagine how they were building it. Periodically, I would wheel a barrel of small objects over to one of the circular pools for \"tempering,\" and I would gaze with some wonderment at the thick, colossal arm ascending from the ground higher than everything around it. I puzzled even then over the mystery of the massive links of chain needed to anchor the anchor, how and where these were fabricated and joined. The drop forges in my section were mammoth structures, and these produced only such small items as bolts, rivets, and buckles. I still don't know how these links of chain were made and have stopped wondering. Today I worry instead about tiny jewelry chains, how in the world the minuscule filaments are assembled into those flexible segments.\n\nWe swallowed salt tablets all day long. For our health. The population at that time was being urged to consume a lot of salt on steamy days to guard against heat exhaustion. Because of the many burning furnaces in the shop, this seemed unusually important for us. The furnaces were mainly small and stood apart from each other. The cylinders for dispensing the salt tablets were hung like light fixtures all about, on walls and posts. It must have been at least as hot and hard and uncomfortable for the blacksmiths as it was for me, because they worked closer to the fires longer and did the turning and pounding and trimming of the hot metal on the anvils and the dies at the drop forges. My job consisted mainly of carrying one at a time the glowing metal rods from the furnace to the forge or the anvil\u2014I used tongs, of course, and wore the bulky, fire-resistant gloves Lee had picked out for me\u2014each time the man I was delegated to work with that day signalled for another unit, then clearing out of his way the one he had newly shaped. But the blacksmiths were paid much more money than I was, and they were accustomed by life to arduous physical labor. Unlike me, they accepted hard work as natural.\n\nA surprising number of them were from rural North Carolina, the northern border of which wasn't that far away; and a good many of the rest had rambled down to avail themselves of the temporary opportunity of defense work, for as long as that opportunity lasted, from agrarian towns in Virginia. Where else could a worthy blacksmith earn a decent living in peacetime?\n\nI had been prepared by northern friends for the various oddities of speech I swiftly encountered. The most singular of these, unlike any of the exaggerated travesties I had heard in movie theaters, flowed from those who regularly transmuted the familiar (familiar to me) _ou_ vowel sound (as in \"out\") into something else\u2014into _oo_ \u2014so that a mouse became a moose (I never thought to probe how a moose was pronounced locally); and so, for example, the sentence \"There's a mouse running about the house\" became \"There's a moose running aboot the hoose.\" I was much too politic and sensitive ever to joke with the men about this, or even to indicate that I'd heard anything humorously atypical. I have almost always been able (with a sympathetic respect that might be either wisdom or sublimation of cowardice) to at least perceive the basis of the other person's point of view, and to see myself as others might see me. To my mother, and Lee and Sylvia, too, to everyone in our family, it would have been a profound character failing ever to deprecate anyone just for being different or handicapped. Bigotry was a heinous offense.\n\nBecause we tried to see ourselves as others might see us, we tended to be a self-conscious bunch. A household anecdote epitomizing that point related to the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur. My mother, who in general was nonobservant, preferred that I go to one of the two synagogues on our street late in the afternoon to say the _Kaddish_ for my dead father, more, I'd guess, to keep up traditional good appearances than from a belief that a prayer from me would be of much help to either my father or the Lord. I attempted to do as she wished for as long as I lived at home, which was until I went into the army. She never insisted; that was not her nature. But in early September of 1949, when I and my first wife, Shirley, were preparing to sail to England for an academic year on one of the earliest of the Fulbright scholarships, she did rouse herself to exhort. By then she had long since broken her hip and was limping about with a cane; that accident befell her while I was still in training as a bombardier. With a diffident urgency that obviously was embarrassing to her, she called both of us aside, a calendar in one hand and in the other a scrap of paper on which the date of that year's approaching Yom Kippur was already noted. We must remember, she emphasized to us, to be sure to find a temple in whatever city we were in when that day came and attend at least part of the services. \"Else,\" she explained in her faulty English, \"the people will think you're a 'Comminist.' \" It happened that we were in Paris on Yom Kippur, my wife and I, age twenty-five and twenty-six, respectively, and in Paris for the first time, and our attempt to scour the city for a synagogue was not wholehearted. We didn't stumble upon one; yet I don't suppose that many of the people in Paris assumed we were \"Comminists.\" And it is insulting to God, I suspect, to imagine He cares whether I pray to Him or even knows where or who I am.\n\nOn emergency leave after my mother's accident, I was appreciative of the benevolence with which the various bureaucratic desks of the army joined to secure my furlough in what seemed a matter of minutes, certainly less than an hour. I was midway through my preflight training at the Santa Ana Army Air Base in California, a huge installation in which thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of aviation cadets were received, examined, evaluated, and assigned to classes for preflight training as pilots, bombardiers, and navigators. The telegram had been sent by my sister. My orderly room referred me to the office of the chaplain, which on the spot arranged a loan to me from the Red Cross to pay for the railroad tickets procured for me by the transportation office, which also awarded me a priority rating for the train.\n\nEntering the hospital in Brooklyn by myself some five days later, I had no idea what I would find. For reasons I don't understand and never expect to, I had constructed the bizarre scenario that I might not recognize my mother and feared that my failure to do so might sink her into deep despair. A couple of dozen beds in the open women's ward of Coney Island Hospital stood before me. Facing the entrance when I stepped in was a bed holding a white-haired woman about my mother's age whose attention I captured instantly. She rose on an elbow to observe me more intently. I stared right back with the tentative beginnings of a smile. Her gaze remained fixed on me and I started across to her. I hugged her gently while kissing her once or twice and sat down. I was appalled that she didn't seem to recognize me or respond appropriately to my name. This was worse than I had imagined. It required a few more uncomfortable minutes of awkward talk for both of us to realize that we had never set eyes on each other before. I glanced about wretchedly. At the far end of the ward I then clearly spied my mother practically levitating out of her bed, plaster cast and all, and waving wildly in furious and frustrated exasperation to attract my attention. She looked exactly as I remembered, and she told me yet again that I had a twisted brain. She said it one more time when I revealed that I would soon be flying regularly in an airplane. It went without saying that she feared I would be killed in a crash.\n\nAfter reading this, anyone who has recently read _Catch-22_ for the third or fourth time might be struck by the parallel between the account of my mother I've just given and an episode in the novel in which Yossarian is visited in a hospital bed by a family of tearful strangers, but I don't remember that I consciously had the former in mind when I was devising the latter.\n\nI HAD AN UNCOMPLICATED TIME with my Southerners in the blacksmith shop. It was easy for me to reason from the outset that my own Brooklyn manner of speaking would appear equally quaint and deformed to them, as it well might to citizens of countless other regions all across the continent, and doubtless still does. We seemed eccentric to each other.\n\nTo all the white men I worked with then, far back in 1942, the Negroes, blacks, or African Americans also working there, however one chooses to designate them, were held in such irrelevant regard and were fixed so solidly in caste that they were never even spoken about, and those there as helpers in the blacksmith shop were never addressed by anyone but me except in terse reference to work. The one or two in my section I most frequently joined with to cooperate on something and with whom\u2014with what I now properly characterize as no more than a patronizing affectation of acceptance\u2014I tried to establish friendly conversational relationships, intelligently withdrew and kept their distance. What surprised me more than the total absence of relationships between whites and blacks was the apparently uniform virulence with which Protestants regarded Catholics. I first learned about this from a dark and roly-poly Irish blacksmith I worked with often, who'd been reared in Northern Ireland, exposed to the enmity of the Protestant \"Orangemen\" there\u2014it was the first time I'd heard that word _Orangemen_ \u2014and was now in the Norfolk Navy Yard in Portsmouth, Virginia, disapproved of and shunned by the others. Once enlightened by him, I plainly saw how he was mistrusted by his coworkers and coolly boycotted.\n\nThe blacks there were disdained and beneath notice, and the Catholics were detested with a touchy hostility. But a Jewish New Yorker like myself was a novel rarity. The local men had never seen one before, and I was the only one in the shop. And I had never been with Southerners. Thus there existed between us a mutual curiosity to be indulged.\n\nAt lunchtime and coffee breaks when we chatted in our group, others might drift close to gawk at me and listen with friendly smirks to our conversations. We always got along just fine\u2014almost always\u2014with much courtesy and consideration expressed by them to me about the mechanical mysteries and dangers of this work that to me was entirely new. As the first duty of my first day there, I was directed by the foreman to move a barrel of bolts to the grinding wheels to mill the surplus fringes of metal smoothly from the heads. I looked at the barrel and I looked at the hand truck, and I didn't know what to do. I knew it wouldn't work, but I decided to try: While the foreman and the assistant foreman observed, I squatted, wrapped my arms around the barrel as far as they would go, and tried to lift. The assistant foreman, a man named Beeman, who rarely smiled at me or anyone else, gestured to me to step aside and demonstrated how simple it was to slide the bottom ledge of the hand truck under the barrel and leverage the full weight back onto the wheels for rolling. I got the hang of that one quickly. He led me to the electrical grinding wheels to make certain I knew how to don goggles and to show me what they wanted done. I proved I could learn that one quickly, too.\n\nA single exception to the harmonious relationships I otherwise enjoyed occurred during one of our daily lunchtime breaks when the general discussion turned to religion and I chose to volunteer the information that Jesus was in fact Jewish and of presumed Jewish parentage. The immediate and united stiffening of the entire circle of white faces was an instantaneous warning that they had never been told this before and did not want to be told it now, or ever. Even my closest pals bristled. And I discreetly chose not to push the point. The symbolic rubric INRI on icons of the crucifixion would not have sufficed to convince them; and besides, I admit, I didn't myself know back then that these letters represented in Latin an abbreviation of \"Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.\"\n\nYears later, in 1962, after the publication of _Catch-22_ , I met Mel Brooks on the summer vacation resort of Fire Island, and I heard him joke, in the hoarse shout that is his second nature, that every Jew should have a big Gentile for a friend. My special friend in our group in the blacksmith shop was the biggest one there, a lumbering, easygoing fellow and the son of the foreman of the shop as well. No one would have dared harass me with him as my protector, but even without him I would have been untouched by any kind of bullying or more subtle abuse. There was no Jew-baiting all the weeks I was there, although there was plenty of raillery about my being a New Yorker and my quaint locutions and barbaric pronunciations. And I took care not to make too much of their being rustic Southerners.\n\nOne man I worked with often, from a farming community in North Carolina, could count and measure quantities with vertical lines in sets of five, the fifth line drawn sideways to cross through the other four, but he had never been taught the basics of division and multiplication. It was one of my functions to work out for him the number of long bars to be requisitioned for a fixed number of small units to be made from them. But he could do the work: With chalk he would measure and mark the lines for the three-foot lengths to be cut from each rod of perhaps thirty feet. And he would arrange them in his furnace and then pound and fashion them into whatever shape they were supposed to take. One day when I was occupied at the cutting machine and at the same time computing amounts with him while he measured and marked, I luckily turned my eyes back to the machine and just did manage to spy the shearing blade descending on my fingers as they fed in the metal. I pulled my hand back in sudden horror, saving my fingers from dismemberment at the last moment. Never again did I shift my gaze to speak to him or anyone else while at that cutting machine, and to this day I count that near tragedy among the most chilling experiences of my life, more frightening than anything that occurred on my second mission to Avignon or any of the other dangerous things that happened to me in wartime. Perhaps, as is classic in nightmares, what I tremble at most in the memory of the shearing machine is a calamity that never occurred, while everything that happened in combat did. I grade in retrospect those missing fingers I didn't lose right up there with the several times I swam out intrepidly when younger to the Coney Island bell buoy, when I didn't drown, and now am in recurrent fear that I might have.\n\nA jollier episode than that near disaster at the shearing machine involved a working friendship with a young master blacksmith from nearby North Carolina. After a few weeks\u2014after, I conclude, he finally decided he approved of me\u2014he invited me, more than once, to drive out with him on a weekend day to the town he lived in, where, he promised, he would introduce me to some girls who would get a kick out of meeting me and would let me have from them as much as I wanted of anything I wanted.\n\nThe temptation was strong. The decisive drawback was stronger: I, fortunately, and unfortunately, too, always look ahead with caution to calculate consequences, even when drunk, and I could clearly see that I would have to give up a day of overtime, more likely two days if I slept over. Whereupon a dispiriting pall settled over my lubricious visions at the thought that afterward I would find myself again doing as much work for eight dollars a day as I could have been doing for twelve.\n\nThere was a second factor, a rather droll one, that perhaps also helped me overcome desire. In the country argot of his home territory, the common vulgar term for the primary female genital was the same as the one commonly employed elsewhere for the male sex organ\u2014as I heard with some sense of shock each time he applied it to _them\u2014_ and that took a good bit of getting used to. The possibility arises only as I write this that he might have been directing me to males, to boys and men, but I strongly doubt that, for we were all talking as usual about sexual congress with women. And my day and night fantasies about women converged always on what he called a different thing and we called pussy.\n\nAnother source of practically daily amusement to my coworkers sprang from the work shoes picked out for me in Manhattan by my cautious brother, Lee. Ever concerned for my safety and everyone else's, Lee sought and found safety work shoes reinforced inside with domed steel shells to protect the toes and the front of the foot against crushing injury by impact from falling weights. Neither of us had the tiniest idea what kind of massive objects in the navy yard I'd be in danger from, and factory accidents do happen. In consequence, the shoes I wore to work were abnormally large and long and very heavy.\n\nAs it turned out, there was a tenet of folklore in my Virginia blacksmith shop holding that the size of a man's foot was directly indicative of the mass and range of his penis. None of my coworkers had ever seen, or even heard of, shoes with interior reinforcing structures like mine, and my feet appeared to be the largest, longest, thickest, bulkiest feet that any of them had ever laid eyes on. Much, therefore, was expected of me. It could be that those reinforced work shoes were the reason my colleague had wanted to bring me to his hometown to display to the women he knew there. The continual teasing I was subjected to in the form of mock praise and admiration was baffling to cope with. I was most loath to disappoint them. Secretly, I schemed to use the urinals in the bathroom only when that chamber was vacant, an attempt requiring more luck and craft than I could dependably command, for in the government navy yard, as in all other workplaces in the world, the rest rooms serve not only as toilets but also as sheltered spaces in which to hang out for short respites of recuperation from the unavoidable monotony of work. Rather than risk eventual discovery and bring down upon my head all the taunting, crude, homespun derision that was sure to follow\u2014as though I were the one responsible for exaggerated expectations\u2014I soon put myself to the expense of purchasing an ordinary pair of shoes and threw my armored ones away. To those at the fires who noticed the change and commented, I feigned a casual shrug and explained: \"Circumcised. You know that.\"\n\nIn actual practice, there appeared to be no greater chance of injury working there than I would today face trying to prepare a hot meal for myself in my kitchen. The work was pretty much as I've said, tending the furnace and bearing bars of glowing metal from the fire to the true artisan; transferring weights from place to place on a hand truck or occasionally by an overhead traveling hoist that traversed the length of the shop on a track near a sidewall and functioned at the touch of button controls like those found today on a remote TV control; cutting metal into specific lengths; grinding bolts into level surfaces at the top, and threading them, too. At the threading machines, almost as a frolic, I devised a speed system of synchronized alternation with the man on the second unit alongside me that allowed us together to thread the bolts at a breathtaking pace unknown before in that shop, a rate that drew admirers and invoked murmurs of amused approbation, even from tight-mouthed Mr. Beeman. But that was diverting only sporadically, for no one was in a rush for the barrels of threaded bolts and we had no true need to hurry, other than to distract ourselves and others.\n\nNow and then I had to work with the heavy sledgehammer. I was not good at that. Luckily, I didn't have to heft it all the way up over my shoulder for maximum power but could let gravity supply most of the needed force as I let it fall with a bang atop some rounding or rimming tool already held in place, Here, the hazard was more to the man I was working for than to me. Apart from that lapse at the shearing machine, I ran no more risk in the blacksmith shop than I had braved as a file clerk or Western Union boy. As a Western Union boy, good God, I could have been struck by a car!\n\nMore powerful to me in memory than anything but that shearing machine is a sinister sense of obscure and unnameable risks I might have been running on the train and boat trips I took to get to the navy yard. I am sensitive to such journeys now, when crimes against innocents seem endemic in our national life, although I doubt I was haunted by the threat of such perils back then. If I were, I might not have made the trip, not by myself. I doubt the family would have wanted me to.\n\nThe journey took all of one day and the morning of the next. I traveled alone in this first train trip from home, and I remember being silent and solitary for just about all of it. It must have been as forlorn and solemn an expedition for me as the bus ride away to summer camp. I spoke to no one, and no one spoke to me. I'm not good at starting conversations with strangers, and I've never picked up a girl unless the initiating remarks were made by someone else. I was a prisoner of the clock, helpless, a grieving slave to the slow passage of time. I was cut off from everyone. I may by then have already been afflicting myself involuntarily with the gloomy Freudian construct that people who went away from home sometimes did not return.\n\nThe train ride finally terminated for me in a place in Virginia called Cape Charles. There, in compliance with an itinerary of instructions laid out meticulously on paper for me by Lee, I boarded a ferry for a water ride that, to my surprise, consumed another few hours. The length of the boat ride and the enormous expanse of the bay, Chesapeake Bay, were astounding to me\u2014till then, my only ferry rides had taken no more than fifteen minutes, from the tip of Manhattan to Staten Island. Daylight was ending by the time I reached Norfolk. Another trip by ferry would bring me to Portsmouth and the navy yard. However, it had not been thought advisable that I arrive in Portsmouth at night to make my way around a strange city after dark.\n\nOn arrival, therefore, I checked into the first inexpensive hotel I could find. It was in appearance... unpretentious. The rosy neon lights from a coffee-shop restaurant across the street bled reflectively through my window into the room. I had an uneventful dinner alone there at the counter. I seemed to be the only guest in the hotel. The desk clerk was a skinny, bleary-eyed man of about thirty with a red patch of a birthmark on one side of his chin. I had done a good deal of reading in American fiction by then, and at dinner I had decided that if he proposed sending a woman up to my room, I would brace myself to say yes, but I didn't know how to ask for one. (Now I think I would know how but doubt I'll ever want to.) Waking up early the next morning, I was jittery. I still caught no sign of any other guests, and I was surprised and relieved when I found I had made my way safely out of the hotel with my suitcases and my life.\n\nThe ferry ride to Portsmouth was short. On getting off the boat, I asked questions at the dock and proceeded several miles by bus to the office in the bungalow complex in which I would reside, to check in and register for a room, and when finally I spotted some familiar Coney Island faces, I felt myself securely at home.\n\nUpon reporting for work my first morning I learned not only what to do with a hand truck, a grinding wheel, and my barrel of iron bolts too heavy for human arms to hoist, but also how to clock in when arriving. Both the friendly foreman and the uncommunicative assistant foreman were waiting just inside the entrance to the shop, and not only for me. They took notice of every worker coming in, and with eagle eyes kept watch on a large, framed board inside a cabinet against the wall bearing round brass checks arranged in numerical order in rows on separate small rings. I was assigned one of these. Every man checking in on our day shift had, upon entering, to turn his brass check over from left to right to mark his presence. One or both of these supervisors was on station there before eight every morning to make certain that no one man turned over the checks for anyone other than himself. When the work whistle confirmed the end of our day shift, the procedure was renewed in reverse, to verify that someone who'd reported in for the day's work hadn't escaped in the interval. And in the morning, as soon as the work whistle blew to herald the formal beginning of our shift, a hinged glass door was swung closed over the whole display of this version of a time clock and was locked until quitting time.\n\nAnyone not on the premises on time had forfeited not just the hourly fraction of his lateness; he was barred for the remainder of the day, no matter his readiness to work, his skill, or his excuse. It seemed, therefore, that no acute shortage of labor cried out for remedy. It appeared as well that there was no great rush for any of the products that flowed from our shop. We all kept busy faithfully at what we were supposed to be doing, but the rhythm was methodical rather than hurried. When we worked up a sweat it was more from the temperature than the rapidity of the work. People took days off whenever they wanted to. Apart from the occasional assault against boredom at the threading machines by me and a partner, no one ever sped to break records. Periodically, though, a wave of advance warning would circulate lazily through the shop and awake ripples of disturbance vaguely similar to those in an ant colony or a hive of bees when intruded upon: Government inspectors would soon be coming through.\n\nIn reaction, the fires in all the furnaces would be turned up, and in each of them rods and strips would be inserted for heating. The drop forges would pump and gasp and pound. Grinding wheels would be turned on and threading machines would thread, even when there was next to nothing to thread. The tapping of hammers would be heard in the land, and all of us were so abnormally immersed in our labors as not even to see the high-ranking naval officers and ill-at-ease white-collar civilians passing through with perfunctory yet discerning pauses, as though they understood what they were looking at and what we were doing and why.\n\nThey didn't.\n\nWe didn't either.\n\nWe worked seven days a week and, except for our licensed plumber with the automobile and his girlfriend from the soda shop and for my acquaintance from a different part of Brooklyn whose unrevealed social activities had occasioned a visit from the police, there was not much for any of us in the way of entertainment. I can't remember going to even one movie during the seven or eight continuous weeks I worked without a day off. After we had showered and rested a little at the end of our day shift, it was time for dinner. To be on the job at eight every morning dictated retiring early, and we were doing that seven days a week. Just outside the entrance to the navy yard, in the diner in which we ate breakfast, we were surprised at first to see that certain kinds of liquor were offered, and more surprised to behold it being consumed at that hour, as though liquor for breakfast were commonplace.\n\nWe ate most of our dinners in the boardinghouse of a rather easygoing, voluptuous woman of some years with a shy daughter of about twenty who assisted her in the serving and on whom she kept a vigilant, puritanical eye that did not harmonize with the subtle and perhaps unintended coquettishness in her own sensual bearing. The meals were economical and good, basic: chicken, pork, beef, lamb chops, stews\u2014no fish, thank goodness. The single strange element in her cuisine was something they called corn bread and was not the corn bread we Jewish New Yorkers knew was corn bread. Our corn bread was a plump, hardy, firm, yeasty, East European loaf, and their corn bread was cake. By now, though, I've grown used to their corn bread and wouldn't mind having some right now, with a little raspberry or strawberry jam to go with it. On Passover, all the Jewish laborers in Portsmouth were invited to traditional holiday fare in a large hall rented by members of the Jewish community. It was a happy and novel occasion for us, with much greatly welcomed hospitality, and what we commented most about was the southern pronunciation of both the English and the Yiddish (and the Hebrew, too, in the compressed observances).\n\nIn Norfolk, we'd been told, there was a \"cathouse\" at the address 30 Bank Street. I don't think any of us flirted seriously with the thought of going there; if others went and talked about it, they didn't talk about it to me. Again, a powerful force toward abstinence was monetary, the sobering, unspoken awareness that we would have to atone later with approximately three full days at hard labor for a fling of half an hour in a lewd debauchery that might or might not prove euphorically uplifting. Or worse, might prove ruinously addictive.\n\nAt length, I finally did treat myself to a spree of a day off\u2014two full days, I think; a weekend. I forget what I did with it\u2014it could have been a drive to New York packed into the speeding automobile of one of us at a unit cost lower than the normal commercial fare; the memory is a blur. If so, I don't know what I did there. I can remember (or think I do) the address of a bordello in Norfolk I never went to, but nothing of how I passed the time back home in Coney Island or somewhere else after something like _fifty-six_ consecutive days of formidable labor. But... whatever I did do spoiled me, broke my spirit, sapped my willpower, put an end to my career as a factory worker. Going back to that work even after so short a furlough grew unthinkable, and proved with the passage of the first few days an agony of phobic anguish such that only a man of a steelier character than mine could subdue.\n\nI surrendered with hardly a fight.\n\nI gave notice.\n\nI packed up and left.\n\nBoy\u2014was I happy!\n\nON MY WAY HOME from Virginia, I stopped in Washington, D.C., for one night and two days to visit with my Coney Island friend Marty Kapp. Marty was from 23rd Street, down in the Italian section. We hadn't met until high school, and he became close friends with the rest of us by joining the first of our social clubs. In our bunch he was something of an anomaly\u2014even his stance was upright and he didn't, like the rest of us, slouch along like a cool hipster when he walked. He didn't twirl a length of key chain or even peg his pants. I believe he was one of the rare ones among us\u2014Sy Ostrow was another\u2014who went directly from high school into college, to Brooklyn College, which was free and near to us. It was from Marty's father, an electrician or plumber, that I obtained the obligatory letter of recommendation for the job at the navy yard attesting to my mechanical experience (which I didn't have) acquired working for him (which I had never done). It was not, alas, the only time in my life I cut corners, as the charitable young lady from California who surreptitiously helped me meet the foreign-language requirement for my master's degree in English at Columbia University can warrant, if she's alive and remembers (if she's alive, she remembers). I'm sorry now I did that. It was my malfeasance then that compelled me later, with logical good conscience, to show mercy to two students I caught cheating when I was teaching college in Pennsylvania.\n\nWhile I had been laboring away at the navy yard, Marty was working in Washington in some governmental capacity, either in a civil-service position or perhaps already enrolled in the navy's V-12 program, an agenda of specialized military education in which he was to spend the duration of the war. He found a bed for me in the communal apartment he was sharing with a lively group of others about the same age as the two of us.\n\nThe wartime capital city seemed afire with sunshine and energy that weekend. I spent much of my first day, a Saturday on which Marty was occupied responsibly with whatever were his duties, roaming about goggle-eyed in a state of orthodox reverence. I was appropriately awed by the Washington Monument and the sleek, domed Jefferson Memorial, and deeply moved by the solemnity of the seated figure in the Lincoln shrine. I was as spontaneously thrilled by all I saw of official Washington as any uncritical first-time visitor from the hinterlands (i.e., from anywhere outside the District of Columbia) possessing just a superficial and idealized knowledge of American history and a tangential, headline-founded awareness of current events. Even schoolboys now know they can't rely on schoolbooks and official public statements for any honest grasp of the historical truth. In Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, for example, once you're past the simple arithmetic at the beginning of the leading sentence, there's not much left that can be empirically verified. It's a wonderful speech, one of the best on record, certainly, and it's mostly a lot of baloney. So much for speeches!\n\nOn Sunday, Marty and I attended an outdoor symphonic concert, my first concert. I remember the featured work but not the performers; it was the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, which I hadn't heard before. I have a good ear for music and a magnetic memory for musical phrases. A day or two after I was back in Coney Island, I was fortunate enough to catch the same concerto on the radio. I stopped everything to concentrate, listening intently from beginning to end, and had the feeling when it was over that I had known that music all my life. To this day I can recall and hum the major melodic passages in the openings of all three movements. Also today, the violin concerto of Tchaikovsky, once the most beloved and moving of composers to me, is just about the only work of his I can stand.\n\nBACK HOME IN CONEY ISLAND I was nineteen and at loose ends, carefree, but in the state of boyish lunacy and na\u00efvet\u00e9 still widespread among late adolescents, I'd bet. Though carefree, I was nonetheless in a developmental quandary. Others around me were likewise adrift. Bobby Magrill, the pharmacist's son, was set on becoming a physician. George Mandel, our comic-books cartoonist who was making $300 or $400 a week when I was making $15, already in the army, where he would suffer his serious head wound in the Battle of the Bulge, had attended lessons at the Art Students League. These were exceptions. The rest of us were without concrete direction or motivation.\n\nFor us, the military draft looming somewhere ahead was the only certainty in a future that was in all other respects murky. It was hard to give serious consideration to what in later life we intended to do, _could_ do. Danny the Count and Sheiky Silverman sold costume jewelry as peddlers outside the busy entrances of the subway station at Union Square. Sheiky also peddled ice cream on the Coney Island beach that summer, 1942, when he wasn't leading the policemen pursuing him in an agile chase through the crowds in the sand. Louie Berkman was in his father's junk shop. We found jobs for each other. Marvin Winkler worked a short while stringing pearls in a factory where Murray \"Rup\" Rabinowitz already had some standing; later, Marvin did shipping in the garment center for our Coney Island friend Jackie Sachs.\n\nI looked around for what work I could find and took what work I could get. Davey Goldsmith needed assistance as a shipping clerk during a business rush at the U.S. Hatband Company, and I pitched in with him for a while at $21 a week, learning how to unfold and seal flat corrugated boxes. Now and then, when the need arises, I wish I remembered how. Macy's, through Sylvia, hired me for a couple of weeks to count stock in an inventory period. Someone introduced me to a job in a millinery factory in Manhattan to pack hats for shipping and to keep the floors clean. Until then, I\u2014a fledgling, aspiring author\u2014hadn't bothered to find out what \"millinery\" was; I'd imagined it was something like lingerie. The millinery we made was of straw, and the scraps of straw nicked my fingers when I did my best to keep the floors clean. Before the first week was out, one of the scowling elderly partners growled at me not to come in any longer. He was telling me I was fired. Lee was no longer a customer's man on Wall Street but somehow the supervisor in a small factory doing subcontracting work for a larger defense manufacturer. I went to work for Lee on a drill press. I adjusted a template over a square of something that was not wood and brought the spinning auger down into each opening in the dotted pattern of the several holes. Doing just this eight hours a day, four hours at a clip, was nerve-racking. Lee was not hurt or surprised when I confessed I couldn't stand it. Along with so many other Americans of my generation in an era of economic depression that had not truly passed, I'd been biding my time, waiting in numb hope for some unknown, defining reality finally to pop up that would clarify the course I should follow, wind me up, and start me on my way.\n\nWe had not thought it would be a war.\n\nThe announcement by the government that nineteen-year-olds would soon be called up for military service supplied the impetus. We saw no incentive in avoiding the draft. A group of us enlisted\u2014we had nothing better to do. And we were further motivated by the opportunity to choose the branch of service we preferred.\n\nThe morning I left for the army, I had orders to report to a waiting room at the Pennsylvania Railroad Station for transportation to the area's military reception center at Camp Upton, Long Island. My mother and Sylvia walked with me to the trolley stop outside Mr. Moses's candy store at Railroad Avenue. We talked routinely as we waited; I promised I would write often and telephone from Long Island if I could. We hugged formally and kissed cheeks automatically as the trolley car drew near and slowed to a stop. Later, many years later, I was profoundly shaken (and tried not to show it) when my sister happened to disclose that my mother dissolved into tears and collapsed with weeping as soon as the trolley car carried me off on my merry way. Sobbing violently, my mother could barely keep standing, and Sylvia strained to hold her erect as they struggled back to the apartment house.\n\nDope that I was, I didn't see that there was anything to cry about.\n\nMy mother never mentioned the occasion to me, and I never brought it up with her. Our family tendency to keep disturbing emotions to ourselves has lasted as long as we have.\n\nTHE AMIABLE PSYCHOLOGIST Erik Erikson writes somewhere _(Childhood and Society?)_ of a \"Moratorium\" that emerges in the lives of most Western young people between the end of adolescence and the onset of maturity, during which the individual doesn't truly know what he or she is or where he wants to go, doesn't indeed truly know _who_ he is, or what he or she should decide to become. It is a season of baffled uncertainty over identity and can lead to grave mistakes. (Witness the skinheads in England, the neo-Nazis in Germany, the neophyte Nazis in Moscow. What is the average starting age of the cocaine or heroin addict? The average mugger?) To the extent Erickson is right, and for those of us Americans in that stage who weren't harmed physically or damaged emotionally by military service, the war came along at just the right time. (For Europeans, there is never a right time for a European war.) It put an end to our confusion and ambivalence, took most powers of decision out of our hands, and swept us into a national endeavor considered admirable and just.\n\nAnd remunerative, too. My total income upon entering the air force as a private was as much as I'd been able to command outside, and as an officer on flight status was greater than I was able to earn afterward when starting out in my civilian pursuits, first as a college instructor at Pennsylvania State College ($3,000 a year) and next as an advertising copywriter at a small New York agency called the Merrill Anderson Company ($60 a week, $260 per month). But at the Merrill Anderson Company, as an unexpected employee benefit, I drank my first Gibsons with a copy chief named Gert Conroy and learned to love extra-dry martinis in a chilled glass with a twist of lemon peel. (Also, one morning I arrived at work with my pastry and container of coffee and a mind brimming with ideas, and immediately in longhand put down on a pad the first chapter of an intended novel, a chapter that, after expansion and revision, was published in 1955 in the periodical _New World Writing_ #7 as the opening of a novel in progress, a work to be titled... _Catch-18._ I was at _Time_ when a contract for the publication of the novel was offered on the basis of 250 pages and working at _McCall's_ magazine when the manuscript was completed at last in January 1961 and published in October. My salary at _McCall's_ was good, I had two children, and I was obliged to wait almost a full year until the motion picture rights were sold before I had confidence enough to leave.)\n\nAfter the war, Marty Kapp continued what technical education he'd begun in the navy V-12 program and graduated as a soil engineer (yet another thing I'd not heard of before). For all his career he worked as a soil engineer with the Port Authority of New York\u2014on airfields and buildings, I know, and perhaps on bridges and tunnels, too\u2014and had risen to some kind of executive status before he died. He did well enough to die on a golf course. Davey Goldsmith went back to work at the hatband company, prospered there, and eventually inherited a division of that company. I was able to go to college. Lou Berkman left the junk shop to start a plumbing supply company in Middletown, New York, and looked into real estate with the profits from that successful venture. Marvin Winkler passed up college, too, and was soon in the photographic film business (his first in a sequence of modest enterprises), converting surplus air corps aerial film into color film for home use. Albie Covelman went to Bucknell and was soon an executive with a coffee-equipment supply company. Sy Ostrow, who was taught Russian in the service so that he could function as an interpreter, returned to college and, with pained resignation, saw realistically that he had no better alternative than to study law. Stanley Levy, from the file room at the automobile casualty company, became an insurance broker and handled what little business I could give him when we at last caught up with each other. Like Marty Kapp, Stanley died on a golf course. It's my opinion they died of boredom.\n\nI was mustered out of the service even before the war was over, demobilized under a point system put into effect as soon as Germany capitulated at the beginning of May in 1945.\n\nBut even before the war ended with the surrender of Japan in August, I felt myself walking around on easy street, in a state of fine rapture. What more could I ask for? I was in love and engaged to be married (to the same young woman I was in love with). I was twenty-two years old. I would be entering college as a freshman at the University of Southern California, with tuition and related costs paid for by the government. And I'd just had a short story accepted for publication.\n\n# 8  \nPeace\n\nIN DECEMBER OF 1944, when I had completed the tour of duty then defined at sixty missions and was awaiting orders for transportation back to the States, two chaste beginners, both lieutenants freshly shipped overseas, moved into my tent. They replaced a pair who had finished their tours and already left, and one of these new men brought into the tent with him the uncommon personal asset of a portable typewriter. Don't ask me why\u2014I've lost the explanation, though it seems likely he was nurturing the same authorial aspirations I was, and Tom Sloan also.\n\nTom Sloan, a lead bombardier, who was from Philadelphia, and Hall A. Moody, a wing bombardier from Mississippi, were among the friends in Corsica I was closest to. Tom was a conscientious, quick, and capable lead bombardier in whose formation I found it almost a pleasure to fly. Like Moody, I was merely a wing bombardier and operated only a toggle switch, compressing it in the speediest fraction of the instant after I saw the bombs starting downward out of the open bomb-bay doors in the lead plane. Once overseas, I never made use of the bombsight on which I had been trained, or even had one with me in the nose of my plane. I had a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on a ball swivel instead, and fortunately never had to make use of that implement either. Four of the wing bombardiers in the six planes in each of our formations carried no bombsights but single machine guns instead.\n\nTom was only a few years older than I, no older than twenty-five, I'm sure, but he was already married and the father of an infant child he'd seen not more than a few times. He was resolutely intent on surviving to rejoin the family he missed so greatly, and he was increasingly and visibly perturbed that he might not succeed. It's a joy to me now to report that he did. Shipping orders for the two of us arrived the same day; not till they were in hand did we truly feel saved.\n\nHall A. Moody, my age or even younger, was married also, and I relate with pride, not scorn, that neither he nor Tom Sloan ever exhibited even the slightest interest in sex with another woman, not on rest leaves in Rome and not in Sicily, Cairo, or Alexandria. I, unmarried and in depth of experience still almost a virgin, was the boyish and ravenous satyr. Moody was in several ways an innocent: He had never before _even heard_ of oral sex, in either direction. He had not heard of it by either the genteel Latinate names we all now know or the vulgar familiar ones we now all use, and the mere suggestion of any such distorted practice was to him an outrageous, debasing horror he declined to envision and caused him to redden and clench his fists in passionate indignation. When Tom and I left together for the States, Moody was still on combat status and I don't know what became of him, but his name doesn't appear on the list of fatalities in our squadron history, and I assume he survived. And Tom Sloan's infant child, the one he missed so dearly and painfully and reticently when I knew him, was about one year old then and now would be past fifty.\n\nWith travel orders in hand, Tom and I were flown from Corsica\u2014not to Rome, which I would have favored for a final, farewell, youthful revel\u2014but to Naples on the first leg of our journey homeward. Given the choice of returning by air or sea, I expressed unequivocal preference for the sea, because it had become my furtive and sacred resolve never to go up in an airplane again. (In fact, once back safely, I declined to fly again, as soldier or civilian, for something like the next seventeen years, traveling instead by train to company conventions when at _Time_ and _McCall's_ and by cruise steamship when the meetings were in Bermuda and Nassau. Not until the stupefying boredom of overnight rail travel ultimately outweighed all fears of dying did I weaken, and by then there were jets.)\n\nAfter a week or so in Naples, I sailed with a few thousand other servicemen on a converted and highly modern troopship, not long previously the S.S. _America_ , I believe I remember, formerly the premier luxury liner of the American passenger fleet. There were six officers in my cabin on two tiers of bunk beds, sleeping, napping, reading, eating, talking, because there wasn't much else to do in the ten days or so we were afloat. None of us had known any of the others before. I cannot imagine now how I spent so much time doing essentially nothing but sleeping, napping, reading, eating, and talking, and I know I wouldn't ever want to have to do it again. We sailed without convoy or other naval escort. Our cabin wasn't first class, because we weren't on deck; but it wasn't steerage either, for we did have a porthole.\n\nWe were heading for Boston, but didn't know our destination until we were already in port. From Boston we were transported by rail to Atlantic City for routine processing and reassignment, and from there, on furlough, I traveled home to Coney Island and was triumphantly back with my family as something of a glamorous war hero. I never thought to ask what they worried about and said about me while they waited for my letters, and I still don't know.\n\nAmong the first things I did during my medical examination in Atlantic City was ask to be taken off flying status. The doctor was surprised: He found it odd that, after surviving combat duty, I should want to give up half my base pay to avoid only four hours a month of flight time in the States\u2014there seemed little chance of my being sent overseas again. With the shameless knowledge that I was lying, I pleaded that I was afraid to fly, claiming that the dread I might have was keeping me awake: The mere remembrance of the gasoline fumes inside a plane was sickening to me. By that time there were already thousands of airmen like me who had completed combat duty and were back dillydallying in the States while the government tried to decide what to do with us, and he graciously granted my request. And the lie I thought I was telling him turned out to be true, for by then, I realized, I had genuinely grown terrified of flying.\n\nIN BEING ASSIGNED to my tent, the two new replacements, both of them pilots, lucked into one of the most comfortable and best-appointed pyramid canvas abodes in the squadron. We not only had a gasoline-dripping homemade stove for warmth in winter but a splendid fireplace as well. On the wall of the room in my home in East Hampton in which I am arranging these words\u2014rather, rearranging them\u2014is mounted a framed and glass-encased photograph taken inside our tent, lifted from an elegant, bound volume of a squadron history prepared after the war by our squadron public-relations officer, an assiduous captain named Everett Thomas. The page is captioned \"The Holidays Corsica 1944\" and the photograph highlights a large kitchen knife, a cake, and the five of us then dwelling inside the tent. In the background is a spacious fireplace with blazing flames, topped by a broad wood-beamed mantel fabricated from salvaged railroad ties. We are all posing rather obviously for what professes to be a candid photograph.\n\nA young pilot named Bob Vertrees is shown at a table with a long kitchen knife, and he is slicing into what looks like a Christmas fruitcake that presumably has reached him from home. The two newcomers, seated also, are looking on politely. One gazes from the side; the other, possessor of a sparse mustache and the typewriter, practically faces the camera, but his eyes are properly averted toward the cake. Looking on almost impassively between them is a rather short, high-cheeked pilot named Edward Ritter, short but not so short as to have fallen short of the minimum physical requirements for pilot training. Of those shown, Ritter, arriving overseas after me, has been there in the tent with me longest. I am bending forward in a chair at the right, almost in profile, casually smoking a cigarette and clad in my officer's cap with the wire frame removed, a liberty of fashion conferred on air corps personnel as a distinctive privilege, and a leather flight jacket bearing a round patch of the squadron's insignia, a brazen depiction against a dark background of a slim, well-busted naked female wielding a thunderbolt while her windblown hair streams behind her and she sits suggestively straddling a long, projecting bomb that free-falls forward and downward. On a low table just behind me is the portable typewriter, which I was already, with the owner's permission, making much use of, for letters and for manuscripts. Behind that, at the rear of the tent, are the cozy household flames in the fireplace and the broad mantel of sturdy timber, which had been carpeted for the season with a winding garland of Christmas foliage. And on the wall above the fireplace are a number of large, glossy photographs of beautiful women. They are not exactly of the cheesecake kind, but the one immediately behind my head is of an attractive female reclining on a divan in a becoming dress and a full, silken bosom of a quality that still never fails to provoke in me an intuitive reflection of desire and speculation. Vertrees is grinning as he cuts the cake and both of the new men are smiling, too, while Ritter and I look on, absorbed and content. I've been overseas longer than the others, but we're all about the same age. We're kids not long past twenty, and we look like kids who are only past twenty.\n\nIn December 1944 I was twenty-one and a half, and it is hard now, it boggles the mind now, to believe that a young kid like Ritter, whom I'd known the longest and who was somewhat stumpy in physique, was ever, let alone routinely as an occupational specialty, permitted to fly as a pilot at the controls of a twin-engined Mitchell medium-sized bomber that carried a bomb load of four thousand pounds (eight five-hundred-pounders or four of a thousand pounds each) and five other human beings!\n\nHow in hell did he learn to do that?\n\nI, who didn't apply for my first driver's license until I was twenty-eight, find it difficult to envision even now that a kind and unaggressive boy, so young, could learn to fly a bomber. And there were others in the squadron of slighter build and even fewer years who were pilots, too.\n\nA little while before, Vertrees, who was a pilot also, had been wounded in the hand by a chip of flak, injured so trivially that he was out of action only a few days and returned to combat duty in almost no time.\n\nRitter's biography overseas was perplexing. Taciturn, good-natured, soft-spoken, even shy, from Kentucky, he was something of a tireless wonder as a handyman, one with unlimited patience who took pleasure in making and fixing things. The construction of the fireplace was entirely of his devising, if I recall accurately. We have our place in the squadron history book only by virtue of that fireplace. He erected and maintained the stove, too, although by winter every tent contained one like it, a continuously feeding gasoline unit that drew fuel from a can outside and dripped it onto sand in a drum that stood near the center pole and helped warm the interior. We also used the stove to heat our supplementary snacks at night from the boxes of K or C rations that were in abundant supply and the hot water with which we shaved and washed outside in the morning. A flak helmet was our basin. The metal fins on the upright, inverted skeleton of a frame in which unfused bombs were shipped was our washstand.\n\nIn combat, Ritter as pilot had ditched safely once into the Mediterranean waters coming back from a mission on which his engine had been shot out, and all the men with him had made it from the plane into the life rafts without injury and had been rescued by air-sea surface craft before nightfall. I remember awaiting their return. Another time, he flew back with one engine feathered and landed safely, and I believe there was one other time he crash-landed without harm to anyone aboard, either at a different landing strip closer to where his crippled plane was in difficulty or at our own, code-named Genoa. (\"Hello, Genoa, hello, Genoa\" was a pilot's saluting radio call to the control tower of our field at Alisan, Corsica, and the title of a story I once thought I might write and don't believe I ever did.) Hall A. Moody was aboard with Ritter on one of those near disasters, and for that reason, both were awarded a recreational trip to Egypt. Sloan and I went along because we had completed our sixty missions and there wasn't much else for the squadron to do with us as we shambled around waiting for our transfer orders. Also, I suspect there was a forlorn, covert command dream that, refreshed upon our return and intoxicated with gratitude, we would beg to be allowed to fly more missions than the sixty we already had. Neither one of us volunteered to do that.\n\nRemarkably, through all his unlucky series of mishaps the pilot Ritter remained imperviously phlegmatic, demonstrating no symptoms of fear or growing nervousness, even blushing with a chuckle and a smile whenever I gagged around about him as a jinx, and it was on these qualities of his, his patient genius for building and fixing things and these recurring close calls in aerial combat, only on these, that I fashioned the character of Orr in _Catch-22._ (I don't know if he's aware of that. I don't know if he's even read the book, for I've never been in touch with him or almost any of the others.)\n\nIn a nearby tent just across a railroad ditch in disuse was the tent of a friend, Francis Yohannon, and it was from him that I nine years later derived the unconventional name for the heretical Yossarian. The rest of Yossarian is the incarnation of a wish. In Yohannon's tent also lived the pilot Joe Chrenko, a pilot I was especially friendly with, who later, in several skimpy ways, served as the basis for the character Hungry Joe in _Catch-22._ In that tent with them was a pet dog Yohannon had purchased in Rome, a lovable, tawny cocker spaniel he bought while others were purchasing and smuggling back contraband Italian pistols, Berettas. In my novel I turned the dog into a cat to protect its identity.\n\nRome was a wonderful city to go to (and still is), and, given his astonishing achievement, even a limited cast of characters ought to include a tribute to our able squadron executive officer, Major Cover (Major de Coverley in _Catch-22)._ Now, I still don't know what an executive officer is or what one does, but whatever ours did, he did exceedingly well. A few weeks after I arrived overseas for combat in early May of 1944 as a replacement bombardier, the Germans retreated north from the open city of Rome (there was no connection between these events, I'm sure). The first American soldiers were in Rome on the morning of June 4, and close on their heels, perhaps even beating them into the city, sped our congenial executive officer, Major Cover, to rent two apartments there for use by the officers and enlisted men in our squadron: For officers there was an ornate four-bedroom suite with much marble and many mirrors in the reputable residential district of the Via Nomentana, with a separate bedroom with double bed for each officer, and a maid to see that the rooms were tidied; for the enlisted men, who came in larger bunches, there was an extended arrangement of rooms on two floors somewhere up past the top of the Via Veneto, with cooks and maids, and with female friends of the cooks and maids who liked to hang out there with the enlisted men just for sport.\n\nHardly did we learn that the city of Rome was ours than officers and enlisted men who'd been in combat longer were returning starry-eyed from enchanted rest leaves there, speaking, rhapsodically and disbelievingly, of restaurants, nightclubs, dance halls, and girls, girls, girls\u2014girls in their summer dresses strolling with smiles on the Via Veneto. And these fellow fliers taught us the most valuable Italian phrase for just about everything we might want when our turn to go there on a rest leave came:\n\n_\"Quanto costa?\"_\n\nAnd thanks to Major Cover and the apartments, we were frequently on leave there.\n\nRITTER HAD ARRIVED in my tent early on in my tour of duty to occupy the cot vacated by a bombardier from Oklahoma named Pinkard, shot down and killed on a mission to the railway bridge north of the city of Ferrara in the Po Valley. There were several of these missions to Ferrara shortly after I arrived, and the target was a much more terrifying one than I was able to grasp in my absence of experience and my idiotic faith in my own divine invulnerability. On another mission to Ferrara, one I don't think I was on, a radio gunner I didn't know was pierced through the middle by a wallop of flak\u2014it was always flak that destroyed, for there were no German fighter planes attacking us the whole time I was there\u2014and he died, moaning, I was told, that he was cold. For my episodes of Snowden in the novel, I fused the knowledge of that tragedy with the panicked copilot and the thigh wound to the top turret gunner in my own plane on our second mission to Avignon. The rest of the details are all pretty much as I related, except that I did not, like Yossarian, discard my uniform or sit naked in a tree, and I was not given a medal while undressed. Back over water on the way home from that mission, a plane with a bombardier friend of mine named Wohlstein in the crew (he could drive, and with a car from the motor pool we would go exploring together through the tiny Corsican mountain villages on our eastern side of the island), pulled out of formation, toppled into a spin, and corkscrewed down to a fatal crash into the water that killed all five men aboard. The pilot in his plane that day was Earl C. Moon, who was copilot in the crew with which I flew in a B-25 across the Atlantic from South Carolina to Algeria and then to Corsica. I didn't witness that crash or know about it until we were back on the ground, for I was entirely occupied ministering to the thigh wound of my top-turret gunner, with bandages, sulfanilamide, and morphine, and with sickly attempts at solicitous and reassuring platitudes while we flew on and on. The aerial gunner and I had not known each other before. When I went to visit him in the hospital the next day, he must have been given blood transfusions, for his Mediterranean color was back, and he was in ebullient spirits. We greeted each other as the closest of pals and never saw each other again.\n\nEXCEPT FOR THE INSERTION into the novel of a radio gunner who is mortally wounded, the incidents I actually experienced in my plane on this second mission to Avignon were very much like those I related in fictional form. A copilot panicked and I thought I was doomed. By that time I had learned through experience that this war was perilous and that they were trying to kill me. The earlier cluster of missions I had flown to Ferrara when first overseas had assumed in my memory the character of a fantasy nightmare from which I had luckily escaped without harm in my trusting innocence, like an ingenuous kid in a Grimm fairy tale. And I also knew from the serious tone in the briefing room and from an earlier mission to Avignon that this target was a dangerous one.\n\nAll four squadrons in the group were involved, flying into southern France in a single large bunch, then separating near the city to simultaneously attack three separate targets that were several miles apart. My plane was in the last of the three elements turning in, and as we neared our IP, the initial point from which we would begin our bomb run, I looked off into the distance to see what was taking place with the other formations. The instant I looked, I glimpsed far off amid black bursts of flak a plane in formation with an orange glow of fire on its wing. And the instant I spied the fire, I saw the wing break off and the plane nose over and fall straight down, like a boulder\u2014rotating slowly with its remaining wing, but straight down. There was no possibility of parachutes. Then we made the turn toward our target and we were in it ourselves.\n\nThe very first bursts of flak aimed at us were at an accurate height, and that was a deadly sign. We could hear the explosions. I have since read of the tactic developed by the Germans of sending a monitor plane out to fly alongside our bombers and radio our exact altitude and speed to the antiaircraft batteries below, and it's possible they were doing it that day. Soberly and tensely, I did what I had to\u2014we all did. When I observed the bomb-bay doors of the lead bombardier opening, I opened mine; when I saw his bombs begin to go, I toggled away mine; when the indicator on my dial registered that all our bombs were away, I announced on the intercom that our bombs were away. When a gunner in the rear looking down into the bomb-bay announced that the bomb-bay was clear, I flipped the switch that closed the doors. And then our whole formation of six planes wrenched away upward at full throttle into a steep and twisting climb. And then the bottom of the plane just seemed to drop out: we were falling, and I found myself pinned helplessly to the top of the bombardier's compartment, with my flak helmet squeezed against the ceiling. What I did not know (it was reconstructed for me later) was that one of the two men at the controls, the copilot, gripped by the sudden fear that our plane was about to stall, seized the controls to push them forward and plunged us into a sharp descent, a dive, that brought us back down into the level of the flak.\n\nI had no power to move, not even a finger. And I believed with all my heart and quaking soul that my life was ending and that we were going down, like the plane on fire I had witnessed plummeting only a few minutes before. I had no time for anything but terror. And then just as suddenly\u2014I think I would have screamed had I been able to\u2014we leveled out and began to climb away again from the flak bursts, and now I was flattened against the floor, trying frantically to grasp something to hold on to when there was nothing. And in another few seconds we were clear and edging back into formation with the rest of the planes. But as I regained balance and my ability to move, I heard in the ears of my headphones the most unnatural and sinister of sounds: silence, dead silence. And I was petrified again. Then I recognized, dangling loosely before me, the jack to my headset. It had torn free from the outlet. When I plugged myself back in, a shrill bedlam of voices was clamoring in my ears, with a wail over all the rest repeating on the intercom that the bombardier wasn't answering. \"The bombardier doesn't answer!\" \"I'm the bombardier,\" I broke in immediately. \"And I'm all right.\" \"Then go back and help him, help the gunner. He's hurt.\"\n\nIt was our top gunner who was wounded, and his station was in the front section of the plane just behind the pilot's flight deck. But so deeply, over time, have the passages in the novel entrenched themselves in me that I am tempted even now to think of the wounded man as the radio gunner in the rear. Our gunner was right there on the floor in front of me when I moved back through the crawlway from my bombardier's compartment, and so was the large oval wound in his thigh where a piece of flak\u2014a small one, judging from the entrance site on the inside\u2014had blasted all the way through. I saw the open flesh with shock. I had no choice but to do what I had to do next. Overcoming a tremendous wave of nausea and revulsion that was close to paralyzing, I delicately touched the torn and bleeding leg, and after the first touch, I was able to proceed with composure.\n\nAlthough there was a lot of blood puddling about, I could tell from my Boy Scout days\u2014I had earned a merit badge in first aid\u2014that no artery was punctured and thus there was no need for a tourniquet. I followed the obvious procedure. With supplies from the first-aid kit, I heavily salted the whole open wound with sulfanilamide powder. I opened and applied a sterile compress, maybe two\u2014enough to close and to cover everything injured. Then I bandaged him carefully. I did the same with the small hole on the inside of his thigh. When he exclaimed that his leg was starting to hurt him, I gave him a shot of morphine\u2014I may have given him two if the first didn't serve quickly enough to soothe us both. When he said he was starting to feel cold, I told him we would soon be back on the field and he was going to be all right. Truthfully, I hadn't the slightest idea where we were, for my attention had been totally concentrated on him.\n\nWith a wounded man on board, we were given priority in landing. The flight surgeon and his medical assistants and an ambulance were waiting to the side at the end of the runway. They took him off my hands. I might have seemed a hero and been treated as something of a small hero for a short while, but I didn't feel like one. They were trying to kill me, and I wanted to go home. That they were trying to kill all of us each time we went up was no consolation. They were trying to kill _me._\n\nI was frightened on every mission after that one, even the certified milk runs. It could have been about then that I began crossing my fingers each time we took off and saying in silence a little prayer. It was my sneaky ritual.\n\nTHAT WAS A MISSION on August 15th. A week before, I had seen a plane shot down just after the bomb run on the first of our squadron's missions to the bridges of Avignon. I was in the leading flight and when I looked back to see how the others were doing, I saw one plane pulling up above and away from the others, a wing on fire beneath a tremendous, soaring plume of orange flame. I saw a parachute billow open, then another, then one more before the plane began spiraling downward, and that was all. Dick Hirsch, a fellow from Chicago I'd trained with in bombardiering school in Victorville, California, was in one of those chutes. He came down in a field in Provence, was picked up by the underground, hidden, clothed in civilian garb, and smuggled back through the battle lines into the Allied part of Italy. Once back in the squadron he was rotated home without delay, to his surprise and ours, it being the policy never to expose to recapture anyone who had once had contact with the underground. The pilot killed in his plane was a blond fellow from upstate New York named James Burrhus, and I knew him, too, having flown missions with him. The copilot was a younger kid named Alvin Yellon, recently arrived, and I found out more about him fifty years later when I received a letter from his brother asking whether the mission I had described in my writing could have been the one on which his brother had met his death. It was.\n\nIt was all very much more dangerous, I realize now, than I had let myself recognize at the time and since. I believe I've read that more than 10 percent of the three hundred thousand American World War II dead were air corps crewmen.\n\nAnd for those on the ground on the Western Front in Europe that Christmas season, it was even colder and more lethal. I remember seeing in _Stars and Stripes_ , the official military newspaper, photographs of bundled-up Americans plodding their bleak way in desperate winter combat clothing through drifts of snow taller than they were. They looked like foreigners in a different, distant war. Theirs _was_ a different war. As a consequence of the colossal reciprocal miscalculations by both the Allied and the German high commands, miscalculations historically and endemically inherent in high commands, there ensued that Christmas the disasters of what we've learned to call the Battle of the Bulge. Our generals believed that the Germans could not and would not attack through the Ardennes Forest, and maintained defenses there that were thin and inexperienced; the Germans believed they could indeed break through and that the course of the war would be altered to their significant advantage if they did.\n\nBoth were wrong.\n\nThe Germans did break through. But the course of the war was altered most significantly, I'd bet, only for the thousands on both sides who were killed, wounded, or imprisoned in that devastating misadventure by aggressive Germans and complacent Americans. My Coney Island friend George Mandel received his head wound from a sniper there, the bullet penetrating his helmet but going into the brain only so far, and my contemporary friend and unintentional contemporary literary rival for attention, Kurt Vonnegut, was among those taken prisoner. Officers at the top, of course, always know much more than those they command at the bottom, but, until it's all over, there's never a way to know if they've known enough.\n\nWhile combat service in the air corps wasn't altogether the cushy sinecure some might suppose, we did enjoy, together with decent food, enclosed latrines, and heat in our tents, at least one other precious benefit that American ground forces until the Vietnam War did not: a specified tour of duty, after which we were detached from combat, replaced, and rotated home.\n\nI have often wondered whether there were many combat men in our ground forces coming ashore on D-Day who made it through the following eleven months till May and the end of the war with Germany without getting killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.\n\nI wouldn't be surprised to hear there was not even one.\n\nAmong the last several missions in my own tour of duty was an especially theatrical one in which I still take both a military and a civilian pride, the civilian pride bred of my sole assertion of leadership and authority as an officer. The assignment that morning was a hurried one. The destination was the large Italian seaport of La Spezia. The target was an Italian cruiser reportedly being towed out into a deep channel of the harbor by the Germans, to be scuttled there as an obstacle to approaching Allied ground forces pressing steadily north. I was relieved to discover myself assigned to one of the planes in a chaff element. The chaff element was a flight of three planes that led all the others in over the target, with their rear gunners jettisoning open bales of aluminized \"chaff from the two side gun ports to confound the radar below that was directing the enemy's antiaircraft fire. We carried no bombs. Because we carried no bombs, we could go zigzagging in at top speed and vary our altitudes. Because we carried no bombs, I shrewdly deduced that there was no need for a bombardier. Therefore, after priming and test-firing the machine gun in the bombardier's compartment in the nose of the plane, I resolved to sit that mission out\u2014literally.\n\nThe flight deck of the B-25, that part of the plane occupied by pilot and copilot, had armor plate on the floor and the backrests of both their seats. On that kind of mission in that point in my career, I would take two flak suits with me, one to wear and one to shield as much of the rest of me as I could curl up and cover. That day I took up front with me to the machine gun only the one I wore. After preparing the machine gun to fire and crawling back through the narrow tunnel connecting the nose of the plane with the rest, I retrieved the second flak suit, mounted to the flight deck, and sat down on the floor right behind the pilot, with my back against the back of his chair. I had armor plate below and armor plate at my back, a flak helmet on my head, and an extra flak suit to cover my groin and legs. And as an additional precaution, I sat with my parachute pack already hooked to my parachute harness. This time I had my parachute with me. Normally, the parachute pack was too bulky to fit through the crawlspace to the bombardier's compartment and had to be left behind; there was no escape hatch up front, anyway. I was the veteran of that crew, and the two newer pilots didn't know what to make of me. \"It's okay,\" I assured them crisply. \"Let me know if German fighters show up and I'll go back.\"\n\nWhen I looked behind us after we had flown through the flak at La Spezia and turned off, I was greatly satisfied with myself and all that I saw, and with all the others as well. We were unharmed; the turbulent oceans of dozens and dozens of smutty black clouds from the countless flak bursts were diffused all over the sky at different heights. The other flights were coming through without apparent damage. And down below I could watch the bombs from one cascade after another exploding directly on the ship that was our target.\n\nAnd soon after that, I was finished. I was alive and I was well. In that photograph I spoke of earlier of the five of us in the tent exists a huge and invisible divide between me and the others. I was through and they, particularly the two newcomers, now faced more missions to fly to survive, because the official number for those still on combat status, at least in our bomber group, had lately been raised.\n\nHow did they feel about that?\n\nAs casually oblivious and indifferent, I'd guess, as I had felt in midcourse when the number had been raised first from fifty to fifty-five and then to sixty. For them, it was up to seventy.\n\nWHILE MY COMRADES-IN-ARMS were off flying missions, I hunkered in my tent and played with the typewriter, naturally preferring to do that when alone. Our medium bombers were of medium range, our bomber group a tactical one, striking almost exclusively at rail and highway bridges. The flight time of missions averaged about three hours, though sometimes they were closer to two. It didn't take long to go from Corsica past Elba into central Italy and turn around and come back. I have a log before me that marks the time of missions to Poggibonsi, Pietrasanta, and Orvieto at exactly two hours, to Parma at two hours and ten minutes, to Ferrara, farther north in the Po Valley, at three hours and ten minutes, to Avignon, much farther away in France in the Rhone Valley, at four hours and thirty-five minutes. Sometimes we\u2014now they\u2014flew two missions the same day.\n\nOn the morning of August 15, 1944, the day of the invasion of southern France, we\u2014I, too, back then\u2014bombed gun emplacements on a beach near Marseilles shortly after daybreak (the cannons turned out to be wooden dummies), and in the afternoon we went on that second mission to Avignon, all four squadrons separating over three targets to divide the antiaircraft fire. We divided the antiaircraft fire, but nevertheless all three units suffered casualties.\n\nAll that day of the invasion when we weren't ourselves in the air, we watched huge armadas of heavy bombers passing high overhead, higher than we ever flew, from their bases near Naples\u2014hundreds and hundreds of them in their somber, purring formations, more planes on our side than I could believe existed in the entire world. All the advantages in the war now seemed unmistakably ours. But in late December came the German offensive in the Battle of the Bulge, and it took five more months after that for Germany finally to capitulate to us and to the USSR, in the east.\n\nTHE SUBJECT MATTER of all the short works with which I was now busying myself and had been busying myself even earlier was not founded on experiences of my own. I hadn't had any then that seemed worth translating into fiction. I borrowed the action and the settings from the works of other writers, who may\u2014I didn't consider the possibility then\u2014in turn have been borrowing from the works of still others. These experiences, which I as author dealt with knowledgeably, were vicarious and entirely literary, gleaned from wanderings as a reader, and they ranged from the picturesque whimsies of William Saroyan to the hard-nosed, sexist attitudes, particularly toward women and marriage, of Hemingway and Irwin Shaw, embodying as well implicit assessments of materialism, wealth, Babbittry, and ideals of masculinity and male decency that I ingenuously accepted as irreducibly pure and nullifying all others.\n\nIn the immense replacement depot in Constantine, Algeria, where I spent a few weeks with the crewmen with whom I had flown overseas in our small B-25 before being assigned to Corsica, my primary inspiration as a neophyte writer was Saroyan. He appealed to my taste and seemed easy to emulate and well worth copying. (The stories that seemed easiest to emulate and most worth copying were short ones with few descriptive passages written in literary vocabulary and with a large proportion of vernacular dialogue.) In one of his collections was a story titled (I am working here from memory) \"Did You Ever Fall in Love with a Midget Weighing Thirty-eight Pounds?\" In one of the stories from my Algerian period (working still from memory) was a young man in New York romantically involved with a girl who walked around on her hands. I have no recollection of my title. (I can imagine now that I imagined then the title \"Did You Ever Fall in Love with a Girl Who Walked Around on Her Hands?\") Where she walked on her hands and where the story went I have also mercifully forgotten.\n\nBy then I was familiar with most of the work of Hemingway, Irwin Shaw, and Jerome Weidman. Jerome Weidman's prewar collection of short stories from _The New Yorker_ called _The Horse That Could Whistle Dixie_ was another favorite of mine, as were the two novels of his I'd read (which were brought into the apartment by Sylvia or Lee from the circulating library in Magrill's drugstore on the corner of Mermaid Avenue). These were I _Can Get It for You Wholesale_ and its sequel, _What's in It for Me?_ , and I thought them marvelous, as I did Budd Schulberg's _What Makes Sammy Run?_ The Studs Lonigan trilogy of James T. Farrell was another sophisticated favorite of mine and everybody else's, mainly for the realistic action and realistic words. James Joyce's _Ulysses_ floated briefly into the Coney Island apartment also, no doubt borne there, I recognize now, by the notoriety of the court victory over its banning. _Ulysses_ sailed back to Magrill's drugstore unread by any of us, although I still can tingle with the _frisson_ of astonishment I enjoyed coming upon two forbidden words in the very early pages, one of which describes the green color of the sea, the other the gray, sunken state of the world. John O'Hara was known to me also.\n\nI had a large assortment of other reading to draw upon for stimulation while overseas. Professor Matthew Bruccoli at the University of South Carolina reminded me just a while ago of those plentiful Armed Services (or Armed Forces) Editions, which I had forgotten about. Here\u2014there\u2014was a government publishing venture of scope without precedent and one that probably hasn't been and won't be repeated: editions of more than twelve hundred works in printings of fifty thousand copies each, distributed without charge to American servicemen everywhere. Bruccoli, an insatiable collector, has assembled more than a thousand of these titles. He wants them all and won't ever get them, for I doubt that even he can now locate those missing two hundred volumes.\n\nIn one of these paperbound books, a collection of short stories, I found a work by Stephen Crane, \"The Open Boat,\" and in this tale of shipwrecked sailors adrift in a lifeboat is a line of dialogue repeated by a man at the oars like a Wagnerian _leitmotif_ (although I did not learn about Wagnerian _leitmotifs_ until later): \"Spell me, Billy.\" (I'm not absolutely sure of the name Billy. I no longer have the Armed Forces, or Armed Services, Edition, and Bruccoli might not have it among his thousand, either.)\n\nFrom this sonorous reiterated chord, which I pondered in my tent, and perhaps from a one-act play of Saroyan's called _Hello, Out There_ that I might already have read, could have sprung the notion of the short story to be titled \"Hello, Genoa, Hello, Genoa,\" which would be related entirely in brisk intercom radio dialogue between a bomber pilot, or a few of them, and the control tower at the air base in Corsica. It is (even to this day, I feel) an engaging notion with a beguiling title, and I never tried writing it (or have no recollection that I did).\n\nInstead, I wrote a short story in a day or two that I called \"I Don't Love You Anymore.\" It is about two thousand words long, and like everything from my Algerian and Corsican periods, it is based on things I knew nothing about except from my sifting around in the works of other writers. Consequently, it reflects the style and point of view of many of the malign and histrionic fictions by American male authors of that time and ours: A married, worldly-wise serviceman, with whom we are intended to sympathize, feels temporarily, upon finding himself back home, and offering no specific complaint, that he no longer wants his marriage and no longer loves his wife. (Whatever that last was meant to mean, I truly had no idea. It was a convention.)\n\nI don't know how it happened, but after I was back in the States and just out of the service, the story was submitted as an unsolicited manuscript and accepted for publication in _Story_ , a periodical then publishing fiction only and held in very high esteem. By pure luck in timing, the war in Europe being just over, it chanced that the magazine was devoting an entire issue to fiction by men and women from the services.\n\nI was back in Coney Island living in the apartment on West 31st Street when the note of acceptance arrived with the mailman. Overnight, I was, or felt myself, a local celebrity\u2014I saw to that by showing the letter to everyone I knew\u2014and I became talked about, too, in a small social enclave on Riverside Drive in Manhattan, where I was already going steady, keeping company, with a girl I had met not long before and to whom I soon would give an engagement ring and would marry the afternoon of October 2, 1945, just before boarding a Pullman train to California to begin college in Los Angeles.\n\nThe acceptance of my story, of course, impressed everybody, although no one I knew of except Danny the Count had every heard of _Story_ magazine, and probably it was from Danny the Count that I first heard about it. Possibly it was at his suggestion that I made the submission. The payment I received for \"I Don't Love You Any more\" was\u2014I had no idea what to expect\u2014twenty-five dollars.\n\nI was soon calculating deliriously. I had spent only two days on the story at a time when I was distracted by the war. Once I applied myself industriously, I figured, I could easily manage to complete four stories a week, approximately sixteen a month, and, by selling them for twenty-five dollars each, I would soon find myself with earnings almost as large as what I had been raking in as a first lieutenant on combat duty overseas.\n\nI had great expectations.\n\nHere was a beginning, a first convincing demonstration of a promising future, and even my prospective in-laws were proudly persuaded. Soon after the wedding and the train trip to Los Angeles, I derived a second and even greater indication of potential triumph from my first-year course in freshman English.\n\nGETTING GOOD GRADES in classes at the University of Southern California in 1945 proved ridiculously easy (Art Buchwald, a student there at the same time, I later learned, conceivably may have floundered in the classroom, but I did not). It was finding an apartment that was impossibly hard.\n\nAfter luxuriating for a week or more at the Ambassador Hotel for the second part of our honeymoon\u2014it was one of L.A.'s better-known hotels (it was the hotel in whose kitchen Robert Kennedy was shot to death twenty-three years later during his California presidential-primary campaign)\u2014we settled into a large bedroom in a small rooming house downtown on South Figueroa Street, between Washington Boulevard and somewhere else. The costs of the stay at the Ambassador Hotel were met from the cash gifts collected at the wedding, by far the most substantial portion of which flowed into our pockets from my wife's side of the family. The initial segment of the honeymoon was spent in a drawing room of a train going overnight from New York to Chicago and another drawing room of a different train going from Chicago to Los Angeles for three more nights. It was not much fun. We read a lot. The observation car and the club car bedazzled only briefly. A Pullman berth in a drawing room of the _Twentieth-Century Limited_ and then on the _Chief_ or the _Super Chief_ from Chicago to Los Angeles is not ideal as a nuptial couch. There was a beauty shop on board, and my wife, Shirley, went once to have her hair and nails done.\n\nThe rooming house into which we moved was obtained through a housing-locating service at the university. It was the property and dwelling of an elderly, shrinking, white-haired couple named Mr. and Mrs. Hunter. A trolley line just outside bore me to the college in one direction and in the other trundled into Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles and to the pickup and drop-off points of buses going to whichever of the racetracks was in session. There we could find Chinese restaurants and Mexican food, too.\n\nIn the household and marriage of our landlords, Mrs. Hunter was beyond doubt the energetic party. Ghostly, tidy Mr. Hunter, in his light-blue or light-gray cardigan sweater, with an ineffaceable and cryptic smile on his trim, pale face, would drift by wordlessly like some harmless spirit whenever our paths crossed during the academic year we lived in his house. In sharp contrast, Mrs. Hunter, when I was away mornings at school, would corner my wife and try to convert her to Christianity, specifically into a California sect to which, she confided with great secrecy, she had already deeded the house and everything else she owned. Some kind of Jewish evangelist was already in the city at the time\u2014formerly a rabbi, she boasted, and of late a proselytizer for Christ\u2014and she thought we would profit greatly by listening to his radio broadcasts and attending his services. On the other hand, she also confided to Shirley that her husband, Mr. Hunter, was not, or had never been, much good at servicing her sexually and that there were, or had been, periods in her life when her cravings had grown so desperate that she wanted to, or in fact did, seat herself on a cake of ice to cool them. They had never brought forth children.\n\nWe had no cooking facilities, and what limited kitchen privileges were offered (refrigeration was about the extent of them) we hesitated to make use of for fear of being trapped in peculiar conversations. On our corner of Washington Boulevard was a good Greek coffee shop, and we ate most of our dinners there and in a few other neighborhood places. On weekend splurges we indulged ourselves in publicized glamorous haunts like the Brown Derby or Romanoff's in hopes of catching a glimpse of some movie personality, any movie personality. (We scored only one, Rosalind Russell, and I would never have recognized her because of her tiny chin, but my Shirley did.) That part of Washington Boulevard near which we lived was also the center of the city's mortuary-monument industry.\n\nGiven my wife's rather privileged and sheltered upbringing, I am incredulous now that she succeeded in spending a year with me under such conditions or even agreed to try, and that her mother, Dottie, permitted her to. In 1949, four years later, when I received my Fulbright scholarship to Oxford, her mother's abrupt response to her daughter's exciting news was, I was told:\n\n\"You're not going to England!\"\n\nWe went.\n\nIn California, as a married freshman student without friends or family, I found it hard to meet people, and we enjoyed very little in the way of a social life. There was much larking around on campus, especially between the fraternities and the sororities, but we had no part in that. I imagine that an even more confounding time was suffered by the younger male students entering the university, any university, directly from high school. They were very young by comparison to us and they were rendered mute and invisible, were overshadowed by the numbers of veterans crowding into the classrooms, almost all of them my own age, twenty-two, and over. We were older, bigger, and better read and we had experienced more and were zealous to learn (or else we were football players).\n\nIt must have seemed a preposterous hope for any of those younger students to succeed in qualifying for collegiate athletics. The football teams consisted mainly of older young men who had been playing on college teams before the war and had spent the years since then growing huger in muscle and bone mass and, often, honing their pigskin skills on one of the service teams. They moved lethargically through classes on a preplanned schedule to conserve their eligibility until they were most needed. The year I attended Southern California, the football team went to the Rose Bowl, with a backfield that was an average age, I'd guess, of twenty-four. I believe the star was twenty-six. The opposing team was Alabama, whose All-American player, Harry Gilmer, had been something of a standout, I think, even before the war. As a student I received two tickets to the big game. Back then, I already detested organized cheering sections and sneered at things like college spirit and cheer-leading squads. Because Shirley had given up trying to grow interested in football and was apathetic about the Rose Bowl, I sold my two tickets for twenty-five dollars each to a couple from Alabama, and we spent that day, and the money, at one of the local horse tracks, Santa Anita or Hollywood Park.\n\nThe motives for my decision to go to the University of Southern California remain opaque, but they doubtless included the indispensable one that I was accepted there. I don't doubt that they were also evasive in purpose, intended to delay, to buy time. I didn't want\u2014I felt myself much too young\u2014to have to decide right away what I was going to do for the rest of my life. Once afforded the opportunity to attend college, I decided to make use of it. Going to college was easier and more appealing than going to work and certainly, then, more respected. And what work could I have found that would not have been a blow to the spirit after my jubilant homecoming from the war?\n\nBut I didn't know where I ought to try to go. Places on the altitude of Harvard and Yale didn't really exist for me\u2014they were beyond both my grasp and my reach, outside my world and outside my imagining. What would the two of us do with ourselves at Harvard or Yale even if I had applied and been admitted? Who would talk to us? Any concept of higher education as high education was alien to me. I wanted to find out; I wasn't sure I wanted to learn. Anything in the nature of a scholarly love of knowledge was soon cooling realistically with my growing awareness that I would never make the effort to acquire the Greek, Latin, and German referred to so copiously in the illuminating works of literary explication I was guided to. At the same time, the idea was growing stronger that I should strive to make a name for myself as an author of fiction rather than as a critic or some other kind of intellectual. My hyperactive enthusiasm to learn more about just about everything existed principally for my own blissful satisfaction, and still does. (I have given up on Wittgenstein and Sartre and philosophy, but in recent years I have been burrowing into neo-Darwinism, which is congenial to my religious skepticism, and writhing in an exasperating quandary over quantum mechanics, which, to my mind, remains impossible even to define, let alone comprehend.)\n\nI had been stationed twice in lower California during the war and had enjoyed both interludes there. In fact, I pretty much enjoyed everywhere I'd been in the army\u2014Corsica, too, apart from the perils; even San Angelo, Texas, where I was sent for several months after Europe with almost nothing to do almost all the time. I am generally not a hard person to please (although people close to me might find that hard to believe, and distant acquaintances impossible). At the air base in Santa Ana, when I was there for classification as an aviation cadet and preflight training, there were the calm recreations in the town itself on weekends off and the longer, fatiguing overnight excursions by bus from the air base to Los Angeles. At bombardier training school in Victorville in the desert, we could treat ourselves when we desired to the fairly riotous Saturday nights off at Balboa Beach, with its flashy pier and dance halls and bars, and the billions of young girls and women who were also drawn there with the goal of carousing around. For me as for many others, lower California emitted a cinematic charisma as a place of beautiful excitements and charming opulence and opportunity\u2014it still does\u2014and no one expressed reservations about our decision to go there. And, of course, the moderate California weather was always seductive.\n\nThis was in stark contrast to the horrible, deeply depressing, incapacitating winter milieu into which I was harshly plunged on my furlough after I'd returned by steamship to the States from Corsica in January and found myself back in Coney Island. I soon knew without need to put anything into words that, given a choice, I would not want to live there again. Coney Island had long before lost its magic for me and for most of the rest of us as an amusement area, and there was nothing but Nathan's open in winter, anyway. It was black and it was bleak. There was no one around and there was nothing going on. There were no social clubs. I had no girlfriend and didn't know any girls I felt I might want to see intimately, or who might want to see me. In Coney Island that winter there was no place but the movies to go to on a date; other places were too far away, and I didn't have a car. If I'd had a car, I wouldn't have known how to drive it. I had nothing to do.\n\nI missed the army, where there was always something to do, even when there was nothing.\n\nIn a day or two, sister Sylvia and brother Lee took note of my pathetic inertia, and it was Lee who, typically, came up with a suggestion that was not as implausibly far-fetched as it had sounded to all three of us at first mention. Sylvia and I couldn't have thought of it in a million years, but Lee, the selfless wishful thinker, came up with the proposal that marvelously did the trick: Why didn't I take myself off for a week or so to a long-established resort hotel, not far off in the Catskills, which was relatively fashionable to New Yorkers and known to be popular with people who could afford it, and of which I, in my parochial simplicity, had never heard?\n\nGrossinger's.\n\nWe knew I had the money: Allotments from my air corps pay, which we all thought mighty substantial, had been coming to them directly from the start, to be banked in my name. As a serviceman back from overseas I would probably be showered with attention and courtesies. It sounded okay to me. Lee made the reservations and arranged for the van pickup for the trip from Brooklyn to Liberty, New York, and the plan turned out to be a rejuvenating solution not only for the rest of my furlough but also for the shaping of much of my life ahead.\n\nI had never been on ice skates before, but found I could skate capably after the first few minutes, and it was indeed a dashing figure I cut as I circled the rink in my green winter flight jacket with its fur collar and silver first lieutenant's bar. For the evenings I had my officer's dress with my wings and campaign ribbons for overseas service, the only impressive one among them, I knew, the Air Medal with a large number of oak-leaf clusters (which came as routine with the completion of every fixed number of missions and not, as others might suppose, for the accomplishment of anything particularly valorous). I had my gleaming Mediterranean suntan, my health, my youth, my good looks, and my modesty. I was Jewish. I could project self-confidence. I was respectful and polite, and I was made much of by the parents there, especially those with single daughters, and by single women unaccompanied by parents. Even I knew it was a sure thing I would win the weekly dance contest on Saturday night, even though I was not then, am not now, and have not ever been anything much as a dancer. As fortune would have it\u2014the kind of storybook good fortune one used to expect to find in romance magazines\u2014I met the girl there, that week in January, whom I would marry in October and remain married to for thirty-five years before we separated.\n\nWhen I returned to the city we were already going steady.\n\nWe dated when I commuted into New York weekends from Atlantic City until I was shipped to San Angelo, Texas. While I was there we exchanged letters. We saw each other again, in New Jersey and New York, when I was transferred in May to Fort Dix to be processed for discharge. And we went on seeing each other when I was out. It was Shirley's mother who took the initiative when I was alone with her one afternoon in her living room and supplied the impetus I hadn't found the power to generate on my own.\n\n\"Barney thinks,\" said Dottie, with the devious premeditation that was second nature to her and occasionally endearing\u2014it was likely that Barney, the husband, had no inkling of what she was up to\u2014\"that it's because you don't have the money that you don't give her a ring.\"\n\nI had never heard such language before.\n\n\"Give her a ring?\" I inquired, puzzled, for the possibility of my doing any such incomprehensible thing hadn't once entered my mind. \"What for?\"\n\n\"To get engaged to be married.\"\n\nI had money enough for the ring. She made the purchase and billed me for just $500. Friends and families on both sides were delighted with the match. I was a young and unformed twenty-two and a half; the bride had just passed twenty-one. Almost every fellow I'd grown up with in Coney Island was getting married at about that time: Marvin Winkler and Evelyn, Davey Goldsmith and Estelle, Lou Berkman and Marion, Marty Kapp and Sylvia, Sy Ostrow and Judy, and others. (As far as I know, mine and only one other of these early marriages would end in divorce.)\n\nTHE MARRIAGE SEEMS to have been a good neurotic fit, observed the psychiatrist at my introductory consultation with him in which I tried to present fairly all the imperfections in me and in my wife underlying the growing estrangement and irreconcilable disputes that had been arising uncontrollably.\n\nIt surely must have been a good neurotic fit, to endure for thirty-five years. Why then did we eventually separate and divorce? It was a good fit, but, well... I doubt either of us could have said. I don't believe either of us wanted to.\n\n(I found out in ensuing sessions of psychoanalysis that there was nothing generically denigrating about my new mentor's use of that term _neurotic._ \"All of us are neurotic,\" he erupted one day, after I'd strayed again from my free-associating into what he called my habit of intellectualizing. \"Only psychotics are not neurotic\")\n\nMOST WEEKDAY MORNINGS at Mr. and Mrs. Hunter's I spent at school. The thought of cutting classes didn't seriously occur to me in college any more than it had in high school. The temptation to do so, had it arisen, would have tormented me. I enjoyed the work and the classroom competition.\n\nAfternoons and evenings we often roamed about the city, sightseeing. After all, this was Hollywood, the land of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, Van Johnson, Dorothy Lamour. Since we seldom had to be anywhere at an appointed hour, we had time to travel by bus. We looked at the La Brea tarpits and the house of Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies's house at Santa Monica, at the names immortalized in the pavement outside Grauman's Chinese Theater. We went to Tijuana one weekend and even ate a taco each from a street vendor without falling ill. Shirley and I caught our first sight of shish kebab grilling on a skewer in the neon-glaring window of a restaurant on a pulsating street near the UCLA campus early one evening, and it became a reliable weekly meal, with rice and salad, and a side order of french-fried potatoes, for under two dollars. Our year in Los Angeles was educational: Back in New York, we were the only people we knew ever to have heard of shish kebab, and we boosted it heartily. But grilled lamb is not particularly succulent, and we soon advanced to dishes like beef bourguignonne, coq au vin, cappelletti bolognese, shrimp creole, lobsters broiled or steamed\u2014who can remember them all?\n\nAlso in the afternoons and most evenings I did my reading and writing for school and wrote and rewrote my stories and light nonfiction pieces that I mailed away for publication to one magazine after another; they all came back. I had a portable typewriter of my own now, purchased from Macy's through Sylvia at her employee's discount\u2014in the days before discount stores, when a discount was still a discount. Having heard that there existed such a thing as a writer's keyboard, I had ordered it with the idea that my written work would flow that much more swiftly. It had such trivial modifications as quotation marks and question mark in lower case. It made no difference. Typing a little more rapidly only meant that I would have to begin retyping pages, paragraphs, even sentences that much sooner. Both of us read a great deal for pleasure. Shirley read _Wuthering Heights_ and was astounded that it diverged so much from the movie. I read everything I believed to be instructive. On our table radio we listened to the one classical-music station in Los Angeles and to the radio-network comedy programs that were already our favorites. Fred Allen was available and Jack Benny was still funny.\n\nTwo authors for whom I found myself with a new and fervent enthusiasm were Aldous Huxley, for reasons I now can no longer begin to guess, and H. L. Mencken, whose merits as a thinker and writer are brilliantly obvious to this day: a blunt and mordant dislike for every kind of hokum, a command of American English that is eloquently and indisputably his own, a voice whose surface aspects others might seek to copy but who has not, to my mind, been surpassed in individuality and substance.\n\nI was then among the susceptible many trying to copy him, believing I was the only one. Words like \"clodpate\" and \"bastinado\" began showing up regularly in my writer's vocabulary for the scornfully superior humorous pieces I was dashing off at least once a week, interspersed with the short stories I was cranking out at just about the same rate. In the college library I discovered one work of his published in 1919 or so, which, I am ashamed now to say, I responded to with laughing admiration, virtual applause, and which, if in print today and he still among the quick (as he might say, and did), would see him in the stocks for the rest of his natural life, with no fair-minded person dissenting. The volume, a slim one, is titled _In Defense of Women._ The ostensible (and disingenuous) argument is that women in general are the more intelligent members of the human species, and men, in consequence, comparatively stupid. The proof? Women induce men to marry them, to live with them, and to tolerate their presence socially. I am embarrassed to confess that more than Mencken's vocabulary found its way into my literary thinking. It was the fashion, the convention of the time, to present women in a stereotyped way as targets to be patronizingly derided. I am thankful now that none of these efforts of mine found its way into print or even, to my knowledge, still exists.\n\nI had applied to Southern California with a major in journalism, thinking, without thinking clearly, that there'd be a lot of writing and reading involved and that newspaper work by its nature would be invariably arresting, if not always electrifying. While I was registering and noted the required courses, such as copyediting, rewriting, proofreading, and layout, I switched like a fugitive to a major in English and with a deep breath relaxed and blessed my luck. I had a deep feeling of relief that I'd escaped, by the skin of my teeth, an irreparable and very great disaster.\n\nThat semester, as afterward, I enrolled in more classes than the stipulated minimum. With all costs met by the government, why not? By attending college summer sessions, too, I managed to complete the four-year curriculum in three years. I finished my science requirements that first year with overlapping courses in bacteriology, botany, and zoology. These were areas of study totally new to me and entirely fascinating. I would have liked an introductory course to physics, too (I still would), but couldn't find the space to fit one in (and still can't). A survey course in the history of civilization\u2014two semesters, I believe\u2014didn't have a minute in it or demand attention to even one item that didn't thrill me. Flashbacks to my elation upon hearing for the first time about the Indus, the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Ganges are still vivid\u2014what resonant sounds these marvelous words discharge\u2014and Praxiteles and Pericles, too. The work in English, freshman composition, was grist for my mill: Punctuation and syntax were easy, the written assignments valued opportunities to show my stuff.\n\nI tried artfully in all my written work to address my subject with a paper that would also, with ingenious alteration, be suitable for publication in one of the popular magazines I knew about. Thus, when research for a theme on paleontology brought me into contact with paragraphs on geological periods with names like Mesozoic and Jurassic, terms I could retain by rote but not aspire to understand, I first met the assignment adequately and next converted the composition into a humorous spoof, presented (I hoped) with the abrasive superiority of an H. L. Mencken, of the deliberate use of unintelligible jargon affected by pedagogues (another word I lifted from Mencken). The new piece, once typed, went out everywhere and went nowhere. It was perhaps not as humorous as I thought.\n\nThe short stories I wrote at that time tended to be plotted extravagantly and often to be resolved miraculously by some kind of ironic divine intervention on the side of the virtuous and oppressed. In one I remember, a French farmer in Provence who has secretly collaborated with the German occupiers watches in speechless horror as every one of his ten sons is picked out in a random selection from the village people for reprisal executions. In another, a visitor in search of a persecuted figure in the Christian rural South who has mysteriously disappeared turns out to be Jesus or some kind of avenging angel bent on retribution for his murder. It gives me pleasure to say that these stories went nowhere either.\n\nIn an elective course in contemporary theater (I had thoughts of becoming a playwright, too. It seemed easier. There were fewer words) was a blond, outgoing girl named Mary Alden, who early on took a testy dislike to me, which she made little effort to mask. She was my own age, perhaps slightly older, with a couple of years' experience working in the theater. The two of us dominated classroom discussion, and we were on opposite sides of just about every question. She was galled by my contradictions. Having recently come from New York, I had the advantage of referring to people active there in show business of whom she had not yet heard and the teacher had. She found my presumption unforgivable. I was sorry that Mary Alden didn't like me, for I liked her. She held as sacred what I took for sport.\n\nUnfortunately, that has happened with me several times since\u2014with a graduate philosophy major named Norwood Hanson on the steamship carrying a large contingent of Fulbright scholars to England; with a faculty colleague at Penn State named Gordon Smith, when we visited the hallowed battlefield and cemetery sites at Gettysburg; and more than once with a fellow student at NYU named David Krause, but David and I remained friends through college and afterward. The other two refused to speak to me ever again.\n\nMy mother could have told them I had a twisted brain.\n\nFinding in my first term in college that I could attain top grades in just about all my courses with little strain, I devised my program for the next semester with veteran savoir faire, coming up with a schedule designed to release me from classes two or three afternoons a week early enough to join my wife downtown and catch the bus that would get us to the racetrack in time to bet the daily double. (This was childish fancy, for neither of us had cashed a ticket on the daily double the several times we had been to the races, and I have never cashed one since.) Dismounting from the trolley car with schoolbooks still in hand after one of these half days on campus, I was surprised by the sight of Shirley waving with one arm and hastening toward me with a face rosy with joy. In her hand was an opened letter that had come in the mail that morning after I had left the rooming house. It was a note of acceptance from _Esquire_ magazine for a nonfiction piece I had written originally as a theme in my freshman English class. Assigned the subject of describing some kind of method or device, I had invented a series of sure-fire systems, all of them foolish, for always winning money at the racetrack.\n\nAnd with the note had come a check for $200!\n\nI was now, at twenty-two, a certified young author of fiction and, with _Beating the Bangtails_ , of nonfiction also (an illustrious distinction in 1946, two years before Vidal, Capote, Mailer, and others came rolling onto the national scene and made me feel backward, aged, envious, and derelict).\n\nI was not, however, a certified handicapper of horses, and most of the $200 I earned from my freshman theme on how to win money betting on horses was lost at the racetrack the next half-dozen times we went.\n\nTHE VEXATIOUS PROBLEM of obtaining a fitting place to live, which had obstructed the conjugal dreams of us newly-weds in Los Angeles, was brushed away with dispatch in New York by another exercise of the untiring enterprise of Dottie, wielded with Barney's usual reserved and benevolent approval. Friends of theirs were residents and owners of a modernized, narrow, five-story elevator apartment building at a wonderful location in Manhattan, on West 76th Street just off Central Park West, around the corner from the New-York Historical Society and just a few steps from the American Museum of Natural History. When a one-room studio apartment facing front on the first floor became vacant, we moved in.\n\nWe were figuratively just a hop, skip, and jump from a couple of subway lines and bus stops and from all kinds of shopping. One subway carried me expeditiously downtown and back to NYU for the next two years; the other rode me uptown to Columbia University for the year of my master's degree. The amount of room at our disposal wasn't notably greater than what was ours in the California rooming house, but here a roll-out sofa bed permitted us to better utilize what space we had. And here we had a compact kitchen area that conveniently held a table for four. We could entertain, and we did. Among the people we had over for dinner once or twice was Maurice \"Buck\" Baudin, Jr., the instructor in the fiction-writing course in which I and some new friends at NYU were doing so well. Buck was a mere five years older than I, but even after I had moved on from NYU I couldn't with composure bring myself to call him anything but \"Mister.\" The furnishing of the apartment was handled by Dottie and Shirley and was done tastefully and rationally and, I imagine, inexpensively, by their standards. Lee's wife, Perlie, had looked into such things as interior decorating and gushed in praise at the sensible arrangement and the authentic look of several of the almost-genuine antique pieces. Dottie was pleased to have her daughter and her writer\/college-student son-in-law installed in an apartment she would be able to display to her friends with pride.\n\nAnd so, for that matter, was I.\n\nMy former mother-in-law, Dorothy Held, was one of those cultivated, modern women who knew the difference between turquoise and aquamarine. On the other hand, she also knew the difference between sirloin steak and top sirloin, prime rib and top round, and that only first-cut brisket was suitable for a good pot roast.\n\nMy favorite steak before I met her, after I'd left home and discovered it, was filet mignon, always well done. Not until I'd met Dottie's daughter and was eating at her table was I introduced to the joys of rare beef, to the rare sirloin steak, right up to the bone, and to the heavenly and substantial charm of a standing roast of rare prime rib of beef with a crust liberally seasoned with garlic, salt, and paprika. Shirley's family was much better off than my own, with experience vastly more cosmopolitan: They even read the _New York Times._ And her parents found delight in watching me eat\u2014always a second helping, often a third. They were generous in other ways, too. They were well off but not wealthy. Barney\u2014Bernard Held\u2014was partners with a large company in a much smaller firm manufacturing dresses. He apparently made a very good income during the war and for many years after, but the Helds tended, with Dottie providing the impetus, to spend just about everything coming in and to greatly enjoy whatever they spent it on\u2014including us. They spent much on us, and it was largely with their encouragement and help that I was able to spend almost the next six years of my life, and the first six years of my marriage, going to college.\n\nA gratifying event in our marriage was the birthday party my wife made for my sister, Sylvia. Well into the marriage, after some twenty-five years, Shirley was horrified to hear one day that my sister had never in her life been given a birthday party, and resolved to make her one. I had never seen Sylvia so filled with effusive happiness as she was at our house the next time her birthday rolled around. Tears of laughter streamed down her cheeks, and her voice soon was hoarse with her whoops of hilarious reminiscence. With Lee it was the same; he was talking and chortling and wiping his eyes, too. I had never before heard either of them, alone or together, in such exuberant discourse. I listened. I learned. Among the memories Sylvia recalled with merriment was of her first year out of high school when, at age seventeen or eighteen, she would journey into the city with others to search for a job. This would have been in about 1934, when jobs were not easy to find. She and her female friends would chip in for a pack of cigarettes and pool their money for variety in their lunches in a cafeteria. And at the employment agencies, she remembered, they often were spared long waits in vain by someone appearing from inside to announce that they might as well leave: There were no jobs for Jews that day.\n\nThat she could recall this with mirth at her birthday party was testimony to the astonishing good fortune we had all been enjoying since.\n\nOnce, in Finland on a book tour, I met a local writer, Danny Katz, a Finnish humorist whose Jewish parents, like mine, had emigrated from Russia. \"They weren't too smart,\" he muttered, chuckling. \"They settled here.\"\n\nOurs were smarter. They had settled in New York.\n\nAT THE END OF OUR first year back in New York, a full apartment just above us with a complete kitchen and large living room and bedroom opened up and was offered to us. Into it we promptly moved, and there we lived until the fall of 1949, when we sailed to England. I've lost track of the numbers, but I'm certain we were helped significantly with the rent and other expenses, for I very strongly doubt that my monthly subsistence allowance from the government while I continued at school would have enabled us to live on a scale that, then as now, seemed lavish. (I did for a while work part-time after school in the circulation department of a magazine called _American Home_ , filing and finding the address plates of subscribers, but the hourly income and take-home pay from that would not have been gigantic.) To friends from Coney Island, almost all of whom by then had moved out of Coney Island, and to other friends I made at NYU, our standard of living was kingly.\n\nA commodious, well-furnished apartment in a well-maintained building in a prime neighborhood in Manhattan was as precious then as it is today. We held parties and dinners there often, and it was a good meeting place before going out with friends from locations less felicitous. On balmy nights we served drinks on the roof, where there were comfortable chairs and well-tended plants. In summer, Dottie and Barney always took a country house somewhere or booked space in a luxury hotel for the season\u2014I remember the Lido in Lido Beach, Long Island, and the Forest House at Lake Mahopac, New York\u2014and we would go there on weekends and during other breaks in my summer-school sessions.\n\nAll in all, we were living the life of Riley.\n\nAnd it wasn't costing me much.\n\nGetting high grades at New York University required much more application than had my freshman year at Southern Cal, but I managed in almost all my courses. The competition was tougher. Lacking a campus and a campus social life and no longer an active institution in intercollegiate sports, the Washington Square College of the university was something in the nature of a commuting college. And students who traveled to classes, many from homes quite distant, weren't there to fool around. Especially not the war veterans. Two friends I made in philosophy courses, Edward Blaustein and a student named Kahn, received Rhodes scholarships at a time when few, very few, were awarded to Jews. Eddie Blaustein was later a professor of law, then president of Bennington College (the first Jewish president, he said, of a non-Jewish college), then president of Rutgers University. I don't know what happened to Kahn, but I don't doubt that he, too, did all right. The main lesson I learned in philosophy was to react with skepticism and treat with Socratic malice all emphatic ideological beliefs, especially those of my favorite philosophy teachers.\n\nIn the fiction-writing courses of Maurice Baudin was David Krause, who journeyed from faraway New Jersey, journeyed through rainstorms and blizzards\u2014he would, in a figure of speech first coined by Mario Puzo in connection with himself, sooner eat a broom than miss a day of class. He got straight A's, too, and was a professor of Irish and English literature at Brown University all his adult life until his retirement not long ago. David wrote perfect short stories but couldn't be persuaded to submit them for publication because he didn't think they were worthy. And we had Alex Austin, a meager, short fellow who seldom raised his voice above a whisper, even when reading aloud in the classroom. By the time he enrolled in the class, more than two hundred poems and short stories by Alex had been published in \"little\" magazines most of us hadn't even heard of. It was an essential part of his daily regimen, like brushing teeth, to write at least one short story every afternoon\u2014he would sit down at his typewriter devotionally, often without a thought in mind, and simply begin typing. He had novel-length manuscripts, too, and Baudin was reduced to imploring negotiations with him to limit the number he handed in.\n\nUnlike David Krause, who was a genuine idealist (he saw teaching as a calling; I went into it because I thought it would be easier than a business office), I mailed out everything, worthy or not. When I learned that Buck Baudin was selling stories to _Good Housekeeping_ and receiving $1,500 apiece for them, I appended that magazine and all other women's magazines accepting fiction to my list of prospective benefactors. Hardly a workday went by that didn't find the postman delivering to 20 West 76th Street at least a few of my stamped, self-addressed manila envelopes returning manuscripts of mine with rejection slips. _The New Yorker_ then was as admirably efficient in editorial procedure as it was superb in editorial content. I used to joke\u2014and it wasn't much of an exaggeration\u2014that a story I would mail to _The New Yorker_ in the morning would be back with its concise, slighting rejection slip in the afternoon mail that same day.\n\nSometime during my second or third semester with Baudin\u2014I took a third semester without credit because I wanted to keep working with him\u2014he chose four short stories of mine and delivered them for consideration to his literary agent. The reader's report from there said that none in the group was suitable for publication. Of the four, three were subsequently accepted by magazines when submitted by me as unsolicited manuscripts.\n\nMuch later, when I taught for four years at the City College of New York between the publication of my first novel, _Catch-22_ , and the completion of my second, _Something Happened_ , I several times attempted the same thing with my own literary agent for those students whose work seemed especially promising, and was rewarded with the same negative result.\n\nA comment I always seemed to get back from Baudin with each short story, regardless of other notes of praise or criticism, was that I was taking too long to begin, dawdling at the opening, as though hesitant to get going and move forward into what I had in mind. It's a quirk of mine, perhaps a psychological flaw, that has lasted. I have cogitated over it in the closest secrecy, secrecy until now, as a quality that might credibly be described as anal retentive. From the manuscript of _Catch-22_ , after it had been accepted, I deleted of my own volition something like 50 of the first 250 pages without loss of incident. (The editor of these very words, Robert Gottlieb, who was also the editor of _Catch-22_ , snickers at the words \"of my own volition.\" Okay, it was at his suggestion that I did what I could to move into the middle much sooner.)\n\nIn the margin of one story of mine in college, \"Castle of Snow,\" Baudin asked why I simply didn't begin at the top of page four and instructed me to start there when I read it aloud to the class. It went well that way, to my grateful astonishment, and I began on my original page four when I typed a clean copy.\n\nMailed out by me to the \"Fiction Editor\" of the _Atlantic Monthly_ with that revision, it was rejected, but with a personal letter from a woman there who signed her name and seemed to be implying that with several small alterations it might be accepted if resubmitted. (I wish she had suggested one more, for the choice of Chaucer as the favorite author of an East European immigrant forced to sell his books jars the teeth now with its blatant improbability.) I made the changes, amending what was amiss, providing what was lacking (I welcomed text suggestions then, and I've welcomed them since), mailed the revised manuscript directly to her, and the story was accepted for publication as an \"Atlantic First.\" Coincidentally, in the issue of the magazine in which it finally appeared was a story by the equally young James Jones, also presented as an Atlantic First. (Neither of us was fortunate enough to win the semiannual bonus prize for the best of the Atlantic Firsts in that period.) I was paid $250. With a contact now at the magazine, it was not surprising that sooner or later I would place another work there, and I did. For this second one I received just $200, since it wasn't as long as the first one (and not as good, or even much good at all).\n\nI was a star in the class, and I would have been a celebrity on campus if the Washington Square College of New York University had a campus.\n\nMuch the same process was simultaneously going on between me and a benevolent editor at _Esquire_ magazine who finally signed his name George Wiswell in elaboration of the initials to the penciled notes of encouragement he had been adding to the formal rejection slips. Eventually he rejected a story regretfully, lamenting some defect in motivation or characterization and virtually pledging that he would recommend it for publication if that fault could be remedied. I made the attempt, the story was accepted, and for this one I received $300. Sometime later they took another one and paid me less, because the second one was shorter than the first (and not as good, or even much good at all). As I advanced in college, I acquired standards and learned to be more critical, and before I finished I also learned that, apart from their being mine, there wasn't much distinctive about all but two or three of the stories I was writing at this time. I now wanted to be new, in the way that I thought, as I discovered them, Nabokov, Celine, Faulkner, and Waugh were new\u2014not necessarily different, but new. Original.\n\nI mention as a public service the amounts I received in payment for these stories, for people generally have a misinformed notion of the scale of remuneration of successful American authors of fiction, and of freelance writers of any kind. In talking to groups of aspiring authors, I have frequently emphasized, particularly when the audience was made up of young people, that unless they had money, would inherit money, or would marry money, they were going to have to work at something else for quite a while, even if everything they wrote from that moment on found publication. Irwin Shaw would have agreed. And so would John Cheever. I used to boast that I could reel off the names of a dozen or more American authors of distinguished national reputation who weren't earning enough from their writing to ignore other sources of income and devote themselves wholly to their work, and probably I still can. Irwin Shaw could give in an instant the paltry total of dollars he had received for all the short stories he had ever published in _The New Yorker._\n\nA flattering consequence of my collegiate fame was that I was prevailed upon against my better judgment to submit a short story to the college literary magazine just getting started, and I did. For those who care, it was called \"Lot's Wife\" and was about\u2014oh, never mind that!\u2014the wife was icily indifferent and petty in regard to the victim of an auto accident, the man thoroughly sympathetic but no match for her.\n\nOf more interest is the unflattering aftermath of that charitable gesture, which was a patronizing review of the story in the college newspaper by a fellow student with literary ambitions who condescended to find it pallid, riddled with faults, lacking any compensating merit.\n\nThat should have steeled me against unkind critiques in the future, but nothing does.\n\nHowever, at just about that time I was ecstatic to learn that one of my stories, that same \"Castle of Snow,\" had been selected for inclusion in the Martha Foley annual anthology of best short stories.\n\n_That_ was ameliorating! There was no doubt I was on my way.\n\nAnd only twelve years later, after working two years at Penn State, one year at an advertising agency, a year at the Army-Air Force Post Exchange System (from which job I believe I was about to be fired), one year in the Advertising Department of the Remington Rand Corporation (which manufactured office systems and equipment and not, as I had feared, rifles), three years at _Time_ , one year at _Look_ , and three years at _McCall's_ , I finished my first novel and saw it published.\n\nAS I'VE SAID AND REPEAT, I wrote the first chapter in longhand one morning in 1953, hunched over my desk at the advertising agency (from ideas and words that had leaped into my mind only the night before); the chapter was published in the quarterly _New World Writing_ #7 in 1955 under the title \"Catch-18.\" (I received twenty-five dollars. That same issue carried a chapter from Jack Kerouac's _On the Road_ , under a pseudonym.) In 1957, while working at _Time_ , when the novel was only about half done, I received a contract for its publication from Bob Gottlieb at Simon & Schuster (providing for a guaranteed advance of $1,500, half on signing the contract, half on acceptance of the completed manuscript). The novel was completed in early 1961, when I was working for _McCall's_ , and published in October of that year under the title _Catch-22._ (What you may have heard was true: The number in the title was changed to skirt a conflict that same season with the Leon Uris novel _Mila 18.)_\n\nThe novel was not the instant success many people assume it was, not at all on the scale of such immediate national acclaim as greeted the first novels of Norman Mailer, James Jones, and others. It was not a best-seller and it won no prizes. There were reviews that were good, a good many that were mixed, and there were reviews that were bad, very bad, almost venomously spiteful, one might be tempted to say (and I am the one that might say it). In the Sunday _New York Times Book Review_ , for example, in a slender notice located so far back that the only people apt to notice it were those friends and relations awaiting it, the reviewer declared that the \"novel gasps for want of craft and sensibility,\" \"is repetitious and monotonous,\" \"fails,\" \"is an emotional hodgepodge,\" and is no novel; and in _The New Yorker_ , the critic decided that _Catch-22_ \"doesn't even seem to have been written; instead it gives the impression of having been shouted onto paper,\" \"what remains is a debris of sour jokes,\" and in the end \"Heller wallows in his own laughter and finally drowns in it.\" (I am tempted to drown in my own gloating laughter even as I set this down. What restrains me is the knowledge that the lashings still smart, even after so many years, and if I ever pretend to be a jolly good sport about them, as I am doing right now, I am only pretending.)\n\nOn a brighter side came generous statements of cheerful approval from a large range of prominent writers\u2014a gratifying and encouraging surprise. Gradually, as reviews continued to appear for weeks and even months after publication, requests for interviews began to arrive, for radio and television too (and all were accepted eagerly). After a first printing of about seven thousand copies, modest additional printings were distributed throughout the year as interest in the work continued and built. I believe there were fourteen or fifteen printings, and sales of the novel exceeded thirty thousand copies before the mass-market paperback edition was released.\n\nMy young daughter, Erica, and my younger son, Ted, were mildly baffled to find their father a sudden object of attraction and the recipient of compliments from people we hadn't known. Frequently they were titillated (in short time they found themselves driven to a studio by Tony Curtis himself in his Rolls Royce, to witness the filming of an episode of a popular TV series), but the effects were not always salutary. As the two of us were walking along the beach at Fire Island that first summer, my son of six belligerently thrust himself between me and a stranger who had come up to praise me and asserted stridently, \"I'm the one who wrote the book!\" (Probably he won't remember that, but I do.)\n\nFrom then on, I was something of a celebrity presence in the household, and that is never, or hardly ever, an entirely good thing. It would have been witless of me to attempt to ward off these flattering acknowledgments, and hypocritical to pretend I did anything other than lap them up.\n\nIn England, where the novel was published several months later, the history was different. By that time, the London literary world was already largely familiar with the work through word of mouth about the American edition and its growing reputation, and its appearance there was treated as something of an event. Best-seller lists were new and rudimentary in England back then, but _Catch-22_ was quickly at the head of them. News of this success abroad made its way back to New York and helped keep up the momentum of _Catch-22's_ expanding recognition. In the late summer of 1962, that same Sunday _New York Times Book Review_ reported that the underground book New Yorkers seemed to be talking about most was _Catch-22._ The novel was probably more heavily advertised that year than any other, but it was still, to the _Times_ , \"underground.\"\n\nAnd right after that came September and the paperback edition, and a surge in popular appeal that seemed to take the people at the publisher, Dell, completely by surprise, despite their elaborate promotion and distribution strategies. It seemed for a while that the people there could not fully bring themselves to believe the sales figures and that they would never catch up. Still, by the end of 1963 there had been eleven printings. _Catch_ was, I believe, the best-selling paperback book that year, with more than two million copies sold.\n\nSadly, those numbers did not translate into the wealth they might suggest. (The cover prices of these paperbacks was seventy-five cents, the average royalty was somewhere between 6 and 10 percent, and it was divided equally between the original publisher and the author\u2014netting me, I estimate, an unassuming three or four cents a copy.) It was not until the motion picture rights were sold about a year after publication that I felt confident enough, and substantial enough, to leave my job at _McCall's_ magazine, where I was in charge of a department of three others turning out advertising\/sales presentations, and then I did so cautiously on an unpaid leave of absence for one year. The money from the movie sale totaled $100,000, less 15 percent in commissions divided between agent and lawyer. At my request, payments would be spread over four years, allowing me more than sufficient time to throw myself wholeheartedly into my new career as a novelist and complete another work\u2014I thought.\n\nBut not until twelve years later, in the fall of 1974, a mere thirteen years after _Catch-22_ (four of those years spent working in the English department at the City College of New York and another teaching year divided between Yale and the University of Pennsylvania), was my second novel, _Something Happened_ , completed and readied for publication.\n\n_Something Happened_ was much more successful in its initial edition than _Catch-22_ (Irwin Shaw, who had read an advance copy, took me aside at a small gathering to tell me softly, \"I think it's a masterpiece.\" By now I feel free to say I agreed), and since its publication in 1974, I haven't had to work for money at anything I didn't want to work at or associate much with people I don't like. And I won't.\n\nI don't give presents anymore, either, and I no longer observe holidays. I hardly ever hurry.\n\n# 9  \nPsychiatry\n\nTHE FIRST TIME I met my father face-to-face to talk to him, so to speak, was in the office of a psychoanalyst sometime in 1979, when I was already fifty-six years old. My father had been dead for more than fifty of those years.\n\nFor as long as I could recall, I had been the periodic victim of a dream of escalating nightmarish dimensions. It would recur, unchanged, every now and then when I was sleeping at home in my own bed or away from home in hotel rooms, or, almost guaranteed, within the first few nights in strange beds in rented summer places. The dream was always the same in action and emotion. It would always unfold in the identical place, in that same bedroom in the same Coney Island apartment in which I had lived until I was past nineteen and left for the army. I would be in bed in the dream, sleeping, just as I was in bed sleeping when I was having the dream. Unexpectedly, a man would begin coming into the apartment, entering not criminally through the window in my room or through any other in the apartment, but at the front door. His face was in shadows. I would know right off that he was there, and in my dream I would come awake. I was frightened from the beginning and would grow increasingly frightened as I visualized him making his way toward me without hesitation, moving noiselessly past one room after the other along the hallway that ran through the apartment from the front entrance to the last room at the very end, in which I had been lying in my bed, and in fact still was, although in the dream it was always the bed I had slept in while I still lived there. My fear would quickly heighten to sheer horror as I watched myself sitting up in bed and saw the man draw closer and closer. In unbearable dread and panic, I was compelled to cry out for help, and the words would swell in my paralyzed throat and take form as gibberish, they would jam and choke me, I would strain and struggle with all my force, which wasn't much, to shriek out, pleading for safety and survival. And eventually, of course, before he was in my room, before I could distinguish any features of the face that was always cloaked in darkness, before whatever menacing outcome I'd been anticipating with such heart-stopping terror could take place, I would ride to my own rescue by coming awake\u2014as always happens with nightmares, Freud says somewhere.\n\nOr I would be nudged awake with displeasure and rebuked in bad temper by whoever was in the room with me and had been wrested from sleep by my unintelligible gasps and wordless groans.\n\nWhile recalling and then reminiscing out loud about this dream, with my psychiatrist (psychoanalyst) out of sight behind me as I lay on the couch in his office, I was stricken into silence for a moment by the stunning recognition that I had ceased having this dream, that I hadn't once suffered it for something like the two years past, not since I had entered into the patient-analyst relationship with him. He said nothing. I wondered why it had departed, wondered where that familiar, extremely harrowing, yet completely harmless dream of mine had gone, and as I turned my head to gaze at him, he saw me settle into one of those deliberate, stubborn quiets he'd learned by then meant that I was insisting on some kind of explanation.\n\n\"You don't need that dream anymore,\" he commented at last, with palpable reluctance. \"You have me here now.\"\n\nI grasped his interpretation with instant clarity and gratification, perceiving its rightness at once.\n\n\"Then why,\" I asked, and it may have seemed I was doubting him, \"was there fear?\"\n\n\"If that wish of yours were to come true,\" he answered, \"wouldn't you be afraid?\"\n\nI AM NOT GIVING his name, because I am relying on evocations, and he might not be pleased to see me make public reconstructions that are not accurate, or even some that are. At our second consultation, prior to our formally beginning therapy, he appeared somewhat put out when I responded negatively to his guess that in the interval I had reviewed his credentials. The idea of doing so hadn't crossed my mind; I wouldn't have known how, and I would have felt like a sneak if I had. (On the other hand, he took for granted that I had done so and might have judged me neurotic for _not_ doing so.) He was, I subsequently found out, though younger than I, a man of distinguished reputation in his field, greatly respected in New York and elsewhere, and he seemed to want me to know that. He was familiar with my reputation\u2014he was one of those readers I've heard praise _Catch-22_ for having had, they felt, a wholesome impact on their thinking when young\u2014so we started out with some kind of equivalence in mutual regard, and it didn't decline.\n\nAs fully as I could, I filled him in on everything I felt relevant, doing that with what I thought was commendable objectivity. My language probably was laced with technical terms standard in psychology, because that's the way I am (I suppose there was at least a little bit of showing off). I had read a lot of Freud by then and also had read much about him, and, like all imaginative Americans of my generation who knew about him, had been mesmerized (a term technically medical in etymology) by the egocentric implications and promises of psychoanalysis. In the course of my program for therapy, which continued with sporadic interruptions into a third year, I confessed willingly to everything I could remember and guessed at everything I couldn't\u2014well, almost everything. (I didn't tell my analyst that when I was young and afraid that my hair would wave or curl, I would sometimes go to sleep wearing one of my sister's hair nets, or that one time when my eyes felt sore\u2014they often still do\u2014I conjured up, entirely on my own, the reasonable notion of alleviating the irritation with a few drops of olive oil in each eye for lubrication, and consequently saw the world through a blur for the rest of the week. There were a couple of other secrets on that mortifying infantile plane which I wouldn't want him to know\u2014or you, either.)\n\nI was flattered and quick to agree when he said that any therapy less than analysis would be kid stuff for me. This was in the dark ages before Prozac and other mood elevators and stabilizers were at hand and before psychoanalysis, and Freud himself, had coursed inevitably into the buffeting gales of criticism, denial, and opposition by which they are mauled today.\n\nHe expressed the apprehension that I might exhibit a tendency to \"intellectualize\" and thereby obstruct the process. I told him not to worry about that, although, if pressed, I would have had to reveal that I wasn't really sure what either one of us was talking about.\n\nWe decided on four sessions weekly when possible; it often was not possible. There were the ordinary disruptions caused by things such as colds and intestinal flu. More unusual and, in time, more tacitly amusing to both of us, I think, was that frequently he and I would each be tempted and succumb to attractive invitations to travel. He went once to China, I went once to a writers' conference at Berkeley, and we both acquiesced to frequent requests to speak at universities and such. Also, I was usually away for the whole summer with my wife, no matter the intermittent marital discord\u2014he would be away in August, anyway\u2014and I was not going to give up my July out of the city merely to preserve my sanity or attain the peace of mind I was paying for.\n\nI told him frankly that among my motives for coming to see him (truthfully, I could think of no other real reason) was the tactical wish to have a psychiatric medical authority of my own to quote in comeback during domestic arguments\u2014even to misquote, by attributing to him statements that had not been made. He laughed and was not surprised.\n\nHe wanted me to understand that he could be of no help to me with my current emotional problems, a demurral I quickly professed to comprehend. He did believe, however, that a program of analysis might prove of some prophylactic value in warding off that late-life depression that eventually creeps up on so many of the aging and cloistered.\n\nHe was mistaken on that first point. He helped me enormously in the matter of day-to-day embroilments at home and elsewhere by being someone impartial and intelligent I could talk to with absolute freedom and who could point out obvious aspects and approaches in each crisis that I could not rationally spot for myself.\n\nAs for warding off potential depression, well, because of him or not, here I am in late life, and I'm no more depressed, despondent, dour, morose, cynical, bitter, drowsy, lonely, angry, and all the rest than I've been all along. If I'm gripped at times by the somber realization that I have nothing to do that I would enjoy doing or that not much merry is going on, it's because I don't and there isn't. I feel in pretty good shape as long as I have work I want to do. I know things are going well for me if my first thoughts upon waking up each day are related to what I'm writing. Today, my frame of mind is very good, for I awoke this morning with the idea of putting in right here these two sentences I am putting in. It's when I feel I can't find anything I want to do that I'm inclined to sleep a lot and to imagine I'm being infected by the brooding and miasmic lethargy of what the French call a _cafard_ and we used to call \"the blues.\" It grows harder and harder to meet new people you'd like to become close friends with (and the odds are great that you're going to find that out).\n\nHe bound me to this: I was not to make fundamental changes in my life once we began\u2014not in my marriage, my work, or other areas\u2014without discussion with him. So obvious was the reasoning underlying this condition that I agreed without hesitation.\n\nAnd by the end of the summer of 1981, I broke that promise over and over without contrition and without even recognizing I was doing so. I changed accountants, I changed book publishers and instituted a lawsuit against one of them, I left my literary agent, I changed lawyers and then changed lawyers again, I moved out of the marital apartment not once but twice\u2014once in summer, when he was away, and once, this time permanently, during Christmas, when he also was away\u2014and finally, perhaps as a grand and auspicious climax, I unilaterally and abruptly broke off my treatments with him.\n\nThat sudden termination followed a disappointing return to the city after a summer away alone, half in Aspen, where I soon made friends, and half in Santa Fe, where I already had some, when I lost all patience and felt myself running out of money. Expenses were building, income was not. A lawyer had counseled me to just relax all summer and assured me that all disagreements relating to the divorce would be peacefully settled by the time I returned. None was. And I had books to finish as well.\n\nAnd in mid-December of that year I was felled by a rare, paralyzing neurological disease called Guillain-Barr\u00e9 syndrome, whose etiology remains mysterious, and I was pretty much out of action for the next nine months. Stress? Maybe.\n\nFrom the beginning of the analysis, I tried my best to be a very good patient, one effortlessly surpassing the average, dreaming the dreams I was supposed to, retrieving the memories I guessed he wanted me to retrieve, unlocking all the unmentionable buried wishes I might have surreptitiously repressed, in order thereby to uncover the sources of the doubts, fears, drives, and inhibitions with which I was in blind conflict (although I might not know it). But I couldn't get far. My theory now about psychoanalytical theory is that corrective therapy demands unwavering concentration by a patient of intelligence with a clear and untroubled head who is not in need of it. My head was a swarming fun house of lawsuits, quarrels, work, and too many other distracting entanglements to count. Every day, something new might take dominion in my mind, if not from life then in the concentrated ruminations for my writing. While searching for myself as a fatherless Coney Island child, I had one new novel, _Good as Gold_ , published, and another, _God Knows_ , was almost halfway completed before I was through. And of course we talked about those and my two previous novels, about their content and what they might reveal about me, and about the little dramas playing out continually around each of them. (In one appalling mental lapse, I failed to notice that the surname of the reviewer of _Good as Gold_ in the Sunday _New York Times_ \u2014a good review, but not a rave\u2014was the same as that of my analyst, even to the deviant spelling. They were distant relations, it turned out, but that had no effect on either the book review or the extent of my cure.)\n\nI would imagine that in my eagerness to make an excellent impression as a patient, I was not alone among male subjects in a sophisticated hurry to plead guilty to such likely flaws as an Oedipus complex, castration fears, impotence fears, performance fears, ill will, ambivalent emotions toward everyone close to me, latent homosexuality, rage, shame, lustful thoughts, unconscious hatreds and unaccountable losses of confidence, vague perceptions of confrontational inadequacy and abstract dangers, and disguised, subterranean volcanoes of murderous aggression. Had I known then of narcissism as a specific pathology, I might have thrown that in, too. All that serious stuff was easy. It was the simple, unknown stuff that was hard and that eventually proved unconquerable: to go beyond facile academic logic and probe deep into memory for an understanding of feelings and events that might not even be there or ever have occurred, not even in fantasies.\n\nI was blocked often (or thought I was) and freely confessed to that failing even before I could be charged with it. \"Resistance\" was another of the terms I thought to volunteer. (And I'll freely confess right here that the more than ordinary difficulties I am having with these passages might be arising afresh from \"resistance\"\u2014from what some might infer in this place as a psychological block and in other sections of this book dismiss as mere writer's block.)\n\nI have always been a fertile dreamer. Now I was giving value to each dream as a treasure of significance. I was intrigued by the way my dreams began to center on our sessions, even to the physical location of his office, and on what I took to be the elusive essence of my monologues. I was beguiled by the frequency with which such details as the number on his office door began appearing in different dream contexts and, when awake, by the cunning and cute lapses in memory, the endearing tricks of the mind that seemed to fit perfectly into Freudian theory. The most dramatic of these occurred on the last session of one season. I was coasting along in the kind of voluble free-association we both believed in when he interrupted brusquely to demand, \"Don't you know that you were twenty minutes late today?\"\n\nNo, I had not known.\n\nDuring one of the periods of separation preceding my divorce when I was living alone in a sublet furnished apartment, I intrepidly flew off for an unlikely weekend rendezvous, a blind date with a woman I hadn't met or known about before (my most dangerous mission, marveled my friends) and whom nobody I knew had heard of either. (The farcical means by which this unconventional tryst chanced to come about might appear in a sequel, should I ever decide to write one\u2014and I probably never will.) Having arrived, I was at first afflicted by an inability to function sexually, I had to confess to him awkwardly when we resumed on my return (not the only time that had happened to me in my lifetime, I was constrained to admit to him\u2014and to you).\n\n\"I wished you were there with me,\" I said as a joke.\n\n\"I was,\" he said laconically.\n\n\"Then why didn't you help?\" I said.\n\n\"You wanted me to help you do something you didn't really want to do?\" he demanded.\n\nFrom that exchange came much wisdom about the thousand and one other things I often thought I wanted to do but truly preferred not to, and I ceased my regretful wishful thinking about scores of them. I'd never really wanted to live in a house in Tuscany or the French Riviera or have Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe in love with me, and I didn't really covet for myself the bolder public life lived by Norman Mailer, although there was much there to envy. People with choices generally do what they want to do and have no real choice but to be what they already are, and I think even my former mentor would agree. I don't actually want to go to the White House for dinner or receive an award of some kind from whichever transient happens to be living there, although I _would_ like to get my hands on a Nobel Prize or two.\n\nGod knows I deserve it.\n\nOur dialogues were not always so one-sided. From me he first learned the word _catamite._ I was surprised that he didn't know it and he was surprised that I did. I'd found it first long before in a book on forensic medicine that had somehow fallen into my hands in my tent overseas and had taken for granted that it was a technical medical term known universally. And from me came a comment about trying to change neurotic behavior which brought a quick guffaw from him. \"It's like asking a hunchback to stand up straight,\" I said.\n\nHe liked that one and said he might use it often. I gave him license, since that clever phrase had originated with a friend, Speed Vogel, of whom and with whom I have elsewhere written. _(No Laughing Matter_ , if you're genuinely interested.)\n\nThen there were the dreams.\n\nOn days we were scheduled, I usually awoke in a state of high expectancy, especially if I came alive with a sumptuous dream, outlining to myself what purportedly would be spontaneous later, and it dawns on me now that the subject matter of the analysis had in large part become the analysis itself.\n\n\"Oh, boy! Have I got a dream for you!\" I might say to myself proudly, when I awoke from one with a complete plot, a story line fraught with apparent meaning and latent meaning and replete with the right kind of symbols\u2014symbols of sex and death anyone could recognize: steeples, purses, tearful partings. There was a week in which I heard three jokes all dealing with a shipwrecked man releasing a female genie from a bottle and being granted a wish that was sexual and had been misunderstood. While asleep, I conjured up a fourth that was as good as the others for a joke that was conjured up while asleep. Naturally, I began our day's session with that. Fortunately, he hadn't heard any of the others, and I was able to dispose of much of my fifty minutes with jokes and laughter before I settled down to whatever was that day's most disturbing problem, one that, while perhaps not a choice lode for self-discovery, was uppermost in my mind and couldn't possibly be avoided if I was going to express myself with candor, either by free-associating or in blunt complaint and appeal. (I remember two of the jokes\u2014one involved a large man with a little head walking into a bar, the other a man walking into a bar with a smirking ten-inch mannequin perched on his shoulder. I've forgotten the third one and have no memory of the one I dreamed, either because it wasn't as comical as we thought or because I am again prey to an unconscious and deliberate memory lapse.)\n\nTHERE IS A RELUCTANCE to proceed, and it is formidable. It is more than a writer's block. I had forgotten completely, in another memory lapse, that the core of this chapter was to be not my escapades in psychoanalysis at the time of the breakup of my marriage but the death of my father when I was a small boy and the traumatic effects, as all assume, it must certainly have exercised in shaping me. (Rich material, certainly, for the penultimate chapter, and I'm glad I'll never have to review this book\u2014or even write the jacket copy for a book with a passage about how difficult it was to write this passage.) There is a lack of enthusiasm for racing ahead, most rare for me this close to the ending of a book, and it is more likely due to the tender subject matter than to boredom or fatigue or any two-or three-day virus.\n\nNearly twenty-five years earlier, I'd had my one other personal adventure with psychological investigation, and I talked about that with the psychiatrist often and vividly. Certain impressions left from that encounter have remained ineradicable. In 1958, when I was thirty-five and leaving a job at one magazine for a better one at _McCall's_ magazine as head of a small department ancillary to advertising, industrial psychology was much in vogue\u2014at least at McCall's Corporation. I was required to submit to a battery of tests for psychological evaluation before my new appointment could be confirmed. The examinations took up most of one day and perhaps the better part of another and were conducted in mid-Manhattan in the offices of a partnership formed by two professors on the faculty of Columbia University. The procedures were congenial. Most of the tests were new to me, and a couple of them I hadn't heard of before, such as sentence completion, which was both perplexing to me in the range of theoretical possibilities of interpretation and amusing as a guessing game, and the Thematic Apperception Test, the TAT, which, for me anyway, was at times especially challenging and at other times profoundly affecting. The Rorschach test was an immediate catalyst, and I pricked up my senses with the alertness and gusto of, as they say, a cavalry horse at the first notes of the bugle when I saw it coming and we were about to begin.\n\nI charged into the first card. And from then on I talked and talked endlessly about the assorted forces I could easily imagine at work in the individual inkblots in the succession of cards that followed, offering no original responses about any, I'm sure, but dissertating on each until out of breath and the examiner gave evidence of restlessness and we turned to the next. I went gabbing and gabbing away\u2014blithely, inexhaustibly\u2014until I collided with card number 4 or 5, the first of the ink blots in color, and was at once catapulted into a state of startled confusion and silence. My loquacity was annihilated. I was numb. That first color card is labeled the \"color shock\" card, I learned speedily from a technical book I obtained as soon as I could at the local library, and, for me at least, the card was named fittingly. (For others, too, I must conclude, or where would that title have come from?)\n\nFrom that point on I proceeded gingerly, far less sure of myself. It wasn't long before then that I had at last taken the trouble to learn from my sister the cause of my father's death. Applying for my first life insurance policy\u2014I had my wife and two children\u2014I drew a blank when I came to the request on the insurance application for the cause of his death. I was jolted with surprise, and disappointed in myself, too, for I divined that the reason I didn't know how he had died was that I had never wanted to find out. The cause of death, as I've said, was internal bleeding following surgery for a stomach ulcer, and I was mistaken earlier when I assumed he had been a ward patient at Coney Island Hospital. I learned just recently from Sylvia that the hospital was Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, a long, long ride by subway from Coney Island, and it fell upon Sylvia, then just thirteen, to escort my mother to the hospital when they received word of my father's death. One takes the BMT express subway to its final stop at Times Square and then switches to a line of the IRT. But two IRT lines are there: One continues up through Manhattan to the station stop for the hospital; the other diverges into the Bronx and ends somewhere before the border of Westchester County, which is outside the city. Sylvia had never been that far from home. It was her macabre luck to choose the wrong line, and the mournful subway journey of bereaved mother and teenage daughter to the hospital for the certification of death took two hours longer than it should have.\n\nThe predominant color on those Rorschach inkblots that do have color is, I remember (or think I remember), red, in splotches of different densities and shapes. And on that first card, after I recovered from my shock, and on the color cards unveiled subsequently, I could truly see only blood, blood, and amputated or excised bodily organs, human organs. Here and there when faced with green I tried to fake a flower or a fruit, but my heart wasn't in it, and my soul couldn't follow through. So self-conscious and embarrassed was I by the consistency of my gruesome replies that I felt forced to call attention, with a nervous laugh, to my awareness of their morbid uniformity. (Just as with the black-and-white blots, I had a lesser dilemma with genital symbols: I didn't want the examiner to think I feared seeing any; I didn't want him to think I was seeing too many.)\n\nAfter the rite of taking the tests, there was an extended conversational interview. The mood was relaxed. In the course of discussion, I naturally mentioned that I was about halfway through writing a novel for which I already had been given a publishing contract. What was it about? That question still makes me squirm (and I'm still tremendously glad I never had to write a review of _Catch-22_ , either\u2014or its jacket copy). It was set toward the end of World War II\u2014I could be straightforward about that much\u2014and concerned men in an American bomber group on an island off the coast of Italy. And\u2014I swear!\u2014it was only then, in trying to talk about it coherently, that I realized for the first time how extensively I was focusing on the grim details of human mortality, on disease, accidents, grotesque mutilations. I was again awash in the reds and pinks of the Rorschach color cards, in blood, in the deaths of such characters as Kid Sampson and Snowden and even with my colorless Soldier in White. Although I had from the start, from the second chapter on, been dutifully following a disciplined outline, I hadn't perceived till then how much material of a gory nature was embodied in its fulfillment. There was certainly an awful lot for a novel that has since been described by many as among the funniest they've read.\n\nIt has struck me since\u2014it couldn't have done so then\u2014that in _Catch-22_ and in all my subsequent novels, and also in my one play, the resolution at the end of what narrative there is evolves from the death of someone in the chapter just before, and it is always the death of someone other than the main character. In _Catch-22_ , the death of Snowden, who has perished four hundred pages earlier\u2014in fact, before the present action of the novel has even begun\u2014is written about fully only in the chapter before the final one. And in my most recent novel, _Closing Time_ , it is the death of Lew as narrated by his wife that precedes the surrealistic catastrophes at the climax, though Yossarian goes on living. And even in the novel before that one, _Picture This_ , by which time I'd grown cautiously aware of that undeviating pattern and tried to make an effort to break it, the death of Socrates in the _Crito_ as related formally by Plato (to me in translation, of course) is almost against my will the precursor of the final few pages. And\u2014lo and behold\u2014here I am, much to my surprise, doing exactly the same thing with this book! I still haven't broken the pattern. I don't know why this should be so\u2014it reflects no aesthetic or philosophical principle. I would speculate that the individual personality, no matter how protean in creativity, has a character all its own and can construct flexibly only within the parameters of its own nature. The novels of other writers, too, like the mature compositions of classical composers, tend to be more alike than we wish to own.\n\nI've come to recognize something else. Where I stress tender relationships, they are usually most tender between a father and a child, as in _Something Happened_ , and also in _God Knows_ , where King David's most wrenching recollections are of the death of his son Absalom and of the newborn child who is the result of his transgression with Bathsheba.\n\nThe Thematic Apperception Test for the job at _McCall's_ provided me with one indelible prototype that still touches me poignantly whenever it comes to mind. In the TAT, one is asked to comment subjectively about simple drawings that are objectively neutral, to project onto the picture a personal vision of what is taking place, to create a text. It was not that easy, and I would bet that there are many people who at times can't bring themselves to fantasize anything at all. The picture I remember, and it's the lone one I recall, is still with me, together with the emotions it aroused at the time, indissolubly joined.\n\nA woman with white hair is in a room with a grown youth with dark hair. That's all. But to me it was a scene of pain, of miserable, unwanted separation. There are no emotions on the faces pictured in the drawing, but I could sense the sadness of a mother and a son. The boy is going away and they are speechless with sorrow. Another person looking at that same drawing, I've since realized, could easily be projecting a scene of triumph and elation\u2014could imagine, for instance, that a boy away from home at college finds pleasant lodgings with a woman who is happy to have him. But I didn't. (I could venture now that the absence of a father in the picture could be the key to my response to the scene, but I didn't think of that then and I would once more be casting about for a textbook psychoanalytical explanation for the grimness I imposed on the scene, and still do. Certainly, in the picture there was no father, only the mother\u2014or rather just a woman.)\n\nI didn't know him. He isn't there. I would not recognize him. I have only a handful of impressions of him\u2014there is only one snapshot, a photograph in which he is younger than I am now but will always seem older\u2014and the authenticity of a couple of my memories is questionable. Allowed in the driver's seat of an auto of his or his bakery delivery van I am encouraged to press the automatic starter and pretend I'm driving at each grinding lurch. He drives me to the Coney Island Hospital to have my tonsils removed. (And that wasn't fun. Lying there alone afterward, I would have given my life for a drink of water to assuage the maddening thirst.) He is playing with me on the sidewalk with an airplane with a wind-up, rubber-band propeller he has bought for me, when Lee comes walking home from the trolley stop after his runaway summer as a hobo, and there is a joyful reunion. (\"When you come from California,\" my mother would repeat for years afterward, \"you've _got_ to take a bath.\") Sleeping in the same bedroom with my mother and father and at least one time being taken into bed with them\u2014make what you will out of that, but I don't doubt it's true. He commands me back from an open window when he spies me making my way out it toward the fire escape. On the day of his funeral, I wouldn't get in the car for the trip to the funeral parlor or the cemetery, and when older boys on the block came after me, I turned the chase into a game.\n\nSylvia was not at ease answering questions about our father, and I didn't try to extract much. She remembers sitting by the window at night doing her homework by the lamplight from outside, but she doesn't attribute the absence of lighting indoors to any cruel stinginess\u2014none of the families we knew liked the electric company\u2014and after all of us had been driven to wear eyeglasses, she no longer blamed anyone for her defective eyesight. She retains a memory of herself and my mother in the terrible week of mourning that followed the funeral. It was summer and hot. Someone had dressed her, a child of thirteen, in black garments, but my mother advised her to change into something lighter and go outside in the street, where it might be cooler. (I wasn't around for that. I don't know where I was that week, but I doubt it was there. I would remember. In almost three years of therapy I could get so far and no farther.) He was always good to me, Sylvia says\u2014all of them were. His first wife was ill and died and not much later he was ill, too, and he was not always kind to Lee. The youngest in a family of several boys who had emigrated from Eastern Europe to the New York area, he was the least prosperous and the most helpful and cooperative, and was that way with my mother's relatives, too.\n\nLee talked about him to me one time only and with a mixture of deep and conflicting emotions. His eyes were misty and he kept trying to smile. That conversation took place under unhappy circumstances. In New York from West Palm Beach on a family visit, his wife, Perlie, was troubled by shoulder pain and asked us\u2014me and my first wife, Shirley\u2014to recommend a physician, preferably an orthopedic specialist. The doctor she found took X rays and found advanced lung cancer. During the first program of chemotherapy at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, Lee and I had dinner alone a few nights in succession at an Italian restaurant just down the block from my apartment\u2014Tony's, on West 79th Street. It was the most time we had ever spent alone together and the longest we'd ever talked. Both of us drank whiskey.\n\nHe wouldn't acknowledge himself as a runaway from home that long-ago summer. He had only gone to New Jersey to apply for a job, and when it was clear he wouldn't get it, he had simply decided on the spot to keep going west. He sent postcards home every week to let the family know he was well. His most aching childhood recollection was of riding beside my father winter mornings in a horse-drawn delivery van in upper Manhattan, when they lived there before I was born. On icy uphill streets, my father would have to use the whip on the horse, and people on the street would berate them both for their cruelty to the animal. My father was a good and kind man, Lee said, although he would use his belt to beat Lee for any kind of misbehavior. That sounded brutal to me. \"There were lots of Jewish criminals around and he didn't want me to turn out bad.\" Then he did have a good reason, I said in a conciliatory tone. \"Sure. But I was just a little kid. How bad could I have been to deserve that?\" Then he wasn't always so good and gentle, was he? \"He was always very good. His wife was sick and died and he was sick, too.\"\n\nLee did not turn out bad. None of us did. At the age of eighty-four, a widower, he died on the living-room floor of his small condominium in West Palm Beach in a way we would all choose to go, if we were eighty-four and could force ourselves to take leave of life then. Back from a vacation cruise with a group of men and women he'd grown friendly with, he died instantly from a heart attack in the midst of optimistically planning things for the immediate future: He had borrowed some books from the local library that day and had just returned from the supermarket with some staples with which to restock his kitchen.\n\nOne more report, from an uncle by marriage in my first wife's family, who'd been a young boy on the block with us when my father was still alive. He described my father to me as cheerful, jolly, friendly, helpful\u2014and so here I am again, as I mentioned earlier, with another book whose penultimate chapter deals with death, the death of someone other than the principal character in it.\n\nTHE LAST TIME I was with my father or had anything to do with him was more than sixty-five years ago, on the day he was buried in a cemetery somewhere in Long Island or New Jersey. Sylvia might remember where but would be uncomfortable if I asked her, and knowing where would make no difference anyway. Until now I haven't even thought of asking. I've never grappled much with the idea of trying to find out more about him. I prefer not to. I still prefer not to. And knowing more would make no difference now, either. I know him by his absence. Until just now, if I thought about the day of his funeral at all, I was disposed to remember it as one of the more rewarding in my young life. I sat waiting placidly on a stone bench on a stone patio with a railing, just outside the main office at the entrance to the cemetery grounds. It was summer, I had been dressed neatly, and there was sunshine. People milling about fussed over me. Some handed me coins\u2014dimes, an occasional quarter. My Aunt Esther gave me a whole dollar. I felt rich.\n\n# 10  \nDanny the Bull\n\nDANNY THE BULL murdered his mother.\n\nYou couldn't ask for a better opening line than that one for a final chapter, could you?\n\nIt had something to do with heroin, money for heroin. Either she gave him money, five dollars for a fix, or she didn't, or she had been doing both, giving him when she had it and he demanded it, denying him when she didn't. Not like his father, Max the Barber, who would make a contemptuous, bitter show of disavowal whenever his son came abjectly into the barber shop to implore, who was an awful man (in the judgment of my friend Marvin Winkler, who knew them better than I), a kind of insolent \"wise guy,\" abrasive with unfunny remarks. I know the type, and so do you. His father would make sarcastic fun of Danny before others in the barber shop, renouncing him as \"my son, the junkie,\" and boasting with smug pride that he would not give him a dime.\n\nDanny the Bull's mother and father lived apart; they were no longer married. He lived with his mother down around West 23rd Street, near the big yellow-brick synagogue and the big red-brick Catholic church, where the Jewish sector merged with the Italian. Max the Barber is still the only man I've heard of living in Coney Island at that time who was divorced. He had married again. His second wife was a local woman who also had been married earlier and who brought into this marriage children of her own with the last name of Glickman. In due course, Max the Barber's stepson, Raymie Glickman, fell dead in the street from an overdose of heroin. And Leona, Raymie's wife, also died of a heroin overdose. Max the Barber, the father of Danny the Bull, though a rasping, unfunny wise guy, did have cause for discontent.\n\nSoon after the war, with the social clubs finished and school days past, our gathering places were reduced to a very few for those still living in the Island and for those many more who had moved elsewhere but returned regularly for visits with family and friends. I was already in the city and would travel down from Manhattan.\n\nWe were young adults now. On Mermaid Avenue near Happy's Luncheonette was the popular daytime hangout for males\u2014the poolroom belonging to Sammy the Pig. There we could hobnob with lanky Pinya, a rabbi's son with the mien of a hungry friar who was our local bookmaker; with Smokey Bleeker, a well-built, friendly sort of tough guy from an older generation\u2014he was in his thirties; and with Sammy the Pig himself, short and stubby in a porcine way, who didn't gab much and wasn't much fun. In the rear of the poolroom near a large, chalk-lined blackboard mounted to the side was a Western Union ticker-tape machine that typed out up-to-the-minute data on the progress of sporting events nationwide. In season came the inning-by-inning progress of all major-league baseball games. Streetwise sophisticates understood that an unusual lag in a ticker report usually indicated something happening in that half inning of the game; new bets might be made in the delay, odds might change. Bewildering to me still is how some of the guys there who had barely staggered through arithmetic classes for their elementary-school diplomas could now calculate fractional odds and multiple payoffs on parlays with a dazzling rapidity and exactitude that left very little room for betterment by even the swiftest of today's digital computers.\n\nOne of these savants had been a fellow student on my own grade-school level at P.S. 188 with the last name Silverman. For reasons known only to himself, he had changed his name to Ershky Jones, and we now called him that. To most of us, the game of checkers was a matter of haphazard luck. But Ershky saw much more than that; somehow he had penetrated to essentials. He won every time against every player, with none of us ever able to spot the things he saw that we didn't.\n\nHe could also run up walls. He would run a few feet up the perpendicular walls of apartment houses and rooms, turn, and come back down. He would practice running up walls and down while conversing cynically about things like baseball, politics, and the antiunion and anti-Democratic Party biases of the Hearst newspapers and the New York _Daily News._ He was better than anyone else we knew at running up walls. None of the rest of us had the will to try it more than once.\n\nSmokey Bleeker was almost always around, too, at Happy's Luncheonette or in Sammy the Pig's poolroom, grinning, joking, affable, and crassly unschooled in speech, even in comparison to the Brooklyn articulations of Ershky Jones and me. Loose-limbed, muscular, and agile, Smokey always had coarse, black stubble shadowing his countenance, yet always looked as though he had recently shaved. He had been brought up someplace funny and far away and had once worked on a farm\u2014in Pennsylvania, Poland, or both. By the time I met him he had been in prison and had fought in the prize ring. He and another older neighborhood hard guy named Izzy Nish, this one wiry, had formerly buddied around together in a number of shady, daring ventures, one of which had brought a carload or two of equally dauntless Italians with knives charging down upon them in some other part of Brooklyn. Izzy Nish managed to flee, leaving Smokey behind to be carved up in a doorway. He had narrowly survived. Now the two did not speak and took care not to cross paths. They favored different poolrooms. Smokey's face was gashed with scars, and a circular part of the top of his nose had been sliced out into a hollow. That might be the explanation for his perpetual, neat stubble of beard.\n\nOne year Smokey Bleeker enjoyed a season of celebrity because he had a hand, a hand with fingers clenched into a fist, in the genesis of a black eye of a luminous immensity unlike any that people around Happy's or Sammy the Pig's had ever conceived possible before. The black eye was not sported by Smokey himself, naturally, but by a burly fellow of my own generation with a short, thick neck who had been nicknamed\u2014perfectly, and not by me\u2014Quasimodo. Quasi (we sounded the opening consonant like a k rather than a _kw)_ was a sullen person quick to take offense and accustomed to having his own way. He generally did have his own way, for most of us kept out of his way. After once catching sight of his black eye, we could easily understand why a black eye is traditionally known as a \"shiner.\" Quasi's shiner was of a solar brilliance, an injury mending itself over time in prismatic hues from purple to blue to green to yellow to tangerine, and it glowed like a beacon and seemed to polish the ground in front of him as he walked. People (people like me, who deliberately loitered on Happy's corner in hopes of glimpsing for the first time the shiner I'd already heard of) came there, came to Coney Island, just to see the fabled shiner of Quasi's with their own eyes. Some talk about it still, as I'm doing now, and Marvin Winkler does, too.\n\nThat gargantuan black eye came into being as the immediate aftermath of a brief sidewalk fistfight outside the poolroom between Quasi and Smokey Bleeker. I don't have all the details of the provocation. They had something to do with Quasimodo's walking up to where Smokey was seated listening to the radio at the front of the poolroom and changing the station without a word for permission or apology. Smokey, offended, protested that Quasi's action was \"rude.\" (Smokey's employment of that word _rude_ was an astounding incongruity for more than one reason, but people on the spot swore it was the one he spoke.) Quasimodo invited him to step outside to settle the dispute if there was objection. Smokey stepped. Outside the poolroom, Quasi, overlooking Smokey's experience in the prize ring, ducked right down to bull forward and seize him around the waist, lift him, and throw or wrestle him to the ground. Smokey, remembering he'd been a boxer and impervious to physical fear, unleashed an uppercut timed to perfection as Quasi's head came down, and that was the beginning and the end of the fisticuffs.\n\nThe ambulance from Coney Island Hospital pulled up outside Sammy the Pig's poolroom just in time to save Quasimodo from suffocating, for the gigantic swelling around his nose and mouth was choking his windpipe off from the rest of him.\n\nOf Izzy Nish, Smokey's erstwhile confederate in a miscellany of misdeeds that ultimately landed Smokey in the hospital with knife wounds and perhaps also in prison, I know less. He was not one to hang around with nothing to do and was not inclined to exchange pleasantries with younger kids like me. He was married to the sister of a Coney Island friend by the time he was pointed out to me and probably was employed on a standard work schedule. My occasional random sightings of Izzy Nish all occurred in our other Coney Island poolroom, Weepy's, where a largely different group passed the hours at different times of the day. His taut, tawny-colored face also was marked with a scar or two, but what charisma he possessed lay in his pool playing. He was superb. An expert pocket-billiards player is a miracle to behold to someone incapable like me, and Izzy Nish was among the best I've ever watched. Shooting pool, he was a stolid avatar of that self-possessed, mute, concentrated proficiency that is second nature to the shark and mystifying testimony to the maze of intricate nuances inherent in so pacific a competition. For those who don't know, foresight in billiards directs the player not to the billiard ball that is safest to sink but to the one that will leave him and the white cue ball in the best position to sink the next, and the next, and the next. And finally the last, which should be left in a position enabling you to sink it forcefully at the end of a rack while enabling you to break apart the new rack with your cue ball in the same shot, and thereby continue. It was like chamber music watching Izzy move smoothly and wordlessly through one rack of billiard balls, two racks, and sometimes three.\n\nWeepy himself, Murray by name, the owner of this poolroom, was a family man with daughters. Unlike Sammy's, Weepy's had no bookmaker and no ticker machine. There were salami sandwiches on a roll for a nickel each and chocolate-flavored drinks in cold bottles. Women were welcome at Weepy's but were rarely present.\n\nBlackie the Pinochle Player, in a more retiring way, was another local personality. He was a champ at cards, though not at picking horses. I'd laid eyes on him only a few times, never at play, but I'd heard, more than once, the anecdotal account of one tormenting game he'd played at high stakes and the renowned remark he'd made immediately after it. When the bidding was over and he was about to begin play, he calculated with distress that he had drastically overbid. In pinochle, unlike bridge, the player in command has no partner and doesn't play with the support of a dummy hand; he faces two opponents united against him. Blackie, caught between folding the hand and paying up or playing the hand and paying double if he lost (quadruple, for his trump would have had to be spades), reckoned despondently that he needed to take every one of the fifteen tricks, every point left in the deck, to make his bid. He chose to play. He played slowly, and slowly he made all the tricks. Closing in toward the end, when he could guess with assurance where the rest of the cards lay and realized that he was certain to make the hand, his muscles went slack and he drooped with the strain. Looking down with an unhappy sigh and shaking his head with dismay, as though he had lost, not won, he moaned out loud:\n\n\"I played the game all wrong.\"\n\nHAPPY'S LUNCHEONETTE, on Mermaid Avenue a few blocks from Weepy's poolroom, was a lively, clean, well-lighted place, a safe and convenient setting in which to meet with our wives if it was that kind of evening or to hang around in with just the fellows. There were no longer many other spots. It opened early and went on serving very late. Lounging around doing nothing before we went where we were going or after we had been, we could easily put away as a snack a tuna sandwich or two on white toast with a leaf of lettuce inside and a slender length of pickle alongside. Before the war, tuna salad hadn't been heard of. Now a simple tuna sandwich went down as easily as a potato chip or a salted peanut. I told you we liked to eat, all of us, and those of us I still claim as friends still do. We've never regretted a mouthful. For a true hunger, Happy's pork chops were good, and his hamburgers, too. Our drinks of preference were chocolate egg creams or malted milkshakes of any flavor, or in winter a hot chocolate. A taste for coffee takes time to mature.\n\nHappy's, together with the street corner outside, was also a clustering spot for the neighborhood's many surreptitious \"vipers,\" a commissary of sorts where the dedicated marijuana smokers could buy and sell and borrow and swap, and a couple of years later on, when they evolved as a subculture, for the junkies to drift into and linger idly in their auras of furtive and suspicious confidences.\n\nIt was around the corner from Happy's and down the side street one night that observers caught their first sight of heroin in use. A friendly generous pusher showed up to coach a bunch of those there, at no cost, how to mainline heroin. Of the dozen or so willing to accept the injection directly into the vein, every one was quickly retching violently and vomiting into the street. You would have bet that not a single one of them would ever want to go near the stuff again. And you would have lost. All did and all were soon addicted.\n\nOne more watering place for spring, summer, and autumn socializing was a roomy square bar on the boardwalk in our Jewish neighborhood. A bar was an uncommon place for us then, but this one fronted wide onto the boardwalk, projecting the airy character of a resort, and was run by someone we knew. The atmosphere was of a spacious caf\u00e9, a cabaret without live entertainment. Women came there, too, with escorts or with each other. Everyone there knew everyone else, at least by sight. I had long since been living away from Coney Island, and I was led to this place by Marvin Winkler after one of my visits to my mother. It was there that I bumped into Howie Ehrenman from West 31st Street whom I hadn't seen in so long a time, ever since we had departed separately for the war. He, with his brother Henny and the family, now lived somewhere else in Brooklyn. Howie had grown taller, and was quarreling confidently with an adoring girlfriend at the bar. She was a stunning beauty\u2014an Italian girl with lush, olive features and blond hair that glittered\u2014and I thought her ravishing. I haven't seen him since. Marvin directed my attention to a fresh-faced, pretty girl of a different complexion, peaches and cream, who sat facing us at the opposite side of the rectangular bar, pert, laughing, gleaming. She looked, said Marvin, \"like a bottle of milk,\" didn't she\u2014that figure of speech was his\u2014and you would never guess, would you, he confided, that she was being treated for gonorrhea. My instant reaction was to scan enviously the male faces in the room\u2014I was younger, of course, and a romantic even then\u2014for sight of the likely guys, the lucky, likely ones, who might have contracted that disease from that cheery doll. She did indeed look as clean and pasteurized and homogenized as a wholesome bottle of milk. Ever since I heard that simile from Marvin I have been waiting for a chance to use it in my writing, and now I have.\n\nLIKE SOME I KNEW in the neighborhood and others I heard about, Danny the Bull had acted more than once to commit himself voluntarily for treatment in the federal drug rehabilitation facility in Lexington, Kentucky. A quirk in the law then (perhaps still) left a person free to use drugs but decreed it criminal to possess them. In seeking help, one could admit to use and addiction without incurring arrest, and many, perhaps all, of these desperate Coney Islanders did.\n\nAt Lexington, Kentucky, the treatment was \"cold turkey\"\u2014immediate, total withdrawal. It was from those coming back that we first learned the term. This was before the development of methadone and similar alleviating pharmaceutical substitutions, and going cold turkey on heroin was an excruciating ordeal, or at least was said to be by any who had endured it. Leaving Lexington at the completion of a program of treatment, the subject could, if he (or she) wished, obtain from an orderly in an underhanded way a list of sources of supply for the illegal drug of choice on the route home from the institution. What made the outlook for almost all of them dismal was that when the time arrived to go back home, they had no place to go _but_ back home.\n\nFor a very short period I was acquainted with a minister involved in drug rehabilitation work for the East Harlem Protestant parish in New York. The population of his parish was predominantly Hispanic, mostly Puerto Rican. He was a ruddy, buoyant man of a likable disposition, but his pessimism about his work was total: He felt the futility of bringing the weak-willed, damaged addict back into the same situation from which he had come and expecting him to overcome the numerous psychological, social, and environmental influences that had lured him into his addiction to begin with.\n\nA couple of us were witness to a striking and depressing illustration of this fragile despair. We met Danny the Bull by chance one day outside Happy's while he was killing time and waiting, maybe, for another look at Quasi's black eye. The Bull had just come back from another stay in Lexington. He was animated, convinced, firm, almost chipper. Suddenly, he stiffened; then he was quivering, and looking elsewhere. His trembling appearance now was one of agonized indecision and terror. We gazed in the direction he was staring. On the sidewalk across Mermaid Avenue stood an inert, huddling figure one of us recognized as another neighborhood junkie, always a likely source of supply and information about supply. Danny the Bull held out against temptation for not even one whole minute, withdrew from us, and crossed over again.\n\nIn California there was Synanon House, an organization much publicized for successful work with addicts. So celebrated was its reputation for dramatic successes that a film director for whom I was doing some rewriting on a slight sex comedy _(Sex and the Single Girl_ , and the title is more risqu\u00e9 than the content) assigned a researcher to Synanon to give him material for a feature film to be set there that would have a happy ending and great commercial possibilities. And for all I know, he made it. Danny the Bull knew of the place, too. With a friend who was also a junkie, he flew out to Santa Monica to apply for admission. The verdict of doom handed down to him there was that they might succeed in helping his friend but they could do nothing for him. How they could tell I don't know. Danny came back alone to Coney Island and into the apartment on Mermaid Avenue in which he lived with his mother. A short while later, he burst through a door and choked her to death with his bare hands as she lay in her bathtub.\n\nHe insisted afterward in an incoherent explanation of his rage that he had done it because it was all her fault, that she had kept him a junkie by giving him money, and that if she had acted as his father, Max the Barber, had done and given him nothing, he probably would have been cured. He was consigned to a hospital for the criminally insane and if he's still alive he may still be there.\n\nAbout the thunderstruck, horrified, immigrant Jewish woman who was his mother, I would submit that she had not the smallest idea of what was happening to her as she was being strangled to death by her son in her bathtub, or why. And I assume she had been just as helplessly dumbfounded by the addiction and the miserable, weird changes it had produced in her young boy's behavior about which she understood nothing\u2014unlike mothers today, and laudable public officials, who know a great deal about the drug problem, and still can do nothing.\n\nAnother neighborhood heroin junkie with whom I had been much better acquainted was a kid named Solly. We had been through grade school together and sometimes played in the same games on the same team. I don't remember what happened to him in high school, but I doubt that he finished. He had been to Lexington, too. He was like Mark Twain, who found it easy to give up smoking, having done it so many times; Solly had kicked the heroin habit more than once. Marvin Winkler pitched in to assist him after the last attempt. He provided Solly with steady, regular employment in a pastry-baking venture newly begun in New Jersey. Solly strived happily and industriously and took pride in his work. He kept clean. \"I make the best honey-glazed doughnuts in the world,\" he would boast with sincerity. \"People come from all over New Jersey and Connecticut to eat my honey-glazed.\" Soon he had a girlfriend, and the last I heard was that they were talking of marriage. Then Marvin had to close the business to move to California. We don't know what happened to Solly after that.\n\nI can say with some pride that not one of the friends in the three distinct social groups I ran around with in Coney Island (in general, the people from one didn't cotton to those in another) became an addict or thought for a second of ever yielding to anything so self-destructive or in fact to anything over which they had no control. (As with LSD much later on, there was no longing in any of us for that rarefied state of mental elevation about which users bragged.) My conviction is strong that those who did give way to drug addiction were individuals without any compelling attributes of personality.\n\nSPOOKY WEINER was not a junkie and not likely ever to become one. However, through peculiar physiological attunements of unknown origin, he ripened for a while, strangely, into the local authority on gage, or pot (by later generations called \"grass\"), and was the regnant arbiter on \"garbage.\" He had a gift, an unerring flair, for the detection of inferior or adulterated seeds of marijuana. This genius did not pass unnoticed by older hands, members of the bygone Alteo Seniors social club with whom we were still in contact. They would take him along on drives into the city to Harlem or Greenwich Village for major purchases. There, in murky hallways, the suspense would thicken as Spooky sampled and tested. Others in the close crowd of prospective buyers and hopeful sellers would cease to breathe as Spooky inhaled deeply from a stick, or reefer (later a \"joint\"), rolled by his own hands. They waited on tenterhooks for the effect to register and for the squeezed-out verdict to emerge from a throat disinclined yet to exhale. As often as not, the verdict would come with that one word: \"garbage.\" When the verdict was garbage, the transaction was canceled and they would have to search about for a better connection with a better grade of hemp, or gage, or pot, or grass.\n\nSpooky's famous sensitivity to garbage eventually bore him into a scrape with the law that many of us in whom the incident lives, including himself, still find humorous. There came a Saturday night when I was scheduled to meet with him early the next day at my apartment in the city to aid in the launching of a business enterprise of his having to do with the early-morning home delivery of Sunday morning breakfasts of bagels, lox (smoked salmon), and cream cheese. I had, as a charitable service, written the advertising copy for the direct-mail solicitations already distributed by him with a bold headline of his own creation. (That headline read: SLEEP LATER SUNDAY MORNINGS! The company name, with offices on Surf Avenue in Coney Island, was Greenacre Farms, Inc.) Early that Saturday evening, I received a telephone call from Danny the Count in Coney Island advising me with some glee that the appointment for the next morning was off; Spooky wouldn't be there.\n\n\"Why not?\" I responded, and I was already chortling along with the Count in anticipation of his reply, for I was not unaware of the mishaps with which Spooky's business career had been continually and supernaturally blotched. \"Where is he?\"\n\n\"He's in jail,\" said Danny, with a burst of a bronchial laugh that sent me off laughing, too.\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\nWhat happened was that Spooky, with his exceptional devotion to the good in marijuana and his sensitive antennae for \"garbage,\" had been delegated to go into the city to buy a large quantity of rolled reefers for which four or five others had chipped in. The purchase completed, he returned to Coney Island to Weepy's poolroom to await the arrival of his partners. Hardly had he seated himself on the brim of a pool table in the rear than he spied a posse of plainclothes policemen flooding in from the front. In those primeval times in Coney Island, plainclothes police officers in warm weather could be easily marked by two distinguishing traits: by the shirts worn outside the trousers to conceal the tools of the trade at the belt, and by the Celtic-pink and Saxon-white skin of their faces, which were definitively Gentile. They were there looking for someone else, but Spooky couldn't know that. Deftly, he flipped his packet to the floor into the shadows near a wall, praying no one would see.\n\n\"Pick up the package, sonny,\" said the officer who saw. \"Or I'll peel that mustache off your face.\"\n\nSpooky accompanied them to jail with his mustache on.\n\nThe fix went in, the judgment was mild, the arresting officer couldn't be altogether positive that he actually had seen the suspect toss the goods away.\n\nSometime later, Spooky found himself filling out an official application for something like the renewal of a driver's license, and he was faced with the query of whether he had ever been arrested. Fearing a penalty of fine and imprisonment, he decided to make a clean breast of things and answered yes. The follow-up question, though, required him to state the cause. Here he allowed a spasm of humor to override his prudence. With a lightened heart, he wrote:\n\n\"Failure to dispose of garbage.\"\n\nOUR PUNCH BALL GAMES were over. There was no longer amusement for us in the amusement area. We were moving away to live in other places; no one I know of who lived there has moved back or would want to. We were used to the rides and the games and we went there now only to shepherd others who had never been or, lacking any better diversion, to eat. When Nathan's, which was open winters, too, introduced pea soup, it was the best pea soup in the world, singularly so on frosty, stygian nights, and when they began selling pizzas, the pizza was the equal of the best in the world. (As with Solly's honey-glazed doughnuts, people who knew came from far and wide to savor Nathan's delectables and were never disappointed.)\n\nLuna Park had already declined into an unruly and disintegrating relic and was gone; Steeplechase was ailing, sluggishly deteriorating, although we couldn't see that. Observing the gaiety of people less jaded than ourselves cheerfully moving about inside brought a complacent satisfaction. What we definitely were not used to and quickly embraced were the advantageous circumstances our American society was affording us and into which we were advancing with eagerness.\n\nMy trips into Brooklyn after our return from California were irregular. We went as a married couple, or I went alone. Often we journeyed to Brooklyn but didn't go to Coney Island, and much of what I learned I heard from others, mostly from Marvin, who remains the oldest of my very close friends (although we haven't seen each other now in two or three years), and also from Louie Berkman and, news about a different set of people, from Davey Goldsmith, Danny the Count, Harold Bloom, and others. Bulletins of another character came to me from my mother, who remained in the Coney Island apartment until her intestinal surgery rendered her too dependent and impaired to continue living alone, and from Sylvia and Lee, who had their separate apartments nearby. As a married couple, my wife, Shirley, and I socialized most agreeably; we had Marvin and Evelyn, Lou Berkman and Marion, Dave Goldsmith and Estelle, later George Mandel and Miki; still living in Coney Island was Danny the Count, always funny; Evelyn's girlfriend Maxine, married to a former prizefighter; and Maxine's limber older sister, June, an excellent lindy-hop dancer (a very infrequent thing in a white woman) who fell in love with Danny the Count and in order to marry him divorced a husband to whom she had been married early. We mixed easily and we normally could meet as conveniently in the city as in Coney Island.\n\nIn Brooklyn when we had no special plans, where we went and what we did often depended on who had the car. One night Heshie Bodner had the only car, and an older eminence of considerable substance and brawn named Scarface Louie decided that he and his large dog had a number of business calls to make in other parts of Brooklyn and lower Manhattan.\n\n\"Whose station wagon is that outside?\" Scarface Louie inquired, leaning into Happy's.\n\nHeshy made believe he didn't hear.\n\n\"Heshy's,\" a younger innocent named Spotty Dave volunteered, helpfully pointing.\n\nAnd Heshy for the next several hours was off on a disquieting and perilous journey.\n\nBy occupation, Scarface Louie had something to do with the union workers in taverns and small restaurants; either he ran the labor unions or he busted them. That evening he needed meetings with people outside one barroom after another, while Heshy and the dog were ordered to wait in the car. The conversations were quick and quiet but vehement, too. Once or twice they picked up someone else at one place and dropped him off at another. When another rider was in the car, the big dog sat on the front seat beside Heshy. Outside one dark saloon a man was slapped around on the sidewalk, with Scarface Louie looking on collectedly, making gestures of approval. There was even a robbery before they were through. At a gas station where the attendant was less than courteous, Louie and a friend decided they might as well take the cash. Heshy and the dog didn't step from the car during the long trip except for Heshie and the dog to pee against the tire now and then. The dog was a Great Dane.\n\n\"Thanks, Heshy,\" said Scarface Louie when he was dropped off at Happy's. \"We'll do it again soon.\"\n\nTHE MOVEMENT OUT OF Coney Island after the war wasn't then, not at first, an incidence of white flight before an influx of people who were of darker skin and of even poorer economic station. That came later (and continues everywhere, and the apprehensiveness and prejudice at work appear to include social and economic anxiety along with the racial). Rather, the migration away was an optimistic drive toward betterment in response to the multitude of captivating opportunities that flowered in the wake of our victory in the war. Among the richest and most sensible and far-reaching was the G.I. Bill of Rights: Along with the obvious good of making available a higher education to those like myself who'd never hoped realistically to acquire one, it detained several million of us from pouring all together into the workforce and inciting unrest by over-flooding it. Conjoined with this powerful impulse toward upward mobility was the allure of the suburbs to many in the overcrowded cities (to many in the same suburbs and outer districts the longing was to transfer into the overcrowded heart of the cities) and the easy fulfillment of a newly awakened aspiration of families to own their own homes. Shortly after the war came the first Levittown, out in Long Island, in what was then open farmland, followed soon by scores of similar construction developments, advertising attractive houses at fabulously reasonable prices, with paltry down payments, low interest rates, and government financing through G.I. loans. Willie Siegel from my own street in Coney Island (already as a young adult called Bill Siegel, just as I was no longer Joey but Joe) was the first contemporary I knew of to buy his own house in a suburb and perhaps the first to make that quantum growth in maturity of wanting one.\n\nI was gone from Coney Island permanently with my marriage in October of 1945, five months following my discharge from the army. After the year in England and the two years of teaching in Pennsylvania, we settled into Manhattan in an impressive, rent-controlled apartment building with elevators, doormen, and elevator operators, and I went on living in that building for the next twenty-eight years, until the final separation leading to the eventual divorce.\n\nDavey Goldsmith had soon moved away into an apartment in Brighton, still close enough to all he knew; Marty Kapp was first in Riverdale, just north of Manhattan, next in New Jersey; Lou Berkman started his plumbing-supply business in Middletown, New York. All of us married, all of us in our twenties. Lou's family, like mine, was still in Brooklyn, and we would see each other there as well as in Manhattan. Marvin Winkler had moved with his family from Sea Gate in Coney Island to Ocean Parkway even before the war. Albie Covelman moved away with his family then, too, to somewhere close in Bensonhurst, I believe. It was just after a four-handed pinochle game at Albie's house one lazy Sunday afternoon in December that we heard the news of the attack at Pearl Harbor and declared categorically that the Japs had gone crazy and would be slapped down in a week or so. That Hitler then declared war on us before we did on him was a momentous event that seemed to elude my notice. (Had Hitler not blundered that way, there might have unfolded in the European Theater an alternate war in which...?)\n\nGeorge Mandel had also earlier moved with his family into a different part of Brooklyn. After the war, while I was still at NYU, he already had a large, bohemian, bachelor loft in Manhattan, where he could paint and write. He was near Greenwich Village and near my school, and I would drop by there often, as would Danny the Count and Marvin Winkler. All of us were ecstatically astonished when the paperback reprint rights to his first novel, _Flee the Angry Strangers_ , published in 1953, were sold for a price of $25,000! His share of half that seemed a fortune. And $12,500 then _was indeed_ a fortune to someone living largely on disability payments for his war wound, and to someone like me, who had worked as a college instructor and next as an advertising copywriter for the same small salary of sixty dollars a week. I thought I, too, might try a novel of my own one day when I felt myself competent to complete one. As it turned out, I didn't feel competent to begin one until I was already past thirty.\n\nI DON'T GO THERE anymore. From my home in East Hampton to Coney Island is a long drive. I wouldn't want to go even if I lived closer. My friends are scattered. Their parents are dead. The only people I know who still live there are Sandy Kern, the widow of Ira, a boy who was a classmate in grade school and high school, and Frances Goodman, a friend of my sister's of her own generation. But they both live in Sea Gate, behind the fences and the private security forces. (And I've just learned that Sandy has moved, too.) The beach is near, the ocean is there, the weather is more clement in winter and summer than the extremes in the rest of the city, but they are there for the soothing feelings of safety and peace of mind that a homogeneous haven provides as much as for anything else.\n\nThere is not much of a Jewish neighborhood remaining outside the gates. Twenty years back, sometime around 1978, I made a trip back into the residential area of Coney Island for my novel _Good as Gold_ , just to note the changes. That Marvin and I met in a bar on Mermaid Avenue in itself signified a large change\u2014a change in us that we met in a bar, and a change in our old neighborhood of Coney Island, in which a bar, that particular bar, was the only place left for maturing people in the old crowd still living there to gather feeling safe. Smokey was there that evening, and that was the last time I saw him. He was getting old, he admitted, grinning and laughing as always, and he told me how he had found that out. That summer he'd been peddling ice cream on the beach, and he and an Italian kid in his twenties from down the Island had crossed into what each wanted to think of as a monopoly domain. Neither liked the competition. And the other, like Quasimodo in a different time and place, invited Smokey to settle it with fists under the boardwalk if he had a mind to. \"And,\" said Smokey, putting his head back with a grin and basking in the tale and the memory, \"he beat the hell out of me\u2014so easily.\" Smokey hadn't been able to see a single punch coming, he related to me, practically boasting. \"And I'm the guy that used to chase away all the other peddlers!\" And that's how Smokey could tell he was getting old. (I included his account of that incident, name and all, in _Good as Gold_ , as I also used Sylvia's birthday party, and the torturing wounds\u2014not scars, unhealing _wounds_ \u2014of Lee's lifelong ambivalent love for our father.)\n\nI also went back for an afternoon to look around, and afterward I recorded these impressions of mine of Coney Island in that work of fiction:\n\nFour springy, dark-skinned bloods in sneakers were coming his way, and he [Gold] knew in a paralyzing flash of intuition that it was ending for him right then and there, with a knife puncture in the heart....\n\nThey passed without bothering him, deciding to let him live. His time had not yet come.\n\nGold had noted earlier all the boarded-up, ruined shops on the three major lateral avenues of Coney Island and wondered where all the people went now to buy food, have their suits and dresses mended and dry cleaned, their shoes and radios fixed, and their medical prescriptions filled. In his rented car, he drove alone one more time the desolate length of Mermaid Avenue to the high chain-link fence of the private residential area of Sea Gate, where owners of the larger houses were now accepting welfare families, turned left toward the beach and boardwalk, and made his way back slowly along Surf Avenue. He did not see a drugstore. Behind the guarded barriers of Sea Gate, which once grandly sported a yacht club and was restricted to well-off Christians, younger Jewish families now congregated for safety and sent their children to whatever private schools they could. Elderly men and women, as always, probably still crept forth from secret places each morning and prowled the streets and boardwalk for patches of warming sunlight, conversing in Yiddish, and Raymie Rubin's mother had been killed one day on her return. [A true event: Raymie Miller's mother had been murdered by an intruder in her ground-floor apartment in the building on West 31st in which we had first lived.] Gold did not pass a single Jewish delicatessen. There was no longer a movie house operating in Coney Island: drugs, violence, and vandalism had closed both garish, overtowering theaters years before. The brick apartment house in which he had spent his whole childhood and nearly all his adolescence had been razed: on the site stood something newer and uglier that did not seem a nourishing improvement for the Puerto Rican families there now.\n\nThe newer, high-rise apartment building in the public-housing project there doubtless had elevators, better plumbing, and central air conditioning. I preferred my old apartment house, with its window in the bathroom and a kitchen roomy enough to hold a table at which a family of four could sit comfortably for meals.\n\nFarther down the Island, the Italian section appears compressed but pretty much intact, with the landmark restaurants of Gargulio's and Carolina still functioning. And the Steeplechase Pier, with Steeplechase long gone, was recently officially christened with the name Auletta Pier, to honor a citizen prominent in that section\u2014also, incidentally, the father of the journalist Ken Auletta.\n\nBut when last I was there, the fishermen out on the pier with lines down for crabs and their bobs and sinkers out wishfully for whatever small fish might be hooked were almost entirely Hispanic, as were the women and men with small boys and girls romping delightedly around the pier in the sunshine. All were overjoyed to see me, and the group with me, for I was there with a British film crew for a television show of which they all now felt themselves selected to be part.\n\nI HAD BEEN BACK only a few times. There was the occasion in the sixties mentioned previously when George Mandel and Mario Puzo and I relaxed in Steeplechase and found pleasure in watching our small children scampering about the grounds. And there was an afternoon and that one evening for on-site research sometime about 1978, when I spoke with Smokey in the bar.\n\nEarly in 1982, while a patient in a rehabilitation hospital, the Rusk Institute in New York, recuperating from the muscular weakness of my Guillain-Barr\u00e9 syndrome, I went again. Then I was the accomplished native guide on an abbreviated autobiographical tour with Mary Kay Fish, a physical therapist from upstate New York who had never been to Coney Island; Valerie Jean Humphries, a nurse; and Jerry McQueen, my friend with the car who was then a homicide detective with the city's police force, and a very good one. Valerie Humphries was one of the covey of nurses I fell in love with during a confinement lasting almost six months in two hospitals. We were married in 1987, and she still seems to like me.\n\nSince then I've gone back to Coney Island only three times, and always with television film crews from Europe who wanted to shoot footage for their programs of the place from which I had come, especially since it was a place with a world reputation and so tellingly visual.\n\nThe first group was from England, the next from Germany. This last time I was again with a production group from England. As before, all of the Europeans had heard of Coney Island, and their faces were alive with expectation as we arrived and made ready to disembark from the van and the car. Doubtless they had all been to playlands more modern and luxurious in a variety of cities and countries. But this was Coney Island, and to their minds Coney Island was a luminous myth of which they had long heard and which emitted the animating mystique of legend.\n\nTheir enthusiasm was infectious; I turned eager, too, and proprietary. And at Nathan's, the rallying place I had selected, I charged with more ravenous hunger than the others to the griddle for hot dogs and to the next post for the fried potatoes (with extra salt, please). They progressed to the food counters with the timidity of reverence. The food at Nathan's has never failed to impress my Europeans, and _most especially_ those from Britain, where the bland sausages they put up with have been the topic of caustic jokes since the days of rationing in the last world war.\n\nThis was in May 1994, and the experience was again exhilarating, an adventure for all of us. A complex of apartment houses rose where Luna Park had stood, and the former location of Steeplechase was a vacant area of several blocks, but they didn't seem to mind.\n\nThe defunct Parachute Jump was to them an Eiffel Tower of reddened steel.\n\nIt was midweek, a schoolday in early spring. There were no large crowds. The only high attractions left in operation in Coney Island were the Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone. They hardly noticed the difference.\n\nThey had never, it seemed, laid eyes on such a boardwalk, such a broad, long, sand beach, so sweeping a seascape of the ocean to the horizon at the vast opening into New York Harbor. Unpopulated, the spectacle was serenely perfect, sublime, eternal.\n\nOn Surf Avenue, where games and rides and confectioners and shows had once raucously functioned, one alongside the other almost to infinity, the numbers were cramped into a contained area, and most of the stalls were now the spilling retail counters of a flea market. That was okay with them, too.\n\nThey didn't object. Of the mechanical attractions in operation, a greater proportion than ever before were miniaturized rides for children, but the Europeans with me, of course, didn't miss the ones that were gone. And they didn't care when I spoke of the changes. For them, it was a rapture to be there\u2014if only for that first time.\n\nWe\u2014Valerie and I\u2014rode the Wonder Wheel with them while they taped footage from our swaying gondola on high. But the Wonder Wheel is tame. The Cyclone is not. Jittery beforehand with trepidation, a soundman and a young British woman who was assistant to the producer determined together to brave it; they were shaking when they staggered off afterward and wobbled back to the rest of us, pale with incredulity and jabbering with exultation from the thrilling ordeal. Although it was a schoolday, the rides for the children were full. Buses from a number of schools were parked on the side streets. The children had been brought from their separate schools for a day's outing in spring. They varied widely in their distinct groupings, black, brown, white, Asian\u2014one cluster obviously was from an Orthodox Jewish institution\u2014and their gleeful shrieks of laughter echoed everywhere as they tore around in the orbits of the different mechanisms, definitely having fun (as all children everywhere should always be allowed to do).\n\nI may be kidding myself, but I think I had more.\n\nIRWIN SHAW IS GONE and is very sorely missed by all those who knew him and gloried in his large mind and boisterous generosity of spirit. James Jones is gone, too. Both already were famous novelists when _Catch-22_ came out, and\u2014unacquainted with its author\u2014praised it before publication and helped lift it off to a fortunate start. And we had become friends. Mario Puzo's legs are troubling him. Mine are still weak from that neuropathy of fifteen years ago (and from those fifteen years of aging, too). Speed Vogel has become susceptible to respiratory infections and takes Coumadin for blood clots. Julie Green takes Coumadin now, too, and so does David Goodman and my sister, Sylvia. Lou Berkman did die of Hodgkin's disease, as related in _Closing Time._ My first wife, Shirley, is gone, too\u2014lung cancer, like my sister-in-law, Perlie. George Mandel is still actively around, good-humored as always and growing at least as hard of hearing as the rest of us. Marvin Winkler hangs on, though gorgeously overweight in face and form, as does his wife, Evelyn, who works in California as a teacher of preschool children, and he marvels each time we talk by telephone that the three of us have lasted this long and seem to be mostly in good health. On the first day of May every year he telephones from California to wish me happy birthday. Every February I try to remember to telephone him on his birthday, which falls late in the month. (In Eugene, Oregon, there is a man I've never met or spoken to named Bradford Willett. For something like thirty-five years now, starting soon after the publication of _Catch-22_ , he has sent me a birthday card. Through several changes of address they have managed to catch up with me. Probably, he was in his twenties when he began, and I am delighted and touched deeply to receive them.)\n\nIt is sometimes hard now to look back, to take stock, and to realize, to truly believe, that I have been to college\u2014that was not a common thing in my youth, as I've said, and movies about college life were very popular, and were always comedy romances; to know further that I have even taught at colleges\u2014daydreaming of that would have been a lunatic fantasy at the beginning; and that, further yet, I studied on a scholarship at Oxford University in England for one year, at St. Catherine's College, and that after a term there in 1991 as a Christiensen Fellow, I was appointed an Honorary Visiting Fellow.\n\nJust think: I am an Honorary Visiting Fellow of St. Catherine's College of Oxford University!\n\nI have much to be pleased with, including myself, and I am. I have wanted to succeed, and I have. I look younger than my years, much younger to people who are young, and I am in reasonably good health. My appetite continues hearty, and is complemented by a sterling digestive system that almost never lets me down. I still have most of a good head of hair and probably I have sufficient income and money to go on living as well as I want to, with enough left over, I feel, to please my few heirs (Valerie, sister Sylvia, children Erica and Ted). I am in love with my wife, still find other women appealing, enjoy a good many close friendships, and I have just finished writing this book.\n\nIt will take about a year to be published, and I expect much of what I've just said to still be true when it is.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\n**Begin Reading**\n\nTable of Contents\n\nNewsletters\n\nCopyright Page\n\nHachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.\n\nThe scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author's intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author's rights.\n_For Des_\n\n# Prologue\n\nThe story of their lives was all there.\n\nSandwiched between two battered green leather covers, on a hundred pages of charcoal paper, a bulging patchwork of newsprint, starting on the first page with the engagement notice Deirdre had snipped out of _The Irish Times_ six decades ago, the paper tobacco-colored now with age, the typeface a faintly quaint relic of a bygone age.\n\n#### Mr. M. MacEntee\u2014Miss D. O'Sullivan\n\nThe engagement is announced between Manus, only son of David and Eleanor MacEntee of Kildangan, Co. Kildare, and Deirdre, youngest daughter of Eamonn and Mary O'Sullivan of Ennis, Co. Clare.\n\nThat was the first time Deirdre's name had ever appeared in print. A brief mention, and one that for most of the women of her generation would be the only newsworthy event of their lives. An event as frivolous and short-lived as a single firework on a summer's night, falling somewhere between the announcement of their birth\u2014if indeed anyone had bothered to announce their birth\u2014and that of their death, however many decades later. In between the two, a farmhouse somewhere along the road. A husband, rising up out of the bed before dawn and not returning until after dusk. A clatter of children and a couple of hospital stays. A new hat for each special occasion.\n\nSo it was for Deirdre's sisters, but not for Deirdre. Deirdre's life was always going to be different, something her father seemed to see in her from the start. \"The world is full of boring people,\" he used to say to her, and Deirdre's heart would squirm with the secret pleasure of knowing that he was referring to her sisters.\n\nThe youngest of five girls, Deirdre was separated by six years from the next sister up. And while the other four were one prettier than the other, with their neat little noses and their dancing brown eyes, Deirdre always stood apart from them. With her long-boned face and her wide full mouth\u2014a mouth with hardly a dip in the bow of the upper lip\u2014she was unusual-looking, or so her father kept telling her. \"I'll let you in on a secret,\" he said to her, when she was no more than six or seven. \"You're not a pretty little thing, like your sisters. You're something far better than that. You're _unusual_ -looking.\"\n\n\"You must promise me you'll never be afraid to be different,\" he told her, on more than one occasion. And because Deirdre loved her father more than anyone, because she never for one moment doubted the wisdom of what he told her, she made it her life's work to fulfill that promise. When she left home for Dublin at just seventeen, it was her father who walked her to the train. He found her a carriage with a nun sitting in it, and before he left her there he presented her with the scrapbook as a parting gift. \"All you have to do now is fill it,\" he said to her, his voice brisk and brusque. \"Not a bother to you, Deirdre O'Sullivan.\" As the train pulled away, Deirdre looked back to see him standing on the platform, his arm raised in a rigid salute and tears raining down his cheeks.\n\nThat was the morning after the old Abbey Theater burned down. The smell of it in the air as Deirdre's train pulled into Heuston station, the news on everyone's lips. The Abbey, gone up in flames! Deirdre rushed up the quays and stood with the crowd gathered to peer at the smoldering remains of the national theater. As the Dublin fire brigade hosed down the rubble, as the players and stagehands did everything they could to salvage precious relics from the wreckage, Deirdre looked on in despair, imagining that she had arrived in the capital too late to fulfill her dream of becoming an Abbey actress. In fact the fire would prove to be her opportunity.\n\nAs she stood on the street outside, a man in shirtsleeves leaned out of an upstairs window and started flinging costumes out on to the street. Deirdre was among the onlookers who helped salvage them, spending the rest of the afternoon pegging wet gowns and uniforms on to a clothesline that had been strung across the empty auditorium. Before the day was out, she had the stage manager on a promise to get her an audition for the Abbey School of Acting; on the day of the audition, he was the one who schooled her in the flowery Irish she would need to impress the theater's director.\n\nIt was as a student of the Abbey school that Deirdre secured her first walk-on part just two months later, playing a nurse in the production of _The Silver Tassie_ that marked the start of the theater's long exile on Pearse Street. By the following spring she had her first speaking part, as Nellie the Post in _The Righteous are Bold_ , a play that scandalized her mother as much as it delighted her father. When the notice appeared in the following day's _Irish Independent_ , Deirdre's father sent the hotel porter out for five copies, one of which Deirdre pasted into her scrapbook, using her fountain pen to draw a wide loop of violet ink around the salient sentence:\n\nDeirdre O'Sullivan delivered a vivid performance as Nellie the Post...\n\nDeirdre leaned in to squint at the small print, but she couldn't make out the letters. Blurry discs across her eyes; the first one had appeared a year ago in the corner of her left eye and slipped across her eyeball. A partial eclipse that affected both eyes now, so that everything was steeped in sepia, as if the whole world was aging with her.\n\n\"You have cataracts,\" the doctor had said, when finally she was persuaded to see one. Turning off his miner's flash-light, he wheeled backward on his chair with something like glee. \"Nothing whatsoever to worry about,\" he said. \"It's extremely common at your age. I'm going to refer you to an eye surgeon.\"\n\nSpinning his chair round to face his desk, he dropped his chin to his chest and started tapping on his keyboard. Using his middle finger in a stabbing motion, as a pianist would to hit a final, definitive note, he set the printer in motion. It spat out a page, which he handed over to Deirdre with deadly gravity.\n\n\"You know what this is?\" Deirdre said to him, once she was standing.\n\nHe looked up at her expectantly, waiting for her to answer her own question.\n\n\"This,\" she said, waving the piece of paper at him. \"This is the thin end of the wedge.\"\n\nThe paper she was holding in her hand was a ticket to everything she had always feared. A summons that sooner or later would see her sitting in an ugly armchair in a triple-glazed sunroom in an overheated nursing home, surrounded by other old ladies, and nothing to separate her from them, nothing to make her different. The possibility that her entire personality, and the life she had built on the strength of it, the prospect that all of it might turn out to be nothing more than a notion she had taken upon herself, this was something Deirdre could not bear to contemplate.\n\nAs soon as she was out on the street, she slipped the referral letter into the nearest bin. Giddy as a schoolgirl, she sailed along the pavement, holding her umbrella out imperiously to bring an approaching bus to a stop. She climbed on board, brandishing her free travel pass like a police badge, aware of a mischievous sense of her own power. Not since she had boarded the bus from Ennis to Dublin all those years ago, with her money sewn into her knickers for fear of the criminals she might encounter in the city, not since then had she had such a drunken sense of freedom. The fact that she had found a way to escape the ordinary, at this late stage of her life, it was almost like being immortal.\n\nShe was only a week in Dublin when she met Manus. Six weeks later they were engaged, and by the following summer they were married. A photograph of their wedding appeared in the _Irish Independent'_ s Wedding Bells column; looking at the clipping now, Deirdre had to bite her bottom lip to stop herself from smiling. Manus looked so camp, it was ridiculous. \"How did you not know he was gay?\" Deirdre's daughters had asked her many times over the years. \"Darlings,\" she had told them, \"if I'd known what a homosexual was, I might have recognized him as one. But we neither of us would have had a notion what the word meant. You have to understand how innocent we were. Nobody ever told us anything.\"\n\nManus was a Protestant, which was scandal enough in those days. Of course, he had to convert to marry her. In a gesture of reciprocity, their wedding reception was held not in her hometown but in the long-overgrown walled garden of the estate his father managed in County Kildare. To the horror of Deirdre's mother, there were no chairs, only rugs laid out on the grass for the guests to sprawl on. When Manus left Deirdre for another man\u2014twenty-eight years and three children later\u2014Deirdre's mother claimed not to be in the least bit surprised. After what she'd seen of their wedding day, she had long been prepared for the worst.\n\nWhen Manus left Deirdre, it was a point of pride with her not to react the way everyone expected her to. Everyone expected her to be heartbroken, and humiliated, and of course she was both of those things, but she was damned if she was going to show it. \"Manus and I were always more like friends than lovers,\" she told everyone she met, aware that she needed to subvert the unspoken suggestion of some sexual inadequacy on her part that might have provoked her husband to seek his thrills elsewhere. \"All is fair in love and war,\" she told other people, hinting at a broader dimension to her marriage than might have been outwardly apparent. \"It's a great relief to me,\" she said, \"not to have to put up with him stealing my face creams anymore.\"\n\nSuch was the force of Deirdre's ability to create a part for herself, such was the gusto with which she reprised the role year after year, and decade after decade, that she nearly came to believe it herself. What she almost entirely succeeded in obfuscating, what not even her children guessed at, was the fact that she had never not been in love with him. She had spent her entire life loving a man who could not love her. It was too big a thing to contemplate.\n\nOh, Manus, Manus, Manus. Every cutting of his was pasted into her scrapbook with such naive pride. Reviews of his novel, and feature pieces written with all the genteel reverence of another age. A black-and-white photograph of Manus sitting at his desk in this very study at the top of the house, with the light from the window falling in on him. In the photograph he has an upright typewriter before him, a sheet of paper primed to receive his next novel, a novel that would never come to be written.\n\nDeirdre was sitting at that same desk now, with the same wintry light falling in through the window, only less of it. In the fifty years that had passed since that photograph was taken, the wisteria she had planted as a young bride had stealthily climbed three floors, immersing the back of the house in a deep green sea of leaves, so that even on the top floor you had the sense of being in an underwater cave. A green gloom over everything, it had the advantage of disguising the dust. The patches of dry rot climbing down out of the ceiling cornices. The bucket in the corner to catch the drip from the leaking roof. Deirdre had long ago given up pouring money into that bloody roof.\n\nShe turned the pages of the scrapbook impatiently, passing over articles so well known to her that she didn't need to read them; they were like familiar fields flashing by the window of a train. The piece about Manus from _The New York Times_. The photograph of them both posing on the tarmac at Idlewild, he wearing dark glasses and she a ruby-red turban to match her coat; they looked for all the world like movie stars, which was what they almost were.\n\nTurning the next page, she came upon a publicity photograph of herself, and stopped. A photograph of her standing alone onstage in a flowing gown, her chin lifted slightly to display her long, pale neck to advantage. Her eyes were open wide and artfully vacant, as if she were just an empty vessel aching to channel all the great parts that still lay in store for her. The beauty of her, undeniable by then. Not a small-town beauty like her sisters, but a beauty capable of commanding the national stage. Capable perhaps, even, of conquering the world.\n\nHad she known then that she stood balanced on the brink? Review after review, pasted lovingly into her scrapbook, attesting to her triumphant position as the queen of the Dublin stage. There was talk of movie parts, perhaps a move to Broadway, until the beginning of the end was announced in the form of a tiny patch of newsprint no bigger than a postage stamp; it was attached to the page by a piece of tape as dry and yellow as a flake of old skin.\n\n**MacEntee** \u20144 July 1960, at Stella Maris Nursing Home. To Deirdre, wife of Manus MacEntee, a daughter, Alma. _Deo gratias_.\n\nAlma, who arrived in a flurry of numbers. Talk of inches, then ounces. Weeks, then months. All Deirdre wanted to know was when she could go back to work. \"See that scar on my head?\" Alma would joke in later years, pointing to a chickenpox dent on her left temple. \"That's the mark my mother's heel made when she was climbing over me to get back on to the stage.\" And for a year or two it seemed that motherhood had done nothing to slow Deirdre down. It was only when she fell pregnant again, and sick this time with a morning sickness that lasted all day, only then were her ambitions finally derailed. Reluctantly, she passed up on the part of Brigid in _Shadow and Substance_ (a part she was a little long in the tooth for, truth be told) and took to the bed to await her deliverance.\n\nDeirdre suffered a collapsed lung giving birth to Acushla, and it took her a long time to recover, and although Manus did insert a birth notice, nobody thought to save the paper when it appeared, so no record exists of Acushla's birth, much to Deirdre's regret. There is no record of her father's death either, an event that occurred on the same day Acushla was born. Deirdre was too weak to attend his funeral. She cried for a year afterward, two years maybe; she began to think she would cry forever. \"Why didn't you ask anyone for help?\" asked Acushla once. \"Why didn't you go to the doctor?\" Oh, it was hard to explain. You didn't ask for help back then. It just wasn't something you did. \"What got you out of it?\" asked Acushla, even though she already knew the answer. \"Your brother did,\" said Deirdre with a smile. \"It was your brother got me out of it.\"\n\n**MacEntee** \u2014to Manus and Deirdre (n\u00e9e O'Sullivan), a son, Macdara.\n\nMacdara, who is Deirdre's favorite, according to the girls. As evidence, they cite the fact that the PIN for Deirdre's bank card is the year of Macdara's birth. \"Don't be ridiculous,\" Deirdre says. \"I love all my children equally.\" Even though that's not strictly true. She loves all her children in equal measure, certainly, but not all at the same time, and not in the same manner.\n\nHer firstborn Deirdre loves with a mixture of awe and pride. Alma, who arrived in the world fully in charge of herself; no sooner did she open her eyes than she took command of her surroundings, a command she never once let go. Sometimes it seems to Deirdre that she loves Alma precisely because Alma never asks for her love, and never indicates that she needs it.\n\nAcushla, on the other hand, was born crying out for attention. A fretful baby, she would wake in the middle of the night in need of comfort, a comfort Deirdre did not have it in her to give. Many was the night Deirdre spent walking Acushla around the house in the dead of night, her own helpless tears pooling with her daughter's to form a puddle of sticky grief in the hollow of her collarbone. The legacy of that awful time is a tenderness between Deirdre and Acushla, a tenderness verging on pity for the misery they shared. It is nothing more or less than another strain of love.\n\nBy comparison, Deirdre's love for Macdara was always miraculously straightforward. From the moment she set eyes on him in the hospital, she loved him with a love that was as uncomplicated as it was unexpected. By then, she had ceased to hope for anything out of motherhood, but with Macdara's arrival, after a birth as easy as a bump in the road, she was transformed overnight into an earth mother. Macdara was breast-fed from the start, where the girls had been bottle-fed. Where the girls had been left with nannies, Macdara went everywhere Deirdre went, nestled to her chest in a sling, and at night he crept into the bed between his parents, something the girls would never have been allowed to do.\n\nAfter Macdara was born, Deirdre did not even contemplate returning to work, determined not to miss a moment of her belated joy in motherhood. It was only when he was dispatched to boarding school that she relaunched her career, enjoying a brief but glorious three years back in the footlights. She was just preparing to go on tour with _The Gigli Concert_ when Macdara's crisis came, a crisis that occurred three weeks into his scholarship to the University of Provence (for some reason never entirely understood by Deirdre, the crisis was triggered by a picture of a hermaphrodite he saw in a book). Macdara's breakdown was so severe, and the challenge of helping him back to full health so enormous, that Deirdre dropped out of the tour, an act of career sabotage from which there would be no way back. Thirty years later, mother and son are still shuffling around the same space, brushing up against each other's foibles with a mutual acceptance and an ever-increasing endearment that baffles everyone but themselves. \"You're enabling him,\" Alma said to her once. \"We enable each other,\" Deirdre replied, cutting her off at the pass.\n\n\"Mum!\"\n\nIt was Macdara's voice, calling up to her. \"Do you want tea?\"\n\nBy the sound of it, he had climbed as far as the landing.\n\n\"Please, darling!\" answered Deirdre, rising out of her chair to shout her answer, only to feel the familiar lick of pain racing down her right leg. \"Sciatica,\" the doctor had said. \"Again, perfectly normal.\" The bladder incontinence Deirdre did not deign to mention to him, certain in the knowledge that this too would be written off as a normal consequence of aging.\n\nLowering herself carefully back down into her chair, Deirdre began to speed through the scrapbook, looking for Macdara's only item of news, after his birth. She skimmed over Alma's first article for the college newspaper. Alma's first article for a national newspaper. A front-page photograph of Alma's wedding to Michael Collins (much was made of the fact that the groom was the youngest sitting deputy in the nation's parliament. Much too of the name he bore, a name passed down to him by his father despite the irony of naming your son after the dead hero of the opposition\u2014oh how they laughed at the notion of a Fianna F\u00e1il Michael Collins!). The pages that followed were plastered with coverage of Mick's early political career. His media appearances fast became so numerous that Deirdre had been forced to stop saving them. She took to keeping only those clippings that featured Alma. Alma photographed side by side with Mick at a state dinner. Alma pictured at the edge of a media scrum, microphone in hand. Alma in a full-page interview about the new generation of women making a name for themselves in television.\n\nThere was the odd article about Acushla too. A morsel in a gossip column about her engagement to Mick's twin brother Liam. A picture of her wearing a large hat to Ladies' Day at the Spring Show. An appearance in a list of Ireland's best-dressed women. The only time Macdara's name made it into any form of publication was an entry in his school annual noting that he had triumphed in the spellathon. Deirdre had cut the piece out and dutifully pasted it into her scrapbook, confident that it would be no more than a prelude to greater things. In retrospect, it might have been better to leave it out.\n\nHearing Macdara's tread on the landing, she flipped the page.\n\n\"Here's your tea,\" he said, coming into the room without knocking. Hunched, the way very tall people often are, he bore the mug of tea forward with all the practiced care of a butler. He was wearing a freshly ironed shirt, as always, and one of the hand-knitted ties he had learned to make in occupational therapy\u2014he'd been making them for people as Christmas presents ever since. A V-necked lambswool sweater and camel-colored cords, and on his feet a pair of Ugg boots. Macdara was very prone to cold feet.\n\n\"Scrapbooking?\" he asked her, as he set the mug down on the worn leather surface of the desk.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, wafting her hand over the open pages. \"I was just going to paste in an article on your sister but I got carried away.\"\n\nShe glanced down at the page in front of her.\n\n\"My mother's death notice,\" she said. And there was silence for a moment as they both stared down at it. Macdara was standing on the far side of the desk, so he had to twist his neck so as not to be looking at it upside down.\n\n**O'Sullivan** , Mary. In her 95th year. Widow of the late Eamonn...\n\n\"When was that?\" asked Macdara, looking up at her. His eyes gray and guileless.\n\n\"Nineteen eighty-four.\"\n\nHe was in France when she died. Both of them know this but neither of them mentions it.\n\n\"Thirty years ago,\" he says, with surprise.\n\n\"Yes,\" she replies, but she's not sure whether he's referring to his grandmother's death or the ill-fated stay in France. Or indeed both.\n\n\"Well,\" he says, cocking his head as if he's about to say something else. He drifts toward the door with his head still tilted, and the conversation is left hanging. The next thing he's gone, and whatever it was that he was going to say, it remains unsaid.\n\nOnce Macdara is gone, the room seems emptier than it was before he entered it. Deirdre sits for a moment searching the air for some visible change, but there is nothing but a faint hum.\n\nShe makes a conscious effort to summon a memory of her mother. A desperate desire in her, to remember her mother as a young woman\u2014all that comes to mind are frozen images from photographs. The living, breathing memory is that of a bag of bones in a bed. A pair of angry staring eyes. A smell that remains on Deirdre's breath\u2014despite all the money they spent on the nursing home, there was always that greenhouse smell of human rot. The memory of it horrifies Deirdre. It frightens her, and try as she might, she cannot supplant it. The fact is that her mother lived too long. She outlived even herself.\n\n... deeply regretted by her daughters Margaret (Peggy), Mary, Catherine (Kitty), Maeve and Deirdre.\n\nAll of them still alive. Peggy must be ninety-three by now, and Mary ninety-one. Kitty on the verge of ninety. Even Maeve must be eighty-six, which makes Deirdre eighty at her next birthday. A fact that has been passing through her head with increasing regularity since the start of the year. The number is puzzling to her; it seems incorrect.\n\n\"I don't fancy the idea of it,\" she confided to her ex-husband recently, thinking that he of all people would understand.\n\nInfuriatingly, Manus just laughed.\n\n\"I've always been younger than everyone else,\" Deirdre went on, anxious to make herself understood. \"I can't see myself as an old person. I don't even _like_ old people.\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" he said. \"You have the makings of a magnificent old lady. You were born to be an old lady.\"\n\nOh it annoyed her no end when he said that. It trespassed upon her vanity.\n\n\"You're going to live to be a hundred,\" he said. And she became aware of a great and petulant desire to prove him wrong.\n\n\"Let's face it,\" he told her, with a tease in his voice. \"You come from a long line of survivors.\"\n\n\"Oh, Manus,\" she said. \"That's the problem. It fills me with dread, the thought of getting old.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" he said, with a grim chuckle. \"And yet you must admit, it's better than the alternative.\"\n\nDeirdre had smiled at him, and nodded, but in her head she had started churning a slow-moving thought. Turning over the words he had used until she had extracted the meaning out of them. What had caught her attention was not her ex-husband's cheerful fatalism in the face of the aging process. What had taken hold of her was a notion that he had unintentionally planted in her head, the notion that there was an alternative.\n\n\"You can't kill yourself just because you've developed cataracts,\" said her doctor. \"Sure, you're as fit as a fiddle. You're in better nick than I am.\"\n\n\"Don't even _think_ about patronizing me,\" she said. \"I've given this a lot of thought. I'm going to be eighty in October and I feel I've had a good inning. I've decided to quit while I'm ahead.\"\n\n\"I wonder could you be suffering from depression?\" he asked her, peering at her more closely.\n\n\"Do I look like I'm suffering from depression?\"\n\n\"You're not suffering from a terminal illness,\" he said, ticking another box in his head.\n\n\"Of course I am! I'm suffering from the onset of old age, which in all cases that I know of has proved to be fatal.\"\n\nHe didn't even smile.\n\n\"You do know it's illegal for me to help you?\"\n\n\"I'm not asking you to help me. I'm simply asking you to provide me with my medical records and confirm that I'm of sound mind.\"\n\n\"Oh, this is all most unusual.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" said Deirdre, happily.\n\n\"I would strongly urge you to inform your family of your plans.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" she said, although of course she had absolutely no intention of telling them. That was all part of the fun, the surprise they would get when she sprang it on them. Manus in particular she delighted in surprising. She couldn't help wishing she would be around to see his face when he heard. It was Manus, more than anyone, who would appreciate the supreme stylishness of this thing she was planning to do.\n\n\"I wonder have you stopped to consider the effect this will have on your children?\" asked the doctor.\n\nDeirdre looked at him, wondering how on earth he could be so maddeningly stupid.\n\n\"Don't you see? I'll be doing them a favor.\"\n\nAnd really, that did seem to Deirdre to be the case. By releasing them from any duty of care to her as she got older, by dividing between them the not insignificant sum of money she had scrimped and saved over the years before it was swallowed up by doctors' bills and nursing home charges, it did seem to Deirdre that she would be doing her family a huge favor.\n\nOnce the decision was made, there was a great falling away of her fears. The things that had worried her before\u2014the cataracts and the sciatica, the dilapidated state of her house\u2014these seemed no more than mere irritations to her now. The clouds she had seen gathering\u2014the cancers and the dementia, the incontinence and the immobility\u2014they had miraculously cleared, and for the moment at least, Deirdre saw nothing but blue sky above her. A frothy sweetness to everything, it was as if her life was made of nothing but sherbet. She found herself prone to unexpected bursts of happiness, singing as she went about the house, songs she had not sung since her girlhood.\n\nWhen the old house creaked at night, Deirdre rolled over in the bed and went straight back to sleep. When winter storms tore a long portion of guttering from the back wall, she picked it up and tossed it into the flower bed. When the weathermen predicted flooding as a consequence of global warming, and wet summers in perpetuity, she didn't pay a blind bit of attention, because she wasn't going to be there to worry about it.\n\n\"I've decided to throw a party for my birthday,\" she told her children. \"I thought it would be nice to gather us all together under the one roof.\"\n\n\"Why would that be nice?\" asked Alma, with a disdainful expression that was most typical of her.\n\n\"We could combine it with your fiftieth if you like?\" Deirdre suggested to Acushla, in a moment of rather rash generosity.\n\n\"Why on earth would I want to go advertising the fact that I'm turning fifty?\" asked Acushla, appalled.\n\n\"It's going to be a proper party,\" said Deirdre doggedly. \"We'll have champagne, and canap\u00e9s, and printed invitations.\"\n\n\"It sounds more like a wedding,\" said Macdara, in a morose tone.\n\nAnd Deirdre giggled, giddy as a young bride. Because Macdara was right! This was not at all unlike a wedding, what with its focus on the fripperies rather than the momentous step into the unknown that would follow.\n\nDeirdre had an image in mind of her party, an image that drew on a painting she had always loved. The painting was by Sir John Lavery, and it had been hanging for many years in the National Gallery; for many years Deirdre had been in the habit of dropping into the gallery to visit it, as you might visit an old friend. The subject of the painting was Lady Lavery, and she was depicted seated in a vast and grand room, wearing long, rich robes of satin and silk. On her head she wore an elaborate feathered turban, and her daughters and a dog were arrayed around her, with a servant bearing a tray aloft in the background. In the painting, Lady Lavery's long, pale face was luminous, her posture serene, her eyes sadly knowing.\n\nDeirdre fancies that she used to look like Lady Lavery, a resemblance that was pointed out to her once by a drunk at a party. \"Look,\" said the drunk, \"it's the lady on the face of the old pound note!\" And while Deirdre had brushed off his ramblings with a self-deprecating laugh, while she had pretended to be embarrassed by him, really she was flattered. Ever since then it has formed a private but important part of her image of herself, this notion of a resemblance to Lady Lavery, so that when she thinks back on herself as a young woman, it is Lady Lavery's face that comes to mind, clearer than any memory of her own.\n\nIn imagining her party, Deirdre has an image in her mind of that particular painting. She visualizes herself seated in similarly theatrical attire in her own living room, with her family arrayed around her. In planning the party, she is constructing a subtle _tableau vivant_ in her head. It occurs to her fleetingly that the desire to create this tableau might be the only reason for having the party. If she were to dredge her soul, she might find this to be true. But Deirdre has been playing a part for so many years that she has long since given up on trying to find the place where her own personality ends and the pretending begins.\n\n**In Her Own Words:**\n\n**Alma MacEntee**\n\n**in conversation with Dara Lynch**\n\n**What's your favorite film?** _La Dolce Vita._\n\n**What's your favorite book?** _Love in a Cold Climate_ , by Nancy Mitford. She makes my family seem almost normal, by comparison.\n\n**What part of your body do you like best?** My breasts. If I say so myself, I've great tits.\n\n**Part of the body that you like least?** My teeth. I come from a generation before perfect teeth.\n\n**What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?** Slovenliness.\n\n**What is the trait you most deplore in others?** Humorlessness.\n\n**Which living person do you most admire, and why?** My father, because he has never lost his sense of innocence.\n\n**What is your greatest regret?** I don't believe in regrets.\n\n**What's your favorite smell?** The smell of rashers being cooked for me.\n\n**Who's your favorite fictional hero\/heroine?** Scarlett O'Hara.\n\n**And your hero\/heroine in real life?** Hillary Clinton.\n\n**Have you ever said \"I love you\" and not meant it?** No.\n\n**What is your most treasured possession?** My waistline.\n\n**What beauty product could you not live without?** My factor 50 sunscreen.\n\n**Who would you choose to play you in the film of your life?** Julianne Moore.\n\n**Who's your ideal dinner guest?** My ex-husband (I'd poison him).\n\n**Motto?** Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.\n\n# Alma\n\nAlma MacEntee. Five syllables that, when spoken out loud (as they often are), tumble into each other with an energy that seems to come from within. Almamacentee. A bubbling stream of a word that, in the time it takes for it to travel through the locks and sluice gates of your brain, calls to mind a slew of images, slabs of information, half-remembered snippets of gossip. A gash of red lipstick, a helmet of unashamedly red hair. That hair that seems to get redder all the time, heightening the effect of the china-white skin and the always-amused eyes. In your head you can hear that oh-so-familiar voice, with its almost inappropriate suggestion of intimacy.\n\nAlma MacEntee. In the less than three seconds it takes for you to hear her name, you have her whole history in your head, and with it your own. You remember her beginnings, how she spilled out of the continuity studio and shouldered her way through the dandruff-smattered suits on election night, an oversized microphone in her hand, the questions she asked famous now for their fearlessness. In her next incarnation she was standing on a small, round podium in a pool of artificial light, a dark, murmuring crowd at her feet. The silver gown she wore fell from her hips like an oil spill and her hair was styled into two shining chestnut wings that swept off her painted face. \"And now for the results of the Belgian jury,\" she said. \" _Royaume-Uni, dix points_. United Kingdom, ten points. _Irlande, douze points_. Ireland twelve points.\" As the crowd went wild, Alma MacEntee allowed herself a smile. Of course, nowadays her eyes wrinkle when she smiles, which is why she is careful not to do it so often. Nowadays she is more often seen with her eyebrows disdainfully raised, her elbow resting on the studio table as if in preparation for a bout of arm-wrestling, one manicured fingernail poised to signal an interruption to this or that politician.\n\nShe was married to a politician, once. You remember their whirlwind romance. You remember the front-page photos of their wedding and the kiss for the cameras. You remember the divorce, back when divorce was a scandal. (Was it even legal to get divorced back then? It seems that Alma MacEntee was a divorcee before divorce existed.) She was the lover of a prominent businessman, the lover of a famous actor, the lover of a newspaper owner, long before the word \"lover\" was ever spoken out loud. She was a woman before her time. And while all the Marys and Anns of the small screen were spoken of with their surnames attached, to distinguish them from all the other Marys and Anns out there in the world, while the Eileens and Sharons were sometimes confused with or mistaken for other Eileens and Sharons, Alma MacEntee required only four letters to define her.\n\nAlma.\n\nOn the first day of April\u2014a day she always considered the first day of spring, treating as a bad joke the notion that spring arrived in these parts in February, or even March\u2014Alma woke at seven, as she always did, to the sound of the radio. She lay in her vast empty bed, as was her practice, while she listened to the headlines, suppressing a growl as she heard the morning newscaster mispronounce Barack Obama's name again. No matter how many times Alma lobbed angry rants into General Mail, no matter how many times she raised the issue with the subs, the newsreaders persisted in mispronouncing his name, placing the stress on the first syllable instead of the second. Was the man himself not authority enough on the pronunciation of his own name? Was his wife not to be trusted to get it right? All you had to do was listen to them, for Christ's sake. Swinging her feet out of bed, Alma fought the urge to ring in.\n\n\"I'm a crank,\" she said, even though there was no one there to hear her. She nodded, as always, in agreement with herself. \"I know. I'm a crank.\"\n\nPulling her black velvet robe off the back of the bedroom door, she made her way down into the kitchen, where another radio was tuned in to the same station. She turned on the coffee machine, and while she waited for it to heat up, she stared out of the window into the small back garden, where her daughter's bicycle lay abandoned against the wall, a garland of plastic flowers wound around the handlebars and a threadbare tarpaulin of cobwebs hanging over it. Across the skyline the neighbor's washing swayed in the breeze, underpants and shirts hanging upside down like a row of dead cats strung up by their front paws.\n\nAlma turned away from the window to make her coffee. In her mind she was already running through her agenda for the day, careful not to get anything out of sequence. The hairdresser's first. Then the dry cleaner's. And she had better stop by the paper for a minute on her way in to work, just to cut off any trouble at the pass.\n\nFor that, she'd be needing some war paint.\n\n\"Well,\" said Jim, when she walked into his office without knocking.\n\nHe was sitting at his desk with his jacket off, wearing a lemon-yellow shirt (cotton-polyester mix, Alma would be willing to bet) with a Cross pen in the breast pocket. A cheap red tie curled up in his in-tray like a sleeping snake.\n\n\"I got your message,\" said Alma.\n\nJim propped his feet up on the desk. He leaned back in his chair and intertwined his hands behind his head, revealing the underarms of his shirt, dark and wet.\n\nAlma's expression did not waver.\n\nShe advanced into the room, walking from her hips. She ignored the two chairs that sat facing the desk, weaving her way round to sit on the edge of it instead. She had one bum cheek on the surface, one in mid-air, her pencil skirt riding high above her knees. She wrapped her left ankle around her right leg, balancing herself on a single three-inch heel. (Men like Jim aren't used to having beautiful women flirting with them. This was something that Alma understood. Flirt with a man like Jim, and he's yours for life.)\n\n\"I'm listening,\" he said, his eyes bulging as he looked at her. Alma allowed the faintest touch of a smile to tug at one corner of her lips.\n\n\"I thought it was funny. Go on, Jim. Admit it. You thought it was funny too.\"\n\nHe sighed.\n\n\"People seem to have taken offense.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" she said. \"People.\"\n\nEyebrows raised, she waited for him to say more.\n\n\"The earthworm analogy, in particular, seems to have upset them.\"\n\nShe shrugged.\n\n\"I thought the earthworm thing was quite mild, actually. I've said way worse stuff than that in my time.\"\n\nAnd she had. There was the piece about Ladies' Day at the races (Crufts for humans), the one about West End musicals (strictly special needs, she had suggested, and was forced to apologize a week later, to special needs people and West End musicals both. It was the first of many apologies).\n\n\"Personally, I think the obesity piece was my most offensive to date.\"\n\nHe put his hand over his face.\n\n\"Don't remind me.\"\n\nShe had him now. She knew she had him. But he still had to put up the pretense of a fight.\n\n\"Alma,\" he said, throwing his arms out wide. \"You know as well as I do. I pay you to be provocative. People read your column _because_ it's provocative. But there's a line there, and we need to stay on the right side of it.\"\n\n\"So what are you saying? The earthworm thing was the wrong side of the line?\"\n\n\"Forty-six e-mails, twelve letters and nineteen phone calls.\"\n\nAlma planted one hand on the surface of the desk. The other hand she propped on her hip, and like a teapot, she tipped herself forward.\n\n\"Jim,\" she said, in her deepest, throatiest voice. \"People have no sense of humor anymore.\"\n\n\"These are serious times. Call it evolution.\"\n\n\"In that case, we're the dinosaurs, darling.\"\n\nHe laughed. It was the use of the word \"we\" that was warming him up. The thought of him and her, wrapped up together in that one little word.\n\n\"We're not extinct yet,\" he said, his raw, doughy face flushed with his own fumbling flirtation.\n\n\"No, darling,\" said Alma, narrowing her eyes at him. \"We're not extinct yet. And we must not go down without a fight.\"\n\nThe phone on Jim's desk rang and he reached out to pick it up, winking at her with his left eye, while his greedy little right eye slobbered all over her. She hopped down off the desk and sashayed toward the door, enjoying the knowledge that he was watching her arse as she went. At the door, she turned to blow him a kiss.\n\nHis secretary was sitting outside, watching her with heavy eyes.\n\n\"You know yourself,\" said Alma, pausing to lay a hand on the secretary's desk. \"A girl has to make a living.\"\n\nEight hours later (after three more cups of coffee, two interminable editorial meetings and a marathon session in makeup), she was sitting in the studio. Her hair was sprayed to the texture of dry bark, and she was wearing a creamy white jacket that set off her coloring perfectly. A skimpy black tank top revealed her milky cleavage. Thirty seconds to air and she took a cosmetic purse out from under the table, opened it up and started applying a fresh layer of lipstick.\n\n\"Jesus,\" said the program editor, in the control room. \"I wish she wouldn't do that.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't mind,\" said the studio director, \"but that shade of lipstick she insists on wearing? It's completely inappropriate for a news program.\"\n\n\"I'll tell you what. Why don't you be the one to tell her?\"\n\nSniggers from the shadows, interrupted by Alma's voice, amplified through the gallery.\n\n\"Where are we going first?\"\n\nThe program editor went into a spasm, grappling at the heap of papers in front of him.\n\n\"Jesus! Does she not have the running order?\"\n\nThis tendency of Alma's to wander into the studio without her notes was the stuff of legend. Legendary also was her ability to manage without them. She had been known to present an entire program without so much as glancing down at her scripts. She had sailed through the first segment of an election special once with her constituency guide sitting on top of the coffee machine in the corridor; when at last the ad break arrived and a broadcast assistant dashed in with it, it was only to be stared at by Alma as if to say, what would I need that for? She had winged her way through the peace process, presenting programs late into the night from outside Hillsborough Castle, or Stormont, without so much as a handwritten lead-in. She had done outside broadcasts from rain-sodden piers and muddy fields, or on bridges over flooded rivers, with no more equipment than a powder puff and a golf umbrella. When the autocue went down on budget night 2010, she had not even raised an eyebrow, because she had all the figures in her head.\n\nSo if Alma was a picture of calm fifteen seconds to air and flying the studio blind, then this should have been no surprise to anyone. What was surprising was the panic in the gallery. The gallery had never learned not to panic. The program editor was standing up, gripping his skull with his hands to contain his stress. A broadcast assistant was standing at the studio door with Alma's scripts, her little heart pounding with fear as she waited for the opportunity to slip inside.\n\nThe director leaned in to the talkback.\n\n\"Straight to Government Buildings,\" she said, holding the button down. \"You should have Simon McFeeley in vision.\"\n\n\"Simon!\" said Alma, as if she had just bumped into him on the street. \"How are you, my darling?\"\n\nHer voice shattered the sanctity of the empty studio.\n\n\"Hi, Alma,\" came Simon's voice in return, delayed by a two-second lag.\n\n\"Ten seconds to air,\" said the broadcast coordinator.\n\nAlma gave her hair one last little pat. She dropped her chin a little, to disguise the wrinkles on her neck, as the broadcast coordinator began the countdown. The sting began to roll, graphics tumbling through splintered space. Alma appeared on the monitor, face full square to the camera, blue eyes twinkling. Her perfect symmetry lent her a luminescence onscreen that was not apparent in the flesh. She looked, quite simply, magnificent.\n\n\"Good evening,\" she said. \"And welcome to _Headline_. Coming up on tonight's program, the latest on the talks between the Troika and the Department of Finance. A rude awakening for the drinks industry. And the abolition of the Senate: we debate the pros and cons. But first I'm joined from Government Buildings by our political editor Simon McFeeley...\"\n\n\"Sweet Jesus,\" said the program editor, leaning back into his chair. \"That woman puts years on me.\"\n\nThe lights were still on in the stadium when Alma's taxi swung into the square.\n\nBloody waste of electricity, she thought, wondering to herself was this the seed of a column. Not enough, she decided, and let the thought sink to the bottom of her mind.\n\nThe taxi driver slowed to a crawl, bending low over the steering wheel as he peered up at the stadium. The place was still relatively new; it had been named after the insurance company who sponsored it, and while at first the city's residents had vowed never to use this new name, it was slowly slipping into the lexicon in much the same way as the stadium itself had ingratiated itself into the city's affections. From a distance, it had a curiously transparent appearance, like a great glass bubble on the skyline, but up close and hovering above the forty dark houses of the square, it looked like a spaceship. A great glowing ship of steel and glass.\n\nThe taxi driver was gaping out of the window at it. An Indian man, or Pakistani perhaps, he had a laminated picture of his children on the dashboard.\n\n\"Anywhere here is fine,\" said Alma, impatient to get out of the cab.\n\nThe driver stopped at the corner of the square, but he continued to look up at the stadium. \"You are very lucky,\" he said. \"You are so lucky, to live beside this magnificent stadium. I would be very happy to live beside this stadium.\"\n\nIt was something that Alma found impossible to understand, the devotion of sports fans to this secular temple. From far and wide they came, posing for photographs in front of it. (\"It's a _football stadium_ ,\" Alma had written in one of her columns. \"It's not the Taj Mahal.\")\n\n\"I'll sign for that,\" she said, desperate to be out of the cab. The arches of her feet were aching and her mouth was dry. She was longing to take off her shoes. Longing for a drink, and the ritual post-program cigarette; it was the only one she allowed herself these days.\n\nThe driver turned round to face her. \"On my day off, I am going to come back here. I am going to bring my son to see your gorgeous stadium.\"\n\nThe word \"gorgeous,\" spoken in a Dublin accent.\n\n\"It's not really my stadium,\" said Alma, leaning into the gap between the seats. \"Now if you don't mind, I'll sign your docket for you.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" said the driver. \"Sorry.\" He rooted about in the glove compartment until he found the docket book. Rooted again until he found a pen. Alma signed her name, adding a hefty tip as she always did.\n\nAs she climbed the steps to her house, the square behind her was in shadow. A small enclave of forty red-brick Victorian villas, at one time these would have been solid working-class homes, but then people like Alma started moving in, attracted by the relatively reasonable prices and the proximity to town. Barely twenty minutes' walk to Grafton Street, Alma didn't even need to keep a car, choosing to make liberal use of taxis with impunity instead.\n\nShe raised her knee to her chest to prop up her handbag while she fished around for her front-door keys. By the time she was finally turning the key in the lock, the taxi was sliding out of the square. She pushed open the front door and tossed her keys on to the table inside. She stepped out of her shoes, and with her stockinged foot she gave the door a shove to close it, but the shove didn't take. It didn't take because there was someone standing behind her, holding the door open with his boot.\n\nHORROR ATTACK ON JOURNO was the banner headline in the evening paper the next day. BRAVE ALMA REFUSED TO GIVE THIEVES HER RINGS said a smaller headline on the inside page. And in even smaller print there followed the gory detail: TV STAR LOSES TWO FINGERS IN HORROR ATTACK.\n\n\"It's the familiarity with which they use your first name,\" said her mother. \"That's what I'd have a problem with.\"\n\nAlma's mother had a peculiar talent for tangents. She could discover tangents that no one else knew were there, seizing on them with a single-minded zeal, as if she alone had the power to see through to the heart of the matter.\n\n\"Whatever about the fingers,\" she said. \"The fingers you can live without. It's the familiarity, don't you see? They're on first-name terms with you. That's what I'd have a problem with.\"\n\nAlma looked to her brother first, then to her father for help.\n\nMacdara was standing over by the window. With his eyes roaming the ceiling, it was hard to know if he'd heard. Macdara was often adrift like this. No matter what room he was in, he seemed always to be looking for a way out.\n\nAlma's father was sitting to the left of her bed in a padded chair that doubled as a commode. He was wearing his customary daytime outfit. A nautical blazer, shiny from over-wear, with a handmade shirt that was thirty years old and scuffed at the cuffs and collar. A pair of white cotton trousers that rode high enough on his ankles to reveal a natty pair of turquoise socks. With his shock of white hair, he looked like an aging Captain Sensible: all he was missing was the parrot on his shoulder. He was sitting bolt upright in the chair, but his head had drooped to one side. A lick of hair had fallen across his forehead and his eyes were closed. Poor old boy, Alma thought. He had been the first to arrive. Woken by the early-morning call, he had burst into the hospital room barely twenty minutes later, unshaven and wild-eyed, the nurse trailing after him starstruck. If this was a test of love, then Alma's father had won it hands down.\n\nIt had taken her mother a good hour to arrive (even though her house was nearer, as the crow flies), and when she did come she was dressed for a performance. Her long gray hair was swept up off her face in great swirls that came together in a huge bird's nest on top of her head, and she was wearing her trademark black riding skirt with a purple silk blouse buttoned high up her neck. Thrown over it all was a black wool cape. She looked like she was going to a Bloomsday event.\n\n\"Darling,\" she said, as she bent over her daughter's bed.\n\nAlma found herself drowning in Yardley's Lily of the Valley. So her mother had even taken the time to douse herself in perfume.\n\n_Maman, nul points_.\n\n\"Who would you like me to ring?\" the nurse had asked Alma, as soon as she came out of the anesthetic. \"There was no ICE contact on your phone. We didn't know who to ring.\"\n\nThirst was Alma's first thought. Her mouth was so dry she couldn't swallow. Her next thought was that she was cold. A terrible cold, as if she'd been refrigerated from the inside out.\n\n\"Cold,\" she said. \"Very cold.\"\n\nThe nurse came and covered her with some extra blankets. She gave her a sponge stick to suck, which relieved the parched mouth but not the cracked lips. As her physical discomfort crashed over her like a wave, Alma became aware of her right hand, bulkier than it should be and swaddled tight by her side.\n\n\"How did I get here?\" she asked, noticing the curtained cubicle she found herself in. The large empty window to her left, with the daylight just starting to leach through the clouds. From somewhere outside the cubicle she became aware of noises. A clattering of tin; by the sound of it, someone was shaking a sack full of saucepans. The nurse was checking a bag of fluid that was hanging by Alma's bed. She bent down to write something on a chart, answering Alma's question without looking at her.\n\n\"You were brought in by ambulance.\"\n\nAs soon as she said it, Alma remembered. She remembered the ambulance men in their astronauts' boots traipsing across the bloodstained floor of her kitchen. She remembered worrying that they'd walk the blood into the hall carpet on their way back out. \"Darling,\" one of them had said to her, once they'd strapped her into the wheelchair. \"Now, darling,\" he had said as they lifted the chair down the front steps. Alma remembered being touched by the way he said it, as if she was his daughter, or his sweetheart even.\n\n\"Who called them?\" she asked.\n\nBut the nurse didn't answer. She was copying numbers down on to the chart from a digital monitor by the bedside.\n\n\"Any pain?\" she asked, and she paused to scrutinize Alma's face.\n\n\"No. No pain.\"\n\n\"It was Mr. Maguire who operated on you,\" said the nurse. \"He's gone home to get a few hours' sleep, but when he gets back he'll come and talk to you. In the meantime, is there anyone you'd like us to ring?\"\n\nThe first person who came to mind was Mick. Mick was the one to ring, naturally. Why did they even have to ask? She was just about to tell them when she remembered that she was no longer married to him. Hadn't been married to him for fifteen years. As she retraced the steps in her mind, it was with a vast sense of loss. She missed him, all of a sudden, as she had never missed him before. She could have cried with the pain of missing him.\n\nThe next person she thought of was Nora, but as soon as she thought of her daughter, she thought also of her absence. Pointless to even try and contact her.\n\n\"My mum,\" she said to the nurse. \"In my phone you'll find numbers for my mum and dad.\"\n\nThinking, Great! Fifty years old and my next of kin are my mum and dad.\n\nSo here they were, Alma's parents. Sitting on opposite sides of her bed, like an old married couple settled into their armchairs around the fire on a winter's evening. (Macdara had disappeared without anyone noticing.)\n\n\"Is he asleep?\" asked Alma's mother, nodding toward Alma's father.\n\n\"Who?\" said her father, snapping himself awake. \"Not at all. I was just dozing.\"\n\n\"It's the narcolepsy,\" said her mother, speaking to Alma. \"It's genetic. His father had it before him.\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" said Alma's father, yawning. \"You're just jealous of my ability to fall asleep at will.\"\n\nAlma's mother sat up even straighter in her chair and without comment began to nudge any stray hairs away from her forehead, using spidery fingers. That famous hair; it lent her an air of theatricality that was by no means accidental. She liked to think she still belonged to the theater, even though it was thirty years since she'd been on a stage.\n\n_Mad old bag_ was the general impression she gave, whereas Alma's father was a _wonderful eccentric_. An inequity that was apparent to nobody more than to Alma's mother herself. \"Your father,\" she would say, \"seems to have achieved a kind of cult status in his old age. But I, on the other hand, remain a mere curiosity.\" And while all of his eccentricities seemed effortless (the disco dancing and the eye makeup, the clapped-out old Jag); while his multiplying oddities seemed more an unpeeling of his personality than an adornment to it, hers had a somewhat forced air about them, as if she was just hashing over a part she'd been playing for years.\n\n\"Oh,\" said Alma's father. \"I forgot. I have something for you from Sam.\" Shifting his weight, he began to feel around in the pockets of his jacket. \"I know I put it in here somewhere.\"\n\nAt last he located what he was looking for, tucked inside his breast pocket. A small, much-folded parcel made out of a single sheet of paper, which he passed across to Alma. Painstakingly using her left hand, she unfolded it and revealed a perfectly round coin of golden foiled paper; painted on the surface of it, in black ink, was the silhouette of a small bird in flight.\n\n\"Oh,\" she said, clamping it to her heart. \"I love it. Tell Sam I said thank you.\"\n\nSam, who you couldn't help but love, even though Sam, just twenty-four years old at the time and fresh out of Tangier, was the reason why Alma's parents' marriage had broken down. (\"Oh, that's rubbish, darling,\" Alma's mother had said once. \"It wasn't the affair with a younger man that ruined our marriage. It was your father's vulgar addiction to Hellmann's mayonnaise.\")\n\n\"How is he?\" Alma's mother asked now, with genuine concern.\n\nCheerfully, Alma's father bobbed his head.\n\n\"Oh, he's much the same. Although he's not happy with the new regime I have him on. I'm feeding him mackerel three times a day. Apparently it has miraculous healing powers.\"\n\n\"You make him sound like a sea lion,\" said Alma's mother, her eyes wide and startled. \"Of course the fish oil seems to be the cure for everything nowadays. That and the blueberries.\" She pronounced the word with great suspicion, as if it was a trick.\n\n\"Oh, yes. Sam and I are all for the blueberries. We eat them for breakfast, with granola.\"\n\n\"It's well for you,\" said Alma's mother, \"that you can afford to live on blueberries.\"\n\nNever did she let an opportunity go by to remind him of her impecunity. Alma laid her head back against her pillow and closed her eyes as they continued to bat back and forth across her bed.\n\n\"I'm afraid Sam's diet isn't the problem. It's the climate. He wasn't bred for this ghastly climate.\"\n\n\"We were none of us bred for this climate. If we were, we'd have fins.\"\n\n\"What was that Seamus Heaney poem?\"\n\nAnd so their conversation meandered from superfoods to Seamus Heaney. From Seamus Heaney to Yeats and from Yeats to book tokens and on to Greene's bookshop and the dapper little man who used to deliver their books for them, what was his name?\n\nAs Alma listened to them, it seemed to her that their conversation was like a deck of cards that had been well and truly shuffled and then dealt out, each card appearing at random but still familiar. The whole time she lay there listening to them, the one thing they did not discuss was the thing that had happened to Alma.\n\n\"Remember that scene in _Reservoir Dogs_?\"\n\nAlma's visitors nodded nervously.\n\n\"Well, it wasn't a bit like that.\"\n\nShe was sitting up against a bank of pillows, a black satin kimono jacket draped elegantly over her shoulders and the wounded hand lying discreetly by her side. She had managed to style her hair with some hand cream, which, incredibly, someone had brought her as a gift, but in the absence of her regular, ruthless blow-dry, her hair was taking its first tentative steps back to nature. Thicker and frizzier, it had the effect of softening her face. She had contrived somehow to apply some makeup, using her left hand and without the use of a mirror. The action of painting on her eyebrows, for so long a reflex, now had to be performed with careful deliberation. Even the application of lipstick, which with her right hand she could have done in her sleep, felt weirdly new. It was as if she'd been turned inside out.\n\nAlma's visitors were gathered around the bed, sitting in an assortment of ugly hospital chairs filched from other, less visited rooms. The air was thick with the fug of tiger lilies. The windowsills, the ledges, the surface of the bedside locker, all crammed with expensive floral arrangements. What with the heat in the room and all that foliage, it was like being in one of the greenhouses at the Botanic Gardens.\n\n\"Get a bottle of Prosecco out of the fridge,\" Alma told her visitors when they arrived, gesturing with her good hand toward the small fridge in the corner of the room. \"I've decided that Prosecco is going to play a key role in my recovery. Declan, you can do the honors.\"\n\nDeclan, who had started out in the newsroom on the same day as Alma. She remembers him, straight out of _The Tuam Herald_ , with his cowlick and his confirmation suit. He was head of news now, and therefore Alma's boss. Were she and Declan friends? She thought not. And yet he had come to visit her, all the same, out of duty most likely. And Pat Deacon and Mary O'Malley had volunteered, or more likely been volunteered. A reluctant delegation, they bore with them bags of small gifts sent by those lucky enough to be spared.\n\nDeclan poured the Prosecco into four ribbed plastic cups that he found in a stack on top of the fridge. Awkwardly, they all toasted Alma, keeping their eyes on her face so as not to look at the hand. They sipped at the Prosecco, with the plastic cups buckling in their hands, each of them secretly determined to leave their drink unfinished (Declan because he was driving, Pat because she had to chair the afternoon news conference and Mary because she had to read the two o'clock bulletin).\n\nThe door opened. A head poked around it, a head that for some reason always called to Alma's mind a raw chicken, or a lanky turkey. Free range, with that yellow tinge.\n\n\"You all know Jim,\" said Alma. \"Long-suffering editor of my newspaper column.\"\n\nJim was holding a bunch of pre-packed flowers, clearly from the Spar. (\"Follow the crowd,\" the nurse had said, when he asked her which room.)\n\n\"Hiya, Jim,\" said the others, shifting in their chairs to acknowledge his arrival.\n\n\"Well,\" said Jim, looking around for somewhere to put the flowers.\n\n\"Just put them in the sink,\" said Alma. \"They've run out of vases.\"\n\nJim settled himself against the scorching-hot radiator as Alma continued her story.\n\n\"I'm afraid I was unlucky in my attacker. I'm not sure he'd severed many fingers before. He made quite a meal of it. Funny, the bone was the easy bit. I suppose when you think about it, it makes sense. You know when you chop up a chicken? It's easy enough to cut through the bone, if you have a sharp knife. The skin is the tricky bit. There's always a bit of skin that just won't break.\"\n\nA horrified silence in the room.\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" said Alma. \"Is this hard to listen to? I'm so sorry.\"\n\nShe took a sip of her Prosecco, and flashed them a smile.\n\n\"Actually, I'm not a bit sorry. Pity about you.\"\n\nThey set down their plastic cups, glanced at each other to synchronize their departure and, like a flurry of startled birds, took off. Declan made the first move, but Mary and Pat jumped up after him and they walked out together, taking grateful gulps of the cold air outside. Conscious, each of them, of their ten movable fingers.\n\n\"She's got balls,\" said Pat. \"You have to say that for her.\"\n\n\"Ah, she's some woman,\" said Declan. \"She'd be great in a war.\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" said Mary. \"All that bravado, it's the drugs talking. She must be up to her eyeballs in morphine. I hate to think how she'll feel when it wears off.\"\n\n\"God help her,\" said Pat. \"What a horrible thing to happen.\"\n\nThe morphine was heaven for the first twenty-four hours.\n\nAfter that, Alma began to feel imprisoned by it. She was struggling to distinguish between day and night. She was too high and she wanted to climb down. Whereas before she had thrilled in this soaring pain-free elation, now she wanted rid of it. She needed to face up to reality, whatever reality was. When her surgeon came by on his rounds, she asked him to take her bandages off. She wanted to see the damage to her hand.\n\n\"Are you sure?\"\n\nAlma was sitting on top of the covers, with her white La Perla nightdress pulled up high on her thigh to reveal two long and shapely legs. She was confident he would not notice the stubble on her calves, the plum-colored polish on her toenails that was starting to chip.\n\n\"Come on, Luke,\" she said. \"I'm a big girl. How bad can it be?\" (She had met him at a dinner party once and was determined to continue their relationship on the same footing, as a social acquaintance rather than a patient.)\n\nShe shifted herself up in the bed and he sat down on the edge of it. He looked her in the eye and Alma felt something unfurl inside her, something she recognized belatedly as a rustle of panic. She forced herself not to blink.\n\n\"Okay,\" he said, and without turning he spoke to the nurse who was hovering behind him. \"Jean, can you get me some scissors, please. I'm going to change Miss MacEntee's dressings for her.\"\n\n\"Careful,\" croaked Alma. \"That could be misinterpreted.\"\n\nEven to her own ears, the attempt at flirting fell flat.\n\nThe bandages came off easily, exposing first of all an entirely normal-looking thumb. Next to emerge was a relatively unscathed index finger; the only evidence of any injury was the crust of dried blood that had settled into the wrinkles on the finger, like the sediment left at the bottom of a glass of red wine. The fingernail had black blood caked into the cuticle, as if she had been digging in soil. Carefully, he peeled back the gauze to reveal what was left of the middle finger. It had been severed just above the first knuckle and the stump had been sewn up with what looked like barbed wire, the rounded tip of it blackened, as if the fingertip had been burned off. The ring finger, too, was blackened and criss-crossed with barbed wire. It had been severed just below the knuckle.\n\nAlma noticed that she was breathing out through her mouth. In through the nose, out through the mouth, the way they teach you in pre-natal classes.\n\n\"I warned you it wouldn't be pretty.\"\n\nShe nodded.\n\nHe removed the last bit of bandaging, and a perfectly intact, precious little finger emerged. Alma felt a rush of pity for it.\n\n\"Poor little finger. He's been left out on a bit of a limb, hasn't he?\"\n\nThe joke fell out of her, mis-spaced. Misjudged. Maguire didn't even smile.\n\n\"We had a job tidying it up,\" he said. \"Most of the amputations we see are power-tool-related, which makes them fairly straightforward, but yours was a bit trickier than that. We were three hours in surgery trying to reattach the fingers.\"\n\nHe reminded Alma of a mechanic discussing a tricky problem with an engine. She gave up any hope of flirting with him.\n\n\"You're as well off, actually,\" he was saying. \"Reattached fingers tend to be a bit troublesome. \"Believe it or not, you're as well off without them.\"\n\nIt was not true that Alma had refused to give her attackers the rings. She would have given them the rings in two seconds if she'd only been able to get them off her fingers. She'd have thrown the bloody things at them, and good riddance to them. They were a relic of her marriage, those rings. An ugly, oversized ruby that came down from Mick's grandmother, and an ostentatious clutch of diamonds he'd bought her with some cash he didn't want the tax man to get his hands on. When they'd split up, she had transferred the rings to her right hand rather than give them back to him. If she'd been wearing them on her left hand, her attackers would have chopped those fingers off instead and Alma would have been left with the use of her right hand. She'd have been able to put her makeup on properly. She'd have been able to write, for God's sake. In a way, she decided, this was all Mick's fault.\n\nTwo days since the accident\u2014why did everyone insist on calling it an accident? Two days since the _attack_ , and not a squeak out of him. He must have heard about it by now. He was in Brussels, for God's sake, not Ulan Bator. There was no way he wouldn't have heard. More than a year since she had spoken to him, but she imagined that maybe now, because of this, he would break the silence. What was she expecting, flowers? Who was she kidding? Even at the best of times Mick had never been a great man for the flowers. The first time he took her out to dinner, he ducked under the table to look at her legs. That was the most romantic thing he ever did.\n\nEven when Nora was born, there were no roses. No \"push gift\"\u2014isn't that what they call it now? A revolting notion, and anyway, Nora was born by C-section because she was lying breech. Alma had banned Mick from the operating theater, mortified by the notion of him seeing her with her belly sliced open. Mick had been relieved that she had taken the decision out of his hands. He waited in the pub around the corner until they sent for him, the phone ringing behind the bar; he said it was the only time he ever left a pint half drunk. Alma remembers how the midwife handed Nora to him, an awkward maneuver of the elbows, as if between them they were trying to make a cat's cradle. Mick bent down low over the baby and whispered something in her ear, something Alma couldn't hear. It was the start of a long father\u2013daughter conversation, one that might on the face of it have seemed to be driven by their differences. To Alma's eyes, they were more alike than either of them realized. The same stubbornness in each of them, even if it found a different expression.\n\nShe was always between them, Nora. Driving them apart, keeping them together. Hard to know which. For as long as Nora was a child, they were attached by their mutual attachment to her. And even after they separated, even after Mick went to Brussels and the house they had shared was sold, after Alma and Nora had moved into their new little house and the furniture was divided up, even after all of that, they managed to cooperate in a semi-civilized fashion on the parenting of Nora. But now that Nora was grown-up, now that there were no more school reports to discuss, no parent\u2013teacher meetings at which to present a ham-fisted united front, no graduation ceremonies to attend (one of them on either side of her, with Nora's arms binding them from behind, like a tight chain), now that Nora had drifted out beyond all the milestones, into the murky world she had chosen to inhabit, there was no reason for Mick and Alma to ever speak.\n\nThinking about Nora gave Alma an uneasy feeling, but she could not have said why. Her daughter was occupying her mind with an insistence that was almost physical. Not the Nora of recent times, but the Nora of long ago. Nora at twelve years of age, with her school kilt and her embarrassing budding breasts, and her big sad eyes. Had Alma noticed at the time that Nora was sad? It seemed to her now that her daughter had needed her then, and that she had not been there for her.\n\nOh, she'd been there, of course, she'd been there. She had driven Nora to school every morning and she had come home from work every evening, and they had sat down together to eat whatever meal the child-minder had prepared for them. The child-minder was like an aunt to Nora, she was like a granny to her\u2014Nora was better off with the child-minder, that's what Alma used to tell herself. Anyone could see that Alma wasn't cut out for the job.\n\n\"How do you manage as a single mother?\" she was often asked, in interviews for the lifestyle pages of the papers. And Alma had a stable of stock phrases that she rolled out in reply. \"Oh, I have lots of help,\" she would say, or \"It's a team effort.\" \"It takes a whole village to raise a child,\" she would say. \"I have the greatest admiration for anyone who manages to stay home with their children. I know I couldn't do it.\"\n\nAs she lay in her hospital bed, it occurred to Alma that what she was feeling was guilt. A guilt she had never before stopped for even a moment to entertain, it had her in its grip now and it wouldn't let go of her. With the light outside her window hovering between night and day and the hospital room cast in a bruised blue shadow, with her own voice ringing phrases from the past in her ears, phrases that ran loose in her head, banging the walls as they went and raising echoes to the rafters, Alma realized with great sorrow that she was alone in her hour of need, with no one to blame but herself. She could not call on her daughter now, no matter how much she might feel in need of her. She could not call on her because she had long ago forfeited the right to do so.\n\n\"I've been trying to track her down,\" said Connie, falling into the wing-backed chair beside Alma's bed, with her oversized handbag at her feet and her suede wedges turned inward at the toes. A green felt cloche hat sat on top of her beautiful Modigliani head. The hat's wisp of green netting hovered over her fabulous eyebrows. \"I think she might be on a ship, headed for Gaza. That was her plan, the last time I spoke to her.\"\n\n\"Oh, Jesus,\" said Alma. In her mind she was seeing a headline sequence. A ship at night, with a helicopter hovering overhead. Camouflaged figures wearing night-vision goggles, dropping down on to the deck. The crackle and flash of gunfire. Grenades, louder and brighter again. How many people were killed? Eight? Ten? What were the chances of it happening again?\n\n\"I think they may have sailed from Cyprus, or Greece. Nobody seems to know.\"\n\nAlma pictured a big top-heavy boat, bobbing about on the waves with no radar, no communications, no defenses.\n\n\"I've been trying all the numbers I have for her,\" said Connie. \"Her Irish mobile seems to have been disconnected. The last number she gave me was for a Greek mobile, but I've been ringing and ringing it and I keep getting some guy who doesn't speak any English. I'll try e-mailing her this evening. She may be checking her e-mails.\"\n\n\"Actually,\" said Alma. \"I'd prefer if you didn't.\"\n\nConnie turned her mouth upside down, as she always did when she was dubious about something.\n\n\"I don't see any point in telling her, Connie. If she's on a boat in the middle of nowhere, there's no point in her being told.\"\n\nConnie tilted her head and drew a breath in. She was about to speak when Alma stopped her.\n\n\"Connie, you're going to have to leave this to me. Nora is not to be told.\"\n\nConnie pursed her lips and knitted her eyebrows at Alma, to show that she was unhappy. Like a mime artist, her every feeling played itself out on her face.\n\nConnie of the stolen name, a name Alma had hoarded since childhood, stashing it in a secret place in her heart for the daughter she would one day have (at no point did Alma ever consider the possibility that she would have a son). The only person she confided the name to was her sister, and her sister stole it from her. When Acushla's daughter was born, three months to the day before Alma's, Acushla named her Constance. Furious and hurt, feeling betrayed and blindsided, Alma was forced to go back to the drawing board, and the name she came up with was Nora. In time her sister was to commit worse crimes against her (one crime in particular was far, far worse), but it was the theft of the name that rankled still, long after everything else had ceased to matter.\n\nIt seemed to Alma now that the theft of the name was a crime of lasting consequence. With that name went everything she would have wanted for her daughter, as if the name carried within itself the blueprint of a life. For it is Connie now, who is constant. Connie with her house and her husband and her two little boys. It is Connie who is here at Alma's bedside, while her own daughter is nowhere to be found. It is Connie who is even now unloading bottles of Prosecco from her voluminous handbag and stashing them in the fridge. Connie whom Alma loves, with an easy camaraderie that she has never been able to muster for so much as a single moment with Nora.\n\n\"Has my mum been to see you?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" said Alma. \"She came yesterday. Briefly.\"\n\nAlma knew that Connie had a great desire\u2014a pathetic, childish desire\u2014for her mother and her aunt to be friends again.\n\n\"She brought that orchid,\" said Alma, gesturing with her freshly bandaged hand toward the window, where a spindly black stalk threw out perfect little bursts of magenta flowers.\n\nIt was so typical of Acushla to bring an orchid. She had brought a scented candle too, and a tray of out-of-season peaches, all from Marks & Spencer. Dressed in soft shell-pinks and mauves, she had perched on the edge of the visitor's chair, with her knees falling to the side and her handbag in her lap, like a woman in a waiting room. The space between the chair and the bed may as well have been a vast canyon; as the two sisters spoke, they were both afraid of falling into it. The air between them swirling with all the things they couldn't say to each other.\n\n\"The orchid shouldn't be in the window,\" said Connie, and she went to move it. \"Where will I put it?\"\n\nFor a moment Alma was tempted to tell her to take it home. But she stopped herself.\n\n\"Here,\" she said, clearing a space on her bedside locker. \"Put it here. It's so beautiful, it deserves pride of place.\"\n\nPleased, Connie set the orchid down on the surface of the locker.\n\n\"Well,\" she said. \"I'm afraid I have to dash. I've to collect the gruesome twosome from Mum's.\"\n\n\"All right, doll. Thanks for the supplies.\"\n\n\"No worries. I'll be back tomorrow. Let me know if you need anything.\"\n\nOn her way out of the door, she had to sidestep to avoid bumping into a small Oriental man walking behind an enormous bunch of roses. A jumble of different colors, there were yellow roses, and pink roses, and roses as red as cherries; peach-colored roses, and roses the color of Christmas clementines. The man deposited them on the table tray that hovered over Alma's bed and Alma foraged among the stems with her awkward left hand until she unearthed the florist's envelope. Ripping it open with her teeth, she found a small card bearing a four-line message, typed out in tiny letters.\n\n_You must turn your mournful ditty_\n\n_To a merry measure._\n\n_I will never come for pity,_\n\n_I will come for pleasure._\n\nAlma let her hand drop down on to her lap, with the florist's card still in it. She knew who the flowers were from, even though there was no name. She recognized in the gesture, three days late and already overblown, all the hallmarks of the film director she had been sleeping with, on and off, for the past few months. The very absence of his name, that was a vanity. The extravagance of the bouquet, that was another one\u2014he would have wanted to be certain that his flowers dwarfed everyone else's. The use of the secondhand sliver of Shelley from _Out of Africa_ , that was a vanity heaped on vanities. So she was Karen Blixen to his Denys Finch Hatton, was that what he was suggesting? Or was she Meryl Streep to his Robert Redford? The old Alma would have loved the comparison. The old Alma would have respected the lack of sentiment. But the last few days had changed her, and this was a new Alma, one who was saddened by the flowers, and made lonely by them. She would have preferred that he come and see her, instead of sending her more bloody flowers.\n\nFor the first time in as long as she could remember, for the first time since she was a kid, perhaps, Alma laid her head down and cried wet tears of self-pity that left skid marks of black mascara across the starched white surface of the hospital pillow.\n\nAfter three days in the hospital, Alma was told she could go home. Three days that had been provided to her more as a favor than a necessity\u2014the private wing of the hospital was half empty, so nobody was in a rush to send a fully insured patient home.\n\n\"I'm not sure I'm ready to go,\" she said, panicked at the thought of it.\n\n\"I can't justify keeping you here,\" said Maguire, sitting down companionably on the edge of her bed. \"Your hand is healing well. You've seen the physio, and the pain specialist. I'll see you in a week's time, in my private clinic. In the meantime, I'd recommend the liberal use of painkillers, whenever you need them.\"\n\n\"Couldn't I stay another day or two? I'd like to get some value out of that bloody insurance I've been paying all these years.\"\n\n\"Alma,\" he said, dipping his balding head and looking her sternly in the eye. \"You need to go home.\"\n\nAfter he was gone, she turned her head and stared out of the window. From six floors up, she had a view of the city below her. She could pick out the landmarks of her life, from the water tower at the college where she had once been a student to the transmission mast at the television station where she had spent her whole career. For all its familiarity, there was something about the scene that wasn't quite right. As if there was a kaleidoscope inside her head, one that since the attack had been twisted ever so slightly by an unseen hand, altering the patterns and colors that up until now Alma had been accustomed to seeing. In some weird way that she couldn't yet describe, the entire landscape of her life had become strangely unfamiliar to her.\n\nAfter the attack, all Alma's old columns came back to haunt her. There was the one about the Neighborhood Watch scheme (a license for men with small penises to exploit their vigilante tendencies). The one about Meals on Wheels (shoot me if I'm ever forced to eat an overcooked stew out of a Tupperware container). The demands of friendship (what's so awful about solitude?). After the attack, Alma was afraid to be alone after dark in her own home, but the men on her square were so well informed about her views that they resisted the temptation to check on her, for fear of causing offense. Alma found herself dependent on ready meals because none of the neighboring women dared to darken her door with a casserole. She was desperate for company, but most of her friends and colleagues assumed she'd prefer to be left alone while she recuperated. She found herself stewing in an isolation that was entirely of her own making.\n\nOn her first full day home, she forced herself up to Sandymount village, on the pretext of buying some firelighters. Although it was well into April by now, the temperatures were still low and Alma felt in need of the comfort of an open fire. As she made her way up Sandymount Road, she was as wobbly as a newborn foal. The air that swirled around her was strangely threatening, every sound sharply heightened. When she saw an old lady bearing down on her, bent almost double under the weight of two supermarket bags, she felt a curious stirring of fear at the prospect of an encounter. The old lady drew level with Alma, and paused for a moment.\n\n\"Good to see you out and about,\" she said approvingly, straightening her head but not her body.\n\n\"Thank you,\" said Alma, buoyed up by a pride that was out of all proportion, like a child who has been praised by a teacher.\n\n\"Now, my love,\" said the weary-looking lady behind the counter in the caf\u00e9, when Alma went in on a whim to order a cup of coffee. \"You sit down there and I'll bring it over to you.\" Alma unwound her scarf from her neck and slipped out of the sleeves of her coat, letting the warm clouds of steam from the coffee machine wrap themselves around her as she sat and waited.\n\nThere was a young woman sitting at the table next to her, with a baby asleep in her lap. The young woman was holding her cup of coffee out to one side to avoid any danger of spilling it on the baby, and she was staring into space, her eyes dull with a tiredness the coffee would not relieve. The baby was sleeping with his arms thrown out either side of him, back blissfully arched, belly rising and falling with his breath. Alma was reminded of when Nora was a baby. Nora used to fall asleep just like that, with her arms stretched out either side of her and her head thrown back, mouth open. For a moment it seemed to Alma that the baby might have been Nora, so deeply was her memory resurrected. She found herself overcome by nostalgia, a yearning in her for the sheer ordinariness of being a young mother again, until it occurred to her that she had never been an ordinary young mother. Determined to be extraordinary, she had gone back to work when Nora was three weeks old, with barely a thought for what she was leaving behind.\n\n\"Best time in your life,\" she heard someone say, and looking up she realized that the weary-looking waitress had arrived with her coffee. She too was gazing at the baby.\n\n\"Best time in your life,\" she repeated wistfully. \"When your children are small.\"\n\nAlma stared at her.\n\n\"You don't feel it going, do you?\" said the woman.\n\n\"No,\" said Alma. And it seemed to her all of a sudden that it was the truest thing. The truest and saddest thing.\n\nThe woman put a plate down in front of her.\n\n\"I thought you might like a scone, on the house. I've sliced it for you, to make it easier.\"\n\nAlma was about to decline the offer\u2014normally she would never eat a scone with her coffee\u2014but the comforting smell of the baking soda made her tummy hollow out with hunger, so instead she said thank you.\n\n\"You're very kind,\" she said, blinking her eyes several times in quick succession to stop them from welling up. The kindness of people, that was something Alma had never noticed before. She was profoundly affected by it.\n\n\"I've decided to give up my column,\" she told Jim that evening. She had phoned him rather than going in to see him. The thought of walking through that newsroom filled her with dread. She'd have sooner walked through a snakepit.\n\n\"Now don't rush into any decisions,\" he said. \"You're only just home. It may take you a while to get your strength back.\"\n\n\"It has nothing to do with my strength,\" said Alma. \"Physically, I feel fine. It's just that I can't bring myself to say anything nasty about anyone anymore. I feel like going to live in a bloody Amish community.\"\n\nHow could she explain it to anyone? In order to say all the mean and amusing things that she was expected to say in her column, it was necessary for her to feel that she was different to other people. But since the attack, it had begun to dawn on her that there was nothing different about her at all. She was just the same as everybody else.\n\n\"Come on,\" said Jim. \"Give it time. You'll soon be back to your wicked old ways.\"\n\n\"I wish I could be so sure,\" said Alma. \"Things were much easier for me before I discovered I was human.\"\n\nAfter the attack, or the incident as her mother insisted on calling it, Alma took six weeks off work. (Whenever she felt guilty about it, she reminded herself of that curtailed maternity leave.) Dawn broke earlier every morning, and the evenings were getting longer, but to Alma's surprise, she found that she had no trouble filling her time. She would rise early, making herself a mug of fresh coffee as usual, but instead of standing by the kitchen counter with the radio on as she drank it, she took to sitting beside the French windows in the quiet to savor it. The quiet was new to her and she found it surprisingly pleasant, the absence of all that noise.\n\nSummer had arrived, and with it a burst of color. After the longest winter anyone could remember\u2014a winter that ran right through the month of April and into May, so that people still had their heating on and their fires lit throughout the May bank holiday weekend\u2014the weather changed overnight. The sudden rise in temperatures caused all the summer flowers to bloom at once so that in the space of a single week you had the first tulips bursting open, along with the lilac and the early roses.\n\nIn Alma's garden, two little robins were building a nest where two walls met under the protection of a small weeping cherry tree. Alma found that she liked to sit and watch as the she-robin fussed about at the nest. The he-robin would make occasional trips from the nest to the wall, or from the nest to the top of the shed, returning with scraps of ivy in his beak, or small twigs, which he handed over to the she-robin. The division of labor, while unequal, seemed harmonious. There seemed to be no question between them but that she was in charge.\n\n\"Fair play to you,\" said Alma, raising her mug to them. \"You've got it all ironed out.\"\n\nAfter she'd watched the robins for a while, after she'd drunk a mug or two of coffee, Alma would go about opening the mountain of mail the postman delivered every morning. Day after day she received cards from complete strangers, cards that told of people's hardships and wished her fortitude in dealing with her own. There were letters from people she came across in the course of her work; the politicians in particular emerged as very diligent letter-writers. Some typed their letters, while others handwrote them; it was the fact that they had taken the time to write at all that Alma found so moving. It turned out they were all human beings after all.\n\nSome days Macdara came for lunch, bringing with him curious delicacies he'd unearthed in Lidl or Aldi, or in the Polish section of the local supermarket, delicacies like venison sausage or smoked eel. He would deposit them without explanation on the kitchen counter and Alma would unwrap them with all the discomfort of a cat owner who's been honored with a present of a dead mouse. But where the old Alma would have expressed her disgust in lurid language, the new Alma accepted these offerings in a spirit of quiet martyrdom, rather than risk hurting her brother's fragile feelings.\n\nHe and Alma would sit on either side of her impractical little kitchen table, with their strange lunch set out on a platter between them, and they would talk about small things. A sense of something delicate and tentative unfurling between them, something that, given time, might slowly take root in this space provided by their mutual unemployment. For the first time in a long time, Alma asked herself no questions about the mystery that was her brother's life. For years she had bombarded herself and anyone who would listen with angry queries about him. (What on earth does he do all day? How does he survive? Where's he going to live if we ever have to sell Mum's house? I hope he doesn't think we're going to look after him when she's gone?) Now, in her isolation, she found herself accepting her brother for what he was. A sweet if somewhat unexplained presence.\n\nAcushla came by with lunch other days, bringing enough expensive salads to feed an army. She never could stop; she was always rushing off somewhere else, with some other good deed to do. Alma tried to get her to take some of the salads away with her again, but Acushla wouldn't hear of it and Alma didn't have the energy to be arguing with her.\n\nHer mother was the other extreme. Bringing a leftover piece of salmon for the two of them to share, or a chicken leg that had been languishing at the bottom of her fridge, she would breeze in without warning, like a gust of wind that comes in through a briefly opened door, jumping up again just as suddenly to go. In her wake she always left a lingering smell of Elizabeth Arden face powder and mothballs, a smell that reminded Alma acutely of her childhood.\n\nAlma's father could not visit her for long, because of Sam, but once or twice a week, following a touchingly formal invitation, she would venture out to see them in their \"little shoebox\" (Alma's father refused to use the word \"apartment,\" on the basis that it was vulgar\u2014when his imagination failed him, he would revert to calling his place \"the flat\"). \"Would you join us for a spot of lunch in our little glass eyrie?\" he would say, checking always with Sam before he gave Alma a time. Alma was shocked to find how grateful she was for these invitations. During the daytime particularly, it was good to get out. Any invitations for the evenings she made a rule of turning down.\n\nShe would eat her evening meal at the kitchen table with a novel spread open on a wooden Prop-It, which allowed her to read while she ate. She would drink one or two glasses of red wine with her meal, so that by the time the light had begun to drain out of the garden she would be feeling mildly sedated. She would draw all the curtains in the front room tight against the night and put the chain across the front door, locking the door carefully with the new triple lock system she'd installed after the attack. Then, taking her mobile phone with her, and the rest of the bottle of wine, she would move upstairs, using the sound of the TV to drown out the nighttime noises in the house. All the footfalls and the tappings, the human and inhuman sounds that filtered through the walls from the houses on either side of her. Alma had never noticed them before. Now they scared the life out of her. She took to leaving the TV on all night.\n\nSix weeks Alma was off work, and in all that time she did not go to the hairdresser. She did not go for her customary weekly pedicure\u2014the manicures, for obvious reasons, she also canceled, allowing Connie to cut the nails of what fingers she had left. She watched with morbid fascination as, slowly but steadily, her toenail polish grew out with her toenails. Her hair lost its chestnut sheen as the color bled out of it and she studied her roots every day in the mirror, fascinated to learn\u2014for she had long ago forgotten\u2014what her natural hair color was. By the end of the six weeks she had a clump of dull brown hair, every third strand of it silver, and at the crown of her head an inch of brave new growth as shocking and white as snow. She studied this new growth in the mirror every day with a protective pride. She was like a man who, for the first time in his life, decides to grow a beard. She was fascinated by this as-yet-unexplored aspect of herself.\n\n\"Good God!\" said her hairdresser, when at last she appeared. \"You've gone snow white!\"\n\nHe scrabbled with his fingers in Alma's hair, looking up at the mirror every so often to gawp at her. He couldn't disguise his excitement.\n\n\"It must have happened overnight!\"\n\n\"Is it any surprise?\"\n\nTenderly, he cupped her head with his hands. \"Poor baby,\" he said, talking to her through the mirror. \"But don't worry. We'll come up with a plan of attack.\"\n\nAlma shook her head.\n\n\"No plan of attack. We're going with it.\"\n\nHis eyes flew wide.\n\n\"No!\"\n\nShe smiled. For the first time in weeks, she was enjoying herself. Stirrings of freedom moving through her. (\"A woman's hair is her crowning glory,\" Alma's mother used to always say. It gave Alma great pleasure to think what her mother would say when she saw this.)\n\n\"We're going for a crew cut,\" she said, addressing herself in the mirror. \"And the color stays the way it is.\"\n\nLooking at herself in the mirror, there was no doubt in her mind but that she wanted to do this. She could not go back into the world looking the same as she used to. What had happened to her had changed her so profoundly that she needed her appearance to reflect that change.\n\n\"Okay,\" said the hairdresser, looking at her with new-found respect. \"Okay. You go, girl!\"\n\nSlowly, and with great aplomb, he pulled the scissors out of his belt. With a bullfighter's flourish, he draped a plastic cape around her shoulders. \"Let's do it,\" he said, looking up at her one last time, just to check that she wasn't having second thoughts. \"Okay,\" he said, and he began to snip. Snip, snip, snip. Snip, snip, snip. \"Omigod,\" he said. \"I can't believe we're doing this.\"\n\nAnd when it was done, \"Omigod. You look STUNNING.\"\n\n\"Oh. My. God,\" said Nora. \"What happened to your hair?\"\n\n\"Nora! Where on earth are you? We've been worried about you.\"\n\nOn the screen, Nora was all distorted. Her face was too small, her eyes too big. She looked like a woodland animal who has stumbled upon a secret camera and is inspecting it, oblivious to its purpose.\n\n\"Nora!\" said Alma. \"Can you hear me?\"\n\nNora's face froze, disappeared, and then appeared again in a slightly different position.\n\n\"What happened to your hair?\"\n\n\"Oh, I had a bit of an accident.\"\n\nThere she was again, using that word.\n\n\"What kind of an accident?\" asked Nora. \"An accident to your _hair_?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Alma quietly. \"No, no. An accident to my hand.\"\n\nNora seemed confused.\n\n\"But you're all right?\" she asked.\n\nAnd Alma wanted to say, No! No, she wanted to say. No, I am not all right! But watching Nora's waiting face, she could not bring herself to do it.\n\n\"I'm grand,\" she said. \"You know me. I'm pretty tough.\"\n\nLike a dieter who refuses a chocolate they have been offered, or a teetotaler turning down a drink, Alma had a deeply satisfying sense of her own self-restraint. A sense of pride that she had not told her daughter what had happened. A sense of regret, too, that the moment was gone and could not be brought back.\n\nNora nodded, relieved.\n\n\"You look good,\" she said. \"The hair suits you.\"\n\nIt was hard to tell in the darkness, but Nora looked suntanned.\n\n\"Where are you?\" asked Alma. \"You look like you've been out in the sun.\"\n\nNora tilted her head to one side and her hair fell across her forehead. Using a gesture of her father's, she pushed it away.\n\n\"I can't tell you where I am,\" she said. \"But don't worry, I'm perfectly safe.\"\n\n\"Well when are you coming home?\"\n\n\"Soon,\" said Nora. \"I just have to do something first, and then I'll be home.\"\n\nAlma had a sudden urge to cry. She felt a swell of tears rising up in her like vomit. She had to gulp to force them back down her throat.\n\n\"Nora!\" she said, unable to keep the panic out of her voice. \"You mind yourself, all right? I want you to promise me that you'll mind yourself.\"\n\n\"Don't worry,\" said Nora. \"I'm fine. Look, I'll talk to you soon. Give my love to everyone.\"\n\nAnd Alma was about to send a message of love to Nora\u2014it was in her mind to tell Nora that she loved her, but the connection was already lost.\n\n\"Alma!\" said her boss. \"Jesus.\"\n\nShe kept forgetting what a shock it was to people to see her without her hair. Without her hair she looked like a different person. Her skin tone had changed, that was the first thing. Whereas before it had had a pale, ethereal quality in relation to her hair color, now it looked positively pink. Her eyes were brighter, their blue more intense, and she had taken to wearing less makeup. The effect of this was to make her look younger. Of her old look, the only thing she had retained was the red lipstick.\n\n\"Alma,\" said Declan, jumping up out of his chair and sticking his hand out to grasp hers before realizing his mistake and whipping it away. (\"Use the hand as normally as possible,\" the doctor had said when he took her bandages off, but Alma found this was easier said than done.)\n\n\"Alma. You look great!\"\n\nHe leaned forward to kiss her. His mind would be whirring, she knew. Wondering could he put her back on TV looking like this? Wondering could he stop her going back on TV, or would that constitute discrimination? Poor Declan\u2014since he took on this job he'd had an employment appeals tribunal always biting at his heels. The old Alma would have reveled in his misery.\n\n\"Welcome back,\" he said, with his head stretched back on his neck as he opened his arms to her. \"It's great to have you back.\"\n\nShe allowed him to hug her, hoping he wouldn't notice that she was shaking.\n\n\"Declan,\" she said, as she sat down. \"Here's the thing. I can't go back to being on the telly. I want a move to radio.\"\n\nFair play to him, he made a decent fist of disguising his relief.\n\n\"I don't think you should make any rash decisions,\" he said. \"Why don't you settle back in first? Take a few days to catch up.\"\n\nShe cut him off with a shake of her head.\n\n\"I don't want to be in front of the camera anymore,\" she said, trying to be as direct with him as she could without giving too much of herself away. \"The telly's a young person's game, you know that, Declan. I've held the line for long enough, but it's a losing battle and I don't have the energy to fight it anymore.\"\n\nHe looked at her with a puzzled expression on his face.\n\n\"Are you trying to tell me that the telly's no place for an older woman? You're the very last person I would have expected to say that.\"\n\nShe held his gaze and smiled.\n\n\"Yeah, well, vanity prevails,\" she said. \"I don't want the nation to watch me aging under those studio lights.\" (When the truth was that she was afraid the nation would see something else\u2014something she would not be capable of disguising for the cameras. She was afraid she would not be able to conceal her poor, bruised soul.)\n\n\"Look, Declan. The truth is, I'm too fragile for the telly. What happened to me is written all over my face. I can't hide it.\" She could hear the wobble in her own voice and it terrified her. She uncrossed her legs, leaning forward over her knees and fixing her eyes on his. \"Believe me, you don't want me on the telly. I'm like Princess bloody Diana. Too much empathy. It's not pretty.\"\n\nThis was supposed to make him laugh, but it didn't. The expression on his face was one that Alma didn't recognize at first, so unfamiliar was it to her. It was the one thing she could not bear, to be pitied. She reached down deep inside herself and tried to access something of her old, lost bravado.\n\n\"Come on, Declan, it's not like anyone died. I'll only be moving across to the other side of the newsroom.\"\n\nHe nodded. His expression funereal.\n\n\"Sure,\" he said. \"It just feels like the end of an era.\"\n\n\"Ah, now. Let's not get too dramatic. Why don't you buy me a cup of coffee in the canteen and we'll come up with a plan for the next stage of my career.\"\n\nHe stood up, fumbling his coins around in his pocket. Already his mind had turned to plugging holes in his rosters.\n\n\"Actually, it so happens that I'm short a newsreader for the radio bulletins this afternoon. But of course, if it's too soon...\"\n\nVery quickly she made the calculation that she would be better off getting it over with as soon as possible.\n\n\"Why not?\" she said. \"I'll have to get back on the horse sometime.\"\n\nBut no sooner had she said it than the panic began to rise in her. A lump of nausea formed in the back of her throat and she swallowed it back down, moving ahead of Declan toward the door of his office. Swinging her handbag over her shoulder, she planted one high-heeled foot in front of the other with exaggerated precision. She let her hips swing from side to side, attempting to muster a display of her old swagger. Without her hair to toss around, it just didn't feel the same.\n\nAll morning a steady stream of people made their way over to Alma's desk to welcome her back. Tentative some of them, intrepid others, they all avoided looking at her hand, admiring her hair instead, with varying degrees of conviction. Mary O'Malley arrived into the office with a small bunch of pink roses she'd picked from her own garden, their stems wrapped in damp kitchen paper. She settled them in front of Alma's computer, using an empty smoothie bottle as a makeshift vase. One of the young radio reporters brought her back a Kit Kat from his coffee break, laying it down beside her keyboard without a word as he passed. And Ray O'Donnell\u2014fellow news anchor and longtime nemesis of Alma's\u2014came in the door backward, carrying a wet umbrella and a laptop, and the first thing he did was walk over and kiss her on the top of her head.\n\nBefore the attack, none of the young reporters would have dared to approach Alma, no colleague would have dreamed of kissing her. There could have been no clearer indication of how it had changed her, not only in her own eyes but in the eyes of everyone else too. She felt miserably undeserving of people's kindnesses, like someone who has arrived without a present at a party but is made to feel welcome nonetheless. In the gentle attentions of her colleagues Alma saw only reflections of her own unworthiness. It was a relief to her when the time came round for the afternoon news conference.\n\nShe arrived just as the conference was starting, making for the last empty chair at the far side of the table. As she sat down, the news editor pushed a news list toward her. Was she imagining it or did he look at her nervously? She glanced around the table but everyone had their heads buried in the list.\n\n\"Okay,\" he said. \"We've got unemployment figures out today. The Minister is available. Likewise all the usual suspects.\"\n\nAlma kept her eyes on his face. Once or twice, as he rattled through the list (ward closures in one of the capital's main hospitals, a gangland murder, another rise in the jobless figures), he looked up at her, as if in anticipation of something\u2014but what?\n\n\"Brussels,\" he said, reading the next slug off his list. \"This is a story about our European Commissioner, Michael Collins.\"\n\nThere was a shift in the air pressure inside the room. All those lungs full of carbon dioxide that everyone was afraid to breathe out. A current of excitement like the atmosphere inside a classroom when the monotony of the day is about to be broken by a pre-planned prank.\n\nValiantly, the news editor plowed on.\n\n\"Someone has posted a video on YouTube that appears to show the Commissioner stealing a pepper grinder from a restaurant table in Brussels.\"\n\nOh, the pleasure in the room; it was like a sudden release of gas. Legs were uncrossed, spines unfurled, shoulders rolled back. An atmosphere of lip-smacking malice was unleashed.\n\n\"Hang on now,\" said the news editor, with his hand up to still the room. \"We need to think this one through carefully.\"\n\nAll eyes on him.\n\n\"What's to think through?\" asked one of the program editors.\n\n\"Well, we need to be fair about this. We need to check the authenticity of the footage. Make sure it wasn't a setup.\"\n\n\"Where did it come from?\"\n\n\"Someone with a mobile phone.\"\n\n\"And we're sure it's him?\"\n\n\"Oh, it's him all right.\"\n\n\"Well feck it, I don't know about anyone else, but I'm running it.\"\n\nDespite a few minor quibbles, there was general agreement. What with everything else that was going on, everyone agreed that the nation could do with a bit of light relief.\n\nAlma watched the footage, for the umpteenth time, on the nine o'clock news. She was tucked up in bed, the dregs of a glass of wine beside her on the bedside table. Fair play to Ray O'Donnell, he managed to read the intro with a straight face.\n\n\"Ireland's European Commissioner, Michael Collins, finds himself at the center of a media storm tonight following the publication on a video-sharing website of mobile phone footage that appears to show him removing a pepper grinder from a table at a Brussels restaurant.\"\n\nThe footage showed a pavement caf\u00e9. White tablecloths, with wicker chairs under blood-red umbrellas. Mick was sitting alone at a table with a coffee cup in front of him. He was wearing a dark-colored overcoat, a yellow wool scarf doubled round his neck. (That's what a decade in Brussels does to a man, thought Alma. Before he went to Brussels, Mick would never in a million years have been seen dead in yellow.) The footage showed the waiter approaching the table with the bill on a small steel tray. Mick dug into his pocket and handed him some notes. The waiter dipped into his apron and gave Mick some change, then moved off to another table and Mick was alone again. He leaned forward, elbow on the table, and lifted the pepper grinder an inch off the surface, using his hand as an upside-down claw. He turned the head of the grinder around once, twice, three times, with his free hand cupped underneath it to catch the pepper grounds, which he examined closely. He looked up briefly to check if anyone was watching. Then, with a shifting of the shoulders, one up and the other down, as if they were scales, he slipped the pepper grinder into his pocket.\n\nAlma watched as the TV showed exterior shots of Mick's apartment, with the curtains drawn. They showed the gate to an underground garage, resolutely closed. They showed a close-up of a doorbell, and next to it a small typewritten label: _Monsieur M. Collins_.\n\n\"Every attempt has been made to contact Mr. Collins,\" went the voice-over. \"But so far all our efforts have been unsuccessful. The Commissioner's whereabouts are this evening unknown.\"\n\nAlma reached for the remote control and turned the television off. The quiet that followed had a sound of its own, which she found herself listening to. It was the sound of her house making its presence known to her. The sound of her own blood pounding in her ears. As she lay there listening, she heard another sound, one that it took her a moment to recognize. It was the sound of her doorbell, winding its way through the dark and empty rooms downstairs.\n\n# WIKIPEDIA\n\n**Michael \"Mick\" Collins** (born 9 March 1956) is the European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services and a former Irish government minister. He was first elected to D\u00e1il Eireann in February 1982 and held his seat in Tipperary North until 2002, when he was nominated by Taoiseach Bertie Ahern to serve as Ireland's European Commissioner. A brother of the politician and former minister Liam Collins, he was married to the Irish television presenter Alma MacEntee, with whom he has a daughter, Nora. They separated in 1998 and subsequently divorced. In April 2013 he became a YouTube sensation when mobile phone footage showed him removing a pepper grinder from a table in a Brussels restaurant. The footage went viral and within twenty-four hours had been viewed by more than twenty million people.\n\n#### Contents\n\n1. Early and personal life\n\n2. Early political career\n\n3. Period in government\n\n4. Brussels\n\n5. Pepper grinder incident\n\n# Mick\n\nIt was hard to know which of them was the more shocked.\n\nShe was sitting on the edge of her armchair, her velvet robe bound tightly across her chest, her bare feet balancing on the points of her toes. Mick kept looking from her face to her hair, her hair to her face. The face, he knew. Even without her makeup, he knew her face. But the hair belonged to someone else, and he couldn't get used to it. On the doorstep he had wondered for a second had he arrived at the wrong house. Until she said, \"Mick! Jesus. What are you doing here?\"\n\nHer face was thrown into shadow by the glare of the lamp she'd turned on in the corner of the room. She had offered to light the fire and he'd said, \"Ah, no, sure it's not that cold. I'd kill for a glass of wine, though.\" She had handed him the bottle first, then the opener.\n\n\"So,\" she said to him, once they'd settled themselves on either side of the barren fireplace. \"Why here?\"\n\nHe'd been asking himself the same question.\n\n\"The truth?\"\n\nEven as he said it, he was wondering did he have it in him to be truthful. He could tell her that she was the first person he'd thought of, except that wasn't true. He had thought of his brother first, and then he had thought better of it. His brother would not welcome him arriving on his doorstep.\n\n\"The truth is there was no one else.\"\n\nShe came down off the points of her toes, crossed one leg over the other and sat back into the armchair.\n\n\"I'm not sure whether I should be amused by that, or annoyed.\"\n\nMick leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees, so that he was looking up at her. He adopted his most earnest expression.\n\n\"You were the only one I could trust. I figured you wouldn't have the heart to turn me away.\"\n\n\"Trust,\" she repeated, following the word up with an inward hiss of her breath. He liked the way she did that, the sharp intake of breath, as if she was taking a drag on one of the cigarettes she had long ago given up.\n\n\"You invited me in,\" he said. \"You could have turned me away.\"\n\nShe let a reluctant laugh out of her, a laugh like a yelp.\n\n\"And miss out on hearing the story from the horse's mouth? Are you mad? You knew my curiosity would get the better of me. You old bollocks.\"\n\nHe laughed himself now. Leaned his head back against the headrest, content just to watch her. She had drawn her legs up on to her chair, her bare feet tucked in under her, like a praying saint. She reached her right hand out for her wineglass, gripping it by the stem with her thumb and her index finger.\n\n\"Does that cause you pain?\"\n\nShe hesitated, and he found himself wondering why. The question wasn't difficult. Maybe she was thinking that he didn't deserve an answer. Maybe she was thinking, Fuck you, it's a bit late now to be asking.\n\nShe transferred the wineglass to her left hand and held the right hand out in front of her, studying it. From where he was sitting, it looked like she had her two middle fingers clenched in toward her palm\u2014that old trick you play on a child to let on that you're missing a finger.\n\n\"The pain I can live with,\" she said, in a voice that sounded a little distracted. \"The pain can be solved, with enough painkillers. The look of it is a bit unsightly, but I'm getting used to that too.\"\n\nShe turned the hand over and looked at it from the other side, as if she was seeing it for the first time.\n\n\"It's the fear,\" she said. When she looked up, her eyes were surprisingly unguarded. \"The fear is very bad.\"\n\n\"I'm so sorry,\" he said. And really, he meant it. He felt an awful swell of guilt rise up in him as he contemplated the ordeal she had been through. He had heard about it, of course, he had heard all about it. But he had not thought about it, not beyond his initial revulsion. He had not thought about the effect it would have on her, imagining that she would weather it with her usual resilience, that she would scorn his sympathy. But a thing like that would change you, how could it not? What was wrong with him that he hadn't been in touch with her?\n\n\"Did they catch them yet?\" he asked. \"Any arrests? Any idea who they were?\"\n\nShe shook her head. Over and over again she shook her head at the questions he asked of her, but she did not make so much as a single sound.\n\n\"I'm so sorry this happened to you,\" he said.\n\nShe continued to shake her head impatiently as she tried to explain.\n\n\"Do you know, I never used to notice the sound of sirens before? When I was in the hospital, I started hearing ambulance sirens day and night. And I thought it was just because I was in hospital that I was hearing them. But I still hear them now; there seem to be sirens going off all the time. And every time I hear one, I can't help thinking about the poor person inside. I'm like one of those old ladies who bless themselves whenever an ambulance goes by.\"\n\nShe was looking not directly at him but somewhere off to the side of him. Her attention seemed to be focused on something inside herself, and it was only when she had it in her sights that she turned her eyes on him.\n\n\"You see, you become aware of all the bad things that are happening out there, and the worst of it is that you know for a fact that the bad thing can happen to you. I will never again be able to live under the illusion that the bad thing won't happen to me.\"\n\nHe stared at her, struggling to take in this new version of the woman he'd married. In his mind he had a vision of her on the night they met. Twenty-one years old and precociously fearless, in her knee-high boots and her white skirt suit, an old cravat of her father's knotted tightly around her neck. She had interviewed him at the count center, the two of them standing high above the crowds on a platform of bare boards, supported by builders' scaffolding. Once the camera lights had been turned off he had leaned in and whispered in her ear, \"Let's pray the cameraman shot us from the waist up. We don't want the whole nation knowing that the new TD for Tipperary North had a boner for his interviewer.\" She'd thrown her head back and laughed out loud, a shameless laugh that convinced him then and there that she was the woman for him.\n\n\"Jesus,\" he said, looking at her now. \"I'd string them up for doing this to you. I swear to God, Alma, I'd hold them down and cut off their balls, one by one.\"\n\nShe smiled and rolled her eyes at him.\n\n\"Thanks, Mick, but I suspect you're in enough trouble as it is.\"\n\nHe nodded. Allowed her the opening.\n\n\"So? What have you got to say for yourself?\"\n\n\"I don't know. What do you want to call it? A moment of madness?\"\n\n\"Ah, now. What is it you earn? Two hundred grand? Three hundred grand? What possesses someone who earns three hundred grand a year to steal a five-euro pepper grinder? That's what all the papers are going to be asking. You might want to come up with a half-decent answer.\"\n\nHe adopted his most reasonable voice.\n\n\"It's not that easy to find a decent pepper grinder. The one I have in the flat is broken. I keep meaning to buy a new one but I never seem to have the time to get to the shops.\"\n\nShe was shaking her head in disbelief.\n\n\"You're going to have to come up with something a bit better than that, Mick.\"\n\nWith the knuckle of his index finger he began to worry at his lip. Nudging the lip with his knuckle, it was a tic of his. An indication that he was rattled.\n\n\"I know,\" he said. \"I know.\"\n\n\"They're going to have a field day.\"\n\nHe squirmed in his chair. He put his hands over his face and began to stretch the skin away from his forehead, as if his face was a latex mask that he could pull off. He was talking through the gap between his hands.\n\n\"You might try not to sound quite so pleased.\"\n\n\"It's not that I'm pleased. I feel sorry for you, Mick, just as you feel sorry for me. So here we are, feeling sorry for each other. Who would have thought?\"\n\nHe took a long slurp of his wine, resting the glass on his knee while he studied her. \"You're looking good, girl. Despite everything, you look good.\"\n\nAnd she did. To him, she looked bloody good.\n\n\"You're a dirty liar. I look old, is what I look. I look like a washed-up old wreck.\"\n\n\"You're barely fifty, Alma, for God's sake. You're looking pretty good for fifty.\"\n\n\"Fifty-three.\"\n\n\"Ah, come on. You were always able to take a compliment. Don't stop now.\"\n\nHe reached out and picked the bottle of wine up off the cold hearth. Poured the last of it out between their two glasses.\n\n\"What about Nora?\" she asked him. \"Have you heard from her?\"\n\n\"Not a whisper. And you?\"\n\n\"The last time I spoke to her, she wouldn't tell me where she was,\" said Alma.\n\n\"Oh, I know where she is all right. I make it my business to know where she is. She's in Egypt. Having failed to get into Gaza by sea, she's now trying to tunnel her way in through Egypt.\"\n\n\"Don't they bomb those tunnels?\"\n\nHe shrugged.\n\n\"From time to time.\"\n\nHe did not mention that the tunnels had been bombed as recently as December. He did not mention that the tunnels collapse, too. That the plywood that holds up the walls sometimes comes crashing down in a rain of rocks and rubble and shoddy building materials and that people get buried alive under there and that they die that way, unless someone can dig them out in time. None of this did he mention to Alma, even though he had made it his business to know it.\n\n\"I take it she doesn't know what happened to you.\"\n\nAgain, she shook her head.\n\n\"We're not in the habit of telling each other much.\"\n\n\"No,\" he said, by way of agreement, and they lapsed into silence for a moment.\n\n\"Do you think she's planning on ever forgiving us?\" he asked suddenly.\n\n\"For what?\"\n\n\"For fucking up her life. Isn't that what this is all about? She's punishing us for what we did to her.\"\n\n\"I'm relieved to hear there's two of us in it,\" she said. \"I always thought it was just me she was punishing.\"\n\nShe sighed, and he saw something he had never seen in her before. A weariness of spirit; it was the first time he had ever known Alma to be tired.\n\n\"I miss her,\" she said simply.\n\n\"Yeah,\" he said. \"So do I.\"\n\nShe rose out of her chair. \"Well, her room's empty. I'm sure she won't mind you sleeping there. Top of the stairs, it's the door straight ahead of you. Bathroom's on the landing. There's a spare toothbrush in the cupboard under the sink. Don't even think about using mine.\" (That was always a bone of contention during their marriage, her suspicion that he used her toothbrush.)\n\nShe yanked her robe even tighter across her chest in a matronly display of modesty. What did she think he was going to do, try and jump her?\n\n\"All right,\" she said. \"I'm off to bed. Good night, Mick.\"\n\nHe stood up. Leaned in and gave her a peck on the cheek, careful not to lay a hand on her.\n\n\"Good night,\" he said. \"And Alma... thanks for letting me stay.\"\n\nShe turned out into the hall and, using the banisters to support her, climbed the stairs. The smell of her perfume stayed in the room behind her\u2014or was it just the memory of her perfume?\n\nMick sank back down into the armchair. He let himself fall against the back of the seat and closed his eyes. It was a long time before he opened them again, and when he did, he realized that his fingers and toes were numb. Barely able to summon the energy to move, he hauled himself up out of the chair and crept upstairs, anxious not to disturb her.\n\nHe woke early, not knowing where he was. The bed was harder than the one he was used to, the pillows softer, and he wondered for a moment was he in a hotel? So many hotels in his life. Hotels and planes, hotels and trains; sometimes he had to check his location on his BlackBerry just to remind himself where he was.\n\nOh, fuck. Now that he remembered, he wished he hadn't.\n\nHe turned over and buried his face in the pillow, enjoying the sensation of smothering himself. His airways blocked, his eyelids forced shut, he listened to the sound of his own struggling breath, heard from inside his own head. At last, gasping for air, he flipped himself over so that he was lying on his side, facing the window.\n\nThe curtains were open and the day was dawning a pale, powdery pink. From this angle, the stadium was in profile. The great western rim of it like the edge of a gladiator's helmet, its glass tiles angled to reflect the sky. Seen from this perspective, it was a beautiful sight.\n\nOutside the window, a telephone wire bounced up and down in the breeze. A row of small birds gathered along it, one of them tilted this way, one tilted that way. Every so often one of the birds would fly away and then return to the wire. Watching them, it seemed to Mick that they were holding a wordless conversation, a dialogue they were acting out without sound. From behind the stadium a train appeared. It crept along like a mouse scurrying under a giant's sleeping head. A moment later it had disappeared, leaving a new stillness in its wake.\n\nMick rolled over on to his back and studied the posters on the wall in front of him. There was one of _The MotorcycleDiaries_, Che Guevara riding pillion with his arms stretched out either side of him. A poster of _Alive_ , which was Nora's favorite film when she was a kid. She must have watched that film a hundred times, and forced Mick to watch it with her. Staring at the poster, all Mick could think was that he missed his daughter. He missed her not as she was now, but as she was then. He missed all the moments that he had missed of her life, this room of hers that he had never even seen, and this view from the window that was her view every morning when she woke up. He missed all the things that he had missed and that could not now be brought back, no matter how much he missed them.\n\nThe smell of coffee brought him downstairs. Alma was standing by the open French doors, coffee cup in hand, facing out into the back garden. She gave no indication that she'd heard him come into the room\u2014for a moment he wondered had she not heard him\u2014but then she started talking, without so much as turning her head.\n\n\"I've a robins' nest in my garden,\" she said, in a faraway voice. \"Yesterday there were only three eggs in it but today there's a fourth. If you stick your head out the bathroom window you can see them. I don't like to go out there in case I disturb them.\"\n\nHe pulled out a chair and sat himself down at the kitchen table. He was wearing trousers and a shirt, no sweater, no socks. The tiles were cold on his bare feet and he nestled the sole of one foot against the other for warmth.\n\n\"Good morning,\" she said, turning to face him and speaking in an entirely different tone of voice.\n\n\"Good morning,\" he said.\n\n\"I'm afraid there's no waitress service in this house. Coffee's on the hob. Bread in the bread bin. Butter and jam on the counter.\"\n\nHe smiled in recognition of an old pattern. Any tenderness that ever existed between them by night, it would have vanished by daylight. He stood up, poured himself a cup of coffee, and sat back down at the table.\n\n\"I've some light reading for you,\" she said, throwing a copy of _The Irish Times_ down in front of him. \"Bottom of the front page.\"\n\nHe scanned the headline and let his head flop down on to his chest.\n\n\"Listen, you don't have a BlackBerry charger, do you? My phone's gone dead.\"\n\n\"Probably just as well. You might want to think twice about turning it on.\"\n\n\"Sure, but I need to ring my office.\"\n\n\"Here.\"\n\nShe passed him her own phone. \"Now,\" she said, carrying her cup and saucer over to the sink. \"I need to get into the shower.\"\n\nHe made himself two slices of toast that he slathered with apricot jam, the sound of the power shower in the bathroom upstairs like the roar of an aircraft taking off overhead. He had to wait for the noise to stop before he rang his special adviser. It was only when he went to dial the number that he realized he didn't know it. Didn't know his office number either, didn't know any of the numbers. He had them all in his BlackBerry.\n\n\"Fuck,\" he said, trying to remember how people used to find phone numbers before they had mobile phones, trying to remember how he used to do things before he had advisers. He looked around the room and spotted an iPad on the kitchen counter. He powered it up and with a fumbling forefinger stabbed the icon for the Internet connection. It took him ten minutes to navigate his way through the Commission website to a number for his own office. Another five to negotiate the call answering system. Noises upstairs as Alma moved from room to room.\n\n\"Jesus,\" he muttered. \"How the hell are people supposed to contact us?\" Until it occurred to him. Sure, that was the whole point.\n\n\" _Bonjour_ ,\" said a woman's voice at last. \" _Bureau du Commissaire Europ\u00e9en pour le march\u00e9 int\u00e9rieur et les services_.\"\n\nIt was a point of pride with Mick never to speak French. Fucking Frogs; it was bad enough to have to march to their tune without speaking their bloody language too. At least the Germans spoke English.\n\n\"Good morning,\" he said, with all the authority he could muster. \"This is Commissioner Collins speaking. I need to speak to Feargal McCarthy immediately.\"\n\n\" _Un instant_.\"\n\nShe put the call through straightaway. That in itself was suspicious. It was as if they were waiting for him to call in. He imagined the whole office falling silent, everyone frozen in motion as Feargal picked up the phone.\n\n\"Mick! Where are you?\"\n\n\"Never mind that. Now, what's the score?\"\n\n\"Well. We're under siege. We've had every media organization in the world on to us already this morning. We've had requests for interviews from every TV and radio station on the planet. We've got our own government looking for an explanation. And we've got the Commission president breathing down our necks.\"\n\nNasal at the best of times, at moments of excitement Feargal's sinuses tended to seize up on him and his voice took on a distinctly adenoidal pitch. Mick moved the phone away from his ear just a fraction to lessen the impact. The difference this made was surprising and extremely pleasant. Rather than coming out of the handset loud and clear, as if he was in the room with him, Feargal's voice now seemed much further away and therefore less real.\n\n\"We're putting out a holding statement. You know, it was all a misunderstanding, et cetera et cetera...\"\n\n\"Good,\" said Mick. \"Good man.\"\n\n\"You've no public engagements today or tomorrow, so that buys us a bit of time.\"\n\n\"Good stuff.\"\n\n\"If we could meet up maybe, somewhere other than the office\u2014\"\n\n\"Ah, feck it, I think the battery on my phone's about to go...\"\n\n\"Is there another number\u2014\"\n\n\"What's that? No, can't hear you. I think the phone must be running out of juice. I'll tell you what. I'll try you again later. In the meantime, just keep on doing what you're doing, good man.\"\n\n\"But wait\u2014\"\n\nTaking the phone away from his ear altogether and using his thumb as you would to flick a switch, Mick closed the call down. When he looked up, Alma was standing in the kitchen doorway in a belted black dress. With her high heels on, and her red lipstick, she looked almost like her old self.\n\n\"This thing seems to be gathering a bit of momentum,\" Mick told her. \"It might be as well if I lay low for a day or two. How would you feel about harboring a fugitive?\"\n\nKnowing her well enough to know that the idea would appeal to her.\n\nAs soon as the door was closed behind her, as soon as he'd seen her taxi reverse out of the square (waiting a few seconds in case she had to come back for something), Mick set about checking out the house. He patrolled the front room first, taking in objects both familiar and unfamiliar. The print above the fireplace in the dining room, that was one of Sam's. Mick recognized the motifs immediately\u2014spindly minarets against a midnight-blue skyline, and the outline of a bird in flight etched out in Sam's signature gold leaf.\n\nHe wandered into the dining room, taking stock of the highly polished antique mahogany table and its matching mahogany chairs, their seats upholstered in a deep pink velvet. He wondered who had chosen the table and chairs. Alma had never shown any interest in antiques when he was married to her. Could it have been one of her many lovers? That actor fella she was seeing at one stage struck Mick as a suitable candidate, pretentious fucker that he was, and him out of a butcher's shop in Mullingar. Mick had met him a few years back, at an arse-licking session in the embassy, and he'd made a point of establishing a bond with him as a fellow Midlands man. Your man couldn't get away from him fast enough. Oh, he had Mullingar well and truly in the rear-view mirror, that fucker. And Alma too, by the sound of it. Last Mick heard, he was gallivanting around with some young one out of an Australian soap opera.\n\nMick swept forward to study the photographs on the mantelpiece. There was one of Nora as a baby, looking exactly like herself, her eyes wide with indignation. There was a picture of Alma's mother on the Abbey stage, a spotlight pooling at her feet. There was a formal portrait of her father at his writing desk, the same portrait that had appeared on the back of his book. At the edge of the mantelpiece was an old snapshot of Alma herself. It showed her sitting on a low stone wall, wearing a white sundress and a pair of huge sunglasses. Mick identified it as one of their honeymoon photographs, and he was as certain as he could be that it had originally been a photograph of the two of them, but now it showed only Alma. Looking closer, he saw the evidence. A blue knee jutting into the picture from the right-hand side. She must have cut him out of the picture and had it reframed.\n\nHe headed upstairs, bypassing the bathroom and making straight for her bedroom. The bed was unmade, a pile of pillows on one side, dented still by her head. There were clothes heaped on the ottoman, clothes piled up on the armchair by the window, high-heeled shoes scattered around the floor. It had always been a mystery to him how someone so particular about some things could be so slovenly about others. (\"But I _like_ being a slob,\" she had told him once.) Before he left the room, he had a peek into her underwear drawer. He had to know did she still wear the same satin underwear. He was thrilled to find that she did.\n\nHe stripped off on the landing, taking a visceral pleasure in wandering naked through his ex-wife's house. Leaving his clothes in a puddle on the carpet, he headed to the bathroom and ran the shower, waiting until it was steaming hot before he stepped in. Afterward, he helped himself to a clean white towel that he found on the heated towel rail. He collected his clothes from the landing, putting the underpants on inside out for the sake of hygiene. He put on the same shirt he'd been wearing yesterday, and the same trousers, for want of anything else to wear. On his way downstairs he stopped off at the bathroom again and gave himself a generous all-over spraying with a deodorant he found on the bathroom counter. An old trick, from his student days, it almost made him feel young again.\n\nHe made himself a mug of tea and settled down in front of the TV in the living room, feet on the coffee table, mug on the arm of the sofa. With some difficulty he managed to steer the channel to Sky News. They were showing pictures from Syria, but the crawl at the bottom of the screen made reference to him: _Spokesperson for Commissioner Collins says pepper grinder incident was \"a misunderstanding\"_...\n\nAs Mick watched, the newsreader appeared full screen.\n\n\"You're watching Sky News,\" she said. \"Coming up this hour, new footage shows the European Commissioner Michael Collins stealing a _pen_ from the Russian president Vladimir Putin.\"\n\n\"Oh, feck it,\" said Mick, sitting up so fast that his tea slopped all over the arm of the couch.\n\nOn the screen, he saw himself in Moscow last year, Putin to the right of him. The Russian president was talking and Mick was listening, or pretending to listen, to the translator in his ear. As he watched, he saw himself reach out and lift Putin's pen off the table in front of him. He turned the pen around in his fingers and then, unmistakably, he could be seen tucking it into his breast pocket.\n\n\"Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck!\"\n\nHe clutched his head with his hands and, sinking back into the couch, let his legs float upward. Like an upended beetle, he grappled at the air with his feet.\n\n\"Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,\" he said. Then he righted himself and went looking for his phone, which he had plugged into Alma's charger.\n\n\"It's a free-for-all,\" squealed Feargal. \"The things they're tweeting about you, you would not believe. Former employees, ex-girlfriends, they're all coming out of the woodwork. I'll tell you one thing, you've really managed to make some enemies over the years. It looks like this is payback time.\"\n\nMick listened, the sound of static filling the air inside his head. He was having trouble concentrating.\n\n\"So, what do we do now?\"\n\n\"Well, wherever you are, we think it's best if you lie low for a day or two. Where are we now? Thursday. The hope is this will all have blown over by next week.\"\n\n\"Any word from on high?\"\n\n\"They're suggesting the best way out of this may be a treatment program.\"\n\n\"Treatment for what?\"\n\n\"Well,\" said Feargal, \"according to the psychiatrist who's just been interviewed on BBC 24, it's a classic case of kleptomania. What did she say? I'm paraphrasing here, so bear with me. The irrational urge to steal things regardless of economic necessity belongs on the spectrum of obsessive\u2014compulsive disorder.\"\n\n\"For fuck's sake,\" said Mick. \"Did it never occur to them that I just fancied the bastard's pen?\"\n\nHe spent the rest of the afternoon avoiding the news channels. He hopped around the lower reaches of the remote control, finding nothing but cookery programs. Who would have thought there was so much cookery on TV? You could spend your whole afternoon just watching people cook. He imagined a whole continent, morbidly obese and fed on fast food, sitting on their couches and watching cookery programs on daytime TV.\n\nHe discovered that his favorite was a program called _Come Dine with Me_. He watched with perverse fascination as five strangers cooked for each other in their own homes, night after night, competing for a prize of a thousand pounds. A thousand pounds? he thought, puzzled. Why would anyone want to expose themselves and their pathetic homes for a paltry thousand pounds? He watched, struggling to understand, as they snooped around each other's houses, making fun of each other's possessions for the cameras. He watched, appalled, as they cooked meal after gruesome meal for each other. He found himself marvelling at the awfulness of people. The niceness of them, too.\n\nHe had the dinner ready for her when she got home, a menu constructed on the basis of what he had managed to find in her kitchen.\n\n\"This is all very domestic,\" she said, as she deposited a large paper bag on the kitchen counter. He peered into it and saw multiple packs of black socks, white underwear, white T-shirts. He was overcome by nostalgia. She used to always shop for his clothes when they were married.\n\n\"Thank you,\" he said, touched.\n\nShe ignored him.\n\n\"So, they're staking out your apartment. They've someone camped outside your office. They're even keeping an eye on your brother's house.\"\n\nMick chuckled.\n\n\"I'd be tempted to pitch up there just for the hell of it.\"\n\nHe was standing at the cooker. A tea towel slung over his left shoulder, he was putting the finishing touches to the meal he'd prepared for her with some prawns he'd salvaged from the bottom of her freezer.\n\n\"So, when did you learn to cook?\" she asked. She was standing against the kitchen counter, holding the glass of wine he'd poured for her.\n\n\"When you threw me out. It was either cook or starve. Has Nora not told you about my culinary prowess?\"\n\n\"Nora tells me nothing, about you or anything else. I always assumed you lived on restaurant food in Brussels. I imagined you surviving on truffles.\"\n\nHe laughed.\n\n\"Yeah, there's a bit of truffling in Brussels all right. Brussels is all about the truffles and the mussels. Bit of a culture shock for a country lad like me.\"\n\nWhen he met her, he had never even tasted an avocado.\n\n\"So, what are they saying?\"\n\n\"Jesus, Mick, you've no idea. It's taken on a life of its own.\"\n\nHe upended a pot of boiled rice into a colander, and the steam rushed up at him.\n\n\"Come on. Tell me the worst.\"\n\n\"Oh, it's open season. Anyone who ever worked for you, they're spilling the beans. Some press officer with the Commission says you made an inappropriate comment about her legs. The waitress in the caf\u00e9 near your office, she says you used to hassle her to go out with you AND you never left her a tip. Oh, and what about the secretary who used to pick up your dry-cleaning for you? She says you didn't pay her back.\"\n\nHe had two plates out on the kitchen counter and he was serving the rice up in little mounds, the way he'd seen it done on the telly.\n\n\"The dirty cow!\" he said. \"Once, maybe twice, I forgot to pay her back. But don't you worry. She used to tape the receipts on to my desk, to remind me. I used to buy her chocolates from Pierre Marcolini, for Christ's sake. I did everything to cozy up to that bloody woman, bar riding her.\"\n\nHe paused in ladling out the prawns to look up at her.\n\n\"Ah, don't look at me like that. You know what I mean.\"\n\nHe carried their plates over to the table, pulling out a chair for her before he sat down himself.\n\n\"Prawns flash-fried with butter and brandy,\" he announced.\n\nTentatively, she speared a prawn with her fork and put it in her mouth.\n\n\"I don't know why you're looking so nervous. It's not like I'm about to poison you.\"\n\nShe smiled.\n\n\"Not bad for someone who used to eat his dinner in the middle of the day.\"\n\nThat was something she had teased him about when they were first married.\n\n\"Tomorrow's going to be more challenging,\" he said. \"Tomorrow I'm down to frozen peas and four eggs.\"\n\n\"I suppose you want me to do some shopping?\"\n\n\"Ah, no. That would spoil the fun. I'm quite enjoying this. It's like that program on the telly. What's it called? _Ready Steady Cook_.\"\n\n\"It's like the diary of Anne Frank, that's what it is.\"\n\nHe raised his glass to her.\n\n\"And you, my girl, are the heroine of the Resistance.\"\n\n\"If they knew you were here,\" said Alma, shaking her head at the thought of it. \"If they knew you were here, Jesus Christ, Mick. I'd be hung out to dry.\"\n\nFor two days, Mick was happy enough to hang around the house. Not for forty years had he had a pajama day, not since he was a child and his school had been closed down for a week because of a burst pipe. He lay on the couch for hours on end, eating Alma's biscuits and drinking tea as he watched back-to-back editions of _Come Dine with Me_. In his mind, the notion that this was a welcome, albeit temporary, reprieve from the world.\n\nOn day three, everything changed. He woke, and before he even opened his eyes, he knew that the buoyancy of the past two days was gone. It was as if the world had turned while he was asleep and now everything was cast in a different light. Outside the window the telephone wire hung in the air, motionless and bereft of birds. The sky was a dense flat white, the tiles on the edge of the stadium sullen and unreflective. Mick lay in the bed, steeped in gloom.\n\nWhereas initially he had chosen to view his predicament as a comical one (the adventures of a sane man in a crazy world), now it began to take on a less cheerful complexion. What at first had seemed a bit of an escapade\u2014a lark, an adventure\u2014now began to take on the appearance of a crisis. His career, everything he had worked so hard to achieve, it was all hanging in the balance. And all because of a fucking pepper grinder. He found himself raging against the injustice of it.\n\nSwinging his legs out of the bed, he reached for his phone and put a call through to Feargal.\n\n\"Okay, Feargal,\" he said, \"I've had enough of this. I'm coming back.\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't know if that's a good idea, Mick.\" Feargal's voice squeaked with protest.\n\n\"Hold on a second. Don't you think this whole thing is getting a bit out of proportion? I filched a fucking pepper grinder. I'm happy to pay for it. The Putin thing, that was just a mistake. I didn't realize what I was doing. What would I want with Putin's fucking pen anyway? Jesus, Feargal, what's the world coming to when a man gets subjected to a public bloody flogging just because he steals a bloody pen? It's not like I'm Dominique Strauss-Kahn, for fuck's sake. It's not like I'm fucking Berlusconi. All I did was pocket a bloody biro.\"\n\nSilence on the other end of the line.\n\n\"There's a bit more to it than that, I'm afraid.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"This doesn't reflect well on the Commission, Mick. Surely you can see that. What with everything else that's going on\u2014people going hungry in Greece, half of Spain out of work\u2014the Commission needs to be seen to take this seriously.\"\n\n\"What are you trying to tell me, Feargal?\"\n\n\"They're putting you on paid leave while they decide what to do with you.\"\n\n\"What!\" He couldn't believe what he was hearing. \"You know what this is, Feargal? It's a fucking witch hunt!\"\n\n\"Mick,\" said Feargal. \"Can you please stop bombarding me with expletives. I've had about enough of listening to your foul language.\"\n\nAnd that was the moment. When Feargal McCarthy\u2014Feargal fucking McCarthy, whom Mick had hired as a spotty kid straight out of UCD\u2014when Feargal fucking McCarthy pulled the PC card on him, that's when Mick knew it was all over.\n\nHe ventured out wearing his overcoat and his dark glasses, a woolly hat of Nora's pulled down low over his ears. The first person he met was Alma's next-door neighbor, bald as an egg, in a bulging diamond-pattern jumper.\n\n\"Howrya,\" said the neighbor, coming out of his house.\n\n\"Howrya,\" said Mick, wondering had the neighbor recognized him.\n\n\"Grand day,\" said the neighbor. And he pulled a rolled-up towel out from under his sweater.\n\n\"Thinking of a swim?\" asked Mick.\n\nThe neighbor stood for a moment looking up at the sky. Then he turned to Mick.\n\n\"That's what I was thinking. High tide's about now.\"\n\n\"Looks like we're in for some rain.\"\n\n\"Ah, sure that won't hurt me if I'm wet already.\"\n\nThe neighbor turned and looked at the upstairs window of his house.\n\n\"Don't go telling on me now. If she found out, she'd kill me.\"\n\nSure, who would I tell? wondered Mick, walking with the neighbor toward the corner.\n\n\"Your secret's safe with me,\" he said, as he and the neighbor parted ways. \"Enjoy your swim now.\"\n\nThe neighbor put his index finger to his lips to reiterate the need for discretion. And Mick thought, hang on a minute, who's the fugitive here?\n\nIn the Spar, he filled a basket with groceries. He scanned the front pages of the papers, afraid to bend down to study them properly in case he aroused any suspicion. With his sunglasses on he could hardly see, but he was afraid to take them off for fear of being recognized. He placed himself in line for the checkout, looking straight ahead of him. When his turn came, he marched forward and hefted his basket up on to the counter.\n\n\"Hiya,\" he said to the young man at the till. A stocky, mahogany-skinned man, he was Malaysian by the looks of him, or maybe even Mauritian. Mick prided himself on being able to guess these things.\n\n\"Where is it you're from,\" he asked. \"Malaysia?\"\n\n\"Me?\" said the young man, surprised. \"I'm from Brazil.\" He jerked his head to the man working at the next till along, \"He's from Malaysia,\" he said, laughing as if it was all a big joke.\n\n\"Good stuff,\" said Mick, wondering to himself when it had come to pass that the only people doing an honest day's work in Ireland were the foreigners.\n\n\"Do you have a loyalty card?\" asked the young man.\n\n\"What?\" said Mick. \"A loyalty card? No. I don't have a loyalty card.\"\n\n\"Would you like one?\"\n\n\"No. No, you're all right, I don't need a loyalty card.\"\n\n\"You should get one,\" said the young man, his brown eyes full of concern. \"It doesn't take long. You fill out this form.\"\n\nAlready he was producing the form from under the counter.\n\n\"Honestly,\" said Mick, waving it away. \"I don't need a loyalty card. I'm not here for long.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" said the young man, putting the form back under the counter. He looked disconsolate, as if he'd just failed to save a soul. Even as he was scanning Mick's groceries, he was ruminating over it. \"You can save a lot of money if you have a loyalty card.\"\n\nMick emerged from the Spar with a plastic bag weighing down each arm. The rain had started and he had no raincoat. No umbrella either, and no means of holding one. There was nothing to save him from getting a wetting. He lingered in the doorway, looking hopelessly out at the rain, and it was then that he spotted Alma's father's car. It was definitely Manus's car, a powder-blue 1962 Mark 2 Jag\u2014sure, who else would drive a car like that? It was stopped at the traffic lights, with Manus's mad head in proud silhouette above the steering wheel. Mick stepped out on to the street, ready to wave him down, a sudden rush of affection unfolding inside him for his former father-in-law.\n\nThe lights changed and the car began to move, prowling through the intersection.\n\n\"Manus!\" called Mick, arm in the air.\n\nThe car cruised toward him, and Mick had to jump back on to the pavement to avoid being mowed down. Alma's father was in profile now, detached from the world like an old sea captain at the wheel of a great ship out on the open sea. Oblivious to the furious wake he was generating, he splattered Mick with mud as he passed.\n\n\"Manus,\" called Mick again, setting his shopping bags down so that he could wave with both hands.\n\nThe car moved slowly past the Spar, blithely occupying the center of the road so that other cars were forced to pull in just to let it pass.\n\n\"Manus,\" called Mick, a third time. Even though by now it was clear that Manus hadn't seen him.\n\nMajestically, the car moved off down the avenue, cresting the bridge and disappearing the other side of it. Mick picked up his shopping bags again and continued on his journey, feeling sadly invisible.\n\n\"Are you the fella from the Corporation?\" asked a very old woman he met at the corner of the square. She was wearing a transparent plastic scarf knotted under her chin, and a large transparent raincoat, even though the rain had stopped and the sun was out again.\n\nMick put his shopping bags down and pointed at himself.\n\n\"Who, me?\"\n\n\"Yes, you. The Corporation said they were going to send someone round to look at the drains. The drains is all blocked, I've been trying for weeks to get them to send someone round.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Mick, sorry to disappoint her. \"No, I'm afraid I'm not the man from the Corporation.\"\n\nThe woman took a step toward him.\n\n\"Only, there's more rain forecast and I'm worried those drains is going to flood. They don't clean out the drains,\" she said, confiding in him now. \"Years ago, there used to be always fellas out cleaning the drains, but nowadays you never see them.\"\n\nMick could feel dried mud splatters caking on the skin of his ankles. His clothes were damp and hung heavy on him but still he had a desire to linger. A desire for human contact.\n\n\"How long are you living on the square?\" he asked her.\n\n\"Oh, I'm here all my life.\"\n\nShe turned and pointed to a house behind her. Mick wasn't sure if she meant the one with the yellow door or the one with the white door.\n\n\"I was born in that house,\" she said. \"My mother had six of us in that house and then she died. My father only lasted three months after her. It was my grandfather who reared us.\"\n\nMick found himself surprisingly affected by her story.\n\n\"How very sad,\" he said.\n\n\"Ah, sure that was the way of it in those days. Times was harder then. People had to manage as best they could.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Mick thoughtfully, and his own misfortunes suddenly seemed very feeble to him.\n\n\"Well,\" said the woman, \"we live in hope.\"\n\n\"Of what?\" asked Mick, thinking for a moment that she had some answer to offer him, something that would show him the way out of the predicament he was in.\n\nShe looked at him like he was simple.\n\n\"We live in hope,\" she said, \"of the man coming about the drains before the place gets flooded.\"\n\n\"Oh, that,\" said Mick, bending to pick up his bags. \"Yes, indeed. We live in hope.\"\n\nWith the shopping bags weighing him down, he made his way along the last stretch of the square.\n\n\"You wouldn't do me a favor?\" asked the bald neighbor. He was standing out in front of his house. \"You wouldn't take me towel? Stick it on a radiator for me. I'll get it back off you later.\"\n\n\"Sure,\" said Mick, putting his shopping bags down again so he could take the towel. \"Afraid you're going to be busted?\" he asked, weighing the wet towel in his hand as if he were trying to guess how heavy it was.\n\n\"Something like that,\" said the neighbor. \"It's the cancer,\" he said, by way of explanation. \"I'm in the middle of me chemo. If the wife knew I'd been in for a swim, she'd kill me.\"\n\nMick nodded, not sure what to say.\n\n\"I'll throw it in the dryer,\" he said. \"Come and get it whenever you want.\"\n\n\"Nice one,\" said the neighbor. And he slipped into his house, pulling the door shut quietly behind him.\n\nMick took Alma's spare keys out of his pocket and tackled her new triple-lock system. Two Chubbs, one Yale, all of them put in the day she'd come home from the hospital, she'd told him. Just as he was losing his patience, the door gave in.\n\nHe unpacked the shopping, humming away to himself happily. He was thinking about the people he'd met, and the feeling it gave him to talk to them. He liked talking to people. That was something he'd missed, all the years he'd been living in Brussels. It only occurred to him now how much he'd missed it. Now that he was back among his own people.\n\n\"I met some of your neighbors,\" said Mick, once they were sitting down to dinner.\n\nRisotto with baby peas; before adding the stock to the rice, he had thrown in a generous glass of a fine Spanish sherry he'd found in Alma's drinks cabinet. The result was sublime, a dish that was more than the sum of its parts. The peas as sweet as gumdrops, the stock neither liquid nor solid, and the rice offering just the right resistance on the teeth.\n\n\"Don't tell me you've been drawing them down on me,\" she said. \"I've spent years studiously avoiding them.\"\n\nRain falling on the skylight, like handfuls of small pebbles striking the glass. It had been raining for hours.\n\n\"Well, I met the man next door,\" said Mick. \"The man with the cancer.\"\n\n\"I didn't know he had cancer.\"\n\n\"He's doing chemotherapy. He still swims in the sea, though. He doesn't want his wife to find out.\"\n\nAlma sighed.\n\n\"That pair,\" she said. \"They drive me mad. He insists on sticking a parking cone outside his house so no one will take his space. On Sunday mornings they cook cabbage and the smell of it seeps into my house through the fireplace.\"\n\n\"There's an old lady across the square. I got talking to her too.\"\n\n\"Not Dolores?\"\n\n\"I didn't get her name. Nice old lady...\"\n\n\"Invisible hairnet, lipstick on the teeth?\"\n\n\"As I said, a nice old lady. She's concerned about the drains.\"\n\nAlma smiled. Very slowly she began to shake her head from side to side.\n\n\"You're unbelievable! You're canvassing my bloody neighbors! Where are we? Three years from the next election? So what are you thinking? Time to reinvent yourself?\"\n\nShe was still shaking her head.\n\n\"I know exactly what you're thinking. You're thinking you'll snatch that seat right out from under your brother's nose.\"\n\nHe stared at her, shocked that she had guessed what he was thinking before he had even formulated it himself. His brother's seat, lost at the last election, it would be ripe for the picking next time round. The thought had been percolating at the back of his head. Not even a thought yet, more like mild vapors, conspiring to take ahold of him.\n\n\"Ah, come on,\" he said. And he lowered his face to look down into his risotto. \"Come on,\" he repeated, digging around in the rapidly congealing rice with his fork. \"What do you take me for?\"\n\nWhen he looked up at her again she was still staring at him. She had one eyebrow raised, her eyes twinkling at him and her lips clamped shut to suppress a smile. She saw right through him\u2014always had done\u2014and yet she liked him all the same. That was the thing about himself and Alma, he thought, they had always liked each other.\n\n\"What happened to us?\" he asked her. \"We were so good together. We brought out the best in each other.\"\n\nShe snapped her head to the side, looking out into the garden. In her throat she sounded a dry little laugh, or an expression of indignation, he didn't know which.\n\n\"You know what happened, Mick.\"\n\nBut did he? It seemed to him that they had never talked about it. Not then, and not since. Not properly.\n\n\"The thing with Acushla,\" he said. \"I still don't know if you believe me. You can ask me a hundred times and I'd give you the same answer over and over again. Nothing. Happened. Between. Me. And. Acushla.\"\n\n\"It wasn't just that,\" she said, looking down at her plate now. \"It was all the others, too.\"\n\n\"They didn't matter.\" Was there a way of saying this without making it sound like a broken record? He tried to put extra feeling into it, tried to make every word ring true. \"Not a single one of them mattered to me, Alma.\"\n\nShe looked up at him as she answered in a throwaway voice.\n\n\"They mattered to me.\"\n\nSuddenly he felt very, very bad. Not just because it had cost him his marriage, not just because it had cost him his home and his daughter, but because he had hurt her.\n\n\"I didn't take it seriously enough,\" he said, and it was a revelation to himself as much as it was to her. \"I took it for granted, what we had. I was a gobshite.\"\n\n\"In fairness,\" she said, softening, \"we neither of us did. We neither of us knew what it was we had.\"\n\nAnd it was typical of her, thought Mick, to be so just.\n\nHe dropped his shoulders forward, lowering his head so that he was looking up at her. Eyes narrowed, he ventured to ask, \"Do you think you'd ever be able to give me another chance?\"\n\nShe grimaced, the way you do when you're breaking bad news to someone.\n\n\"I don't know, Mick. The honest answer to that is, I simply do not know.\"\n\nThe flood came at nightfall.\n\nA wet, dark, silent thing, it slithered out from under the gates of the stadium and coiled itself around the gutters, expanding until it had filled the streets right up to the top of the curbs. Noiselessly, it spilled over, flooding the pavements. It seeped into the grass and began to rise like a sponge cake, the water levels steadily climbing the inside walls of the square. It crept up the pathways of the houses, slipping under their front doors without anyone noticing. Its stealth was a living, breathing thing, silent in the night.\n\nThe first Alma and Mick knew of it was when the neighbor banged on their door. Two dull thuds that bore the sound of a fist rather than a row of knuckles. Alma and Mick were waiting for the start of the nine o'clock news, when they heard it.\n\n\"Jesus,\" said Mick. \"What the hell was that?\"\n\nHe looked over at Alma. She had not moved from where she was sitting. Hands in her lap, head held high, she had closed her eyes, as if by doing so she could make herself disappear. For a second, Mick had a memory of Nora as a child. Whenever they played hide-and-seek, Nora would put her hands over her eyes, imagining that if she couldn't see him, then he couldn't see her either.\n\n\"Stay here,\" he said. \"I'll get it.\"\n\nWhen he opened the door, the flood poured in. The neighbor was standing outside in his pajamas, his wellies deep in the water. The street outside was moving but the sky was still. The rain had stopped, leaving behind an eerie silence.\n\n\"What is it?\" asked Alma, coming up behind Mick.\n\n\"It's the river,\" said the neighbor. \"The river's gone and burst its banks.\"\n\nBehind him Mick could make out dark figures wading through the water with buckets and flashlights. On the doorsteps, backlit by their brightly painted front halls, children stood in their pajamas watching. Above them loomed the stadium, dimly lit from within. It looked sheepish, as if it was trying not to draw attention to itself.\n\n\"Hold on a second,\" said Mick. \"I'm coming.\"\n\nHe reached back into the hall for a raincoat, grabbing a bright yellow mac of Nora's that was hanging on the coatrack. He just about managed to squeeze himself into it. There were no wellies in his size so he took his shoes off, rolled his trousers up over his knees and stepped out into the floodwaters in his bare feet. He was thinking about broken glass. About rats and Weil's disease. Underfoot, he could feel sharp stones. Uneven tarmac. A manhole cover.\n\n\"You stay here,\" he shouted back to Alma. \"Get a brush and try to sweep the water out. I'll find out if there's anything we can do to stop it rising any farther.\"\n\nTogether with the neighbor, Mick waded out into the middle of the street, up to his knees in the cold black water.\n\n\"Where does the water drain to?\" he asked the neighbor.\n\n\"It doesn't. The drains are all blocked up.\"\n\n\"All right. We'll need to open a manhole, so. Has anyone got a crowbar?\"\n\n\"I do, in the house. I'll go and get it.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" said Mick. \"I don't know your name.\"\n\n\"Maurice,\" said the neighbor. \"My name's Maurice.\"\n\nHe held out his hand to shake Mick's.\n\n\"Maurice, I'm not sure whether you should be out here. I'm worried you might catch something.\"\n\n\"Ah, well. It's a bit late for that,\" said Maurice. \"And anyway, nothing this exciting has happened round here for years. I'm not about to miss it now.\"\n\nMaurice waded back into his house, his pajama bottoms sagging under an inadequate drawstring. A moment later he returned with a crowbar.\n\n\"I came across the manhole cover here somewhere,\" said Mick, walking around in the pitch-black water. He was scoping out the ground with the soles of his feet. Every so often he would touch on something slimy, or something that moved. At one point something scurried between his feet and he scrambled, comically, to lift his legs off the ground, hopping first on one foot and then the other. At last his right toe made contact with the dimpled metal surface of the manhole cover.\n\n\"Here it is!\" he shouted. \"Here it is, Maurice, I have it!\"\n\n\"Good man,\" said Maurice, and he waded over to Mick with the crowbar. Taking it from him, Mick blind-guided it in through the opening on the cover of the manhole and leaned on it with all his weight. The cover didn't budge.\n\n\"Give us a hand here.\"\n\nMaurice came around behind him and together they grabbed on to the crowbar.\n\n\"All right, are you ready? One, two, three.\"\n\nThe two of them leaned down on the crowbar and gradually, with great reluctance, the manhole cover lifted. Carefully, Mick hefted it to one side, and he and Maurice stood peering down into the black flood waters. In both of their minds was the possibility that whatever was down there might make its way up\u2014a geyser of raw sewage\u2014to add to their troubles.\n\nAs they gazed into the impenetrable depths, slowly but steadily the manhole began to draw on the flood water. From all around them it was being sucked downward until, unbelievably, the water levels began to fall.\n\n\"Sweet Jesus,\" said Mick. \"It's working.\"\n\n\"I don't believe it,\" said Maurice, looking up at him. His strangely hairless face was shining in the moonlight. \"We did it,\" he said, and he slapped Mick on the back.\n\nThe water was hovering around Mick's ankles, and still falling. A festival air about the place, all around the square people were squelching about in the puddles. Children had ventured out, dressing gowns lapping around the rims of their wellies. The old lady Mick had befriended came out of her house in a quilted robe. Plastic bags tied around her feet, she began handing out mugs of tea that she poured from a giant flask. Someone else passed around biscuits and they all stood about in the dull glow of the stadium, enjoying a neighborly midnight feast. And into this happy atmosphere, into this almost magical gathering of people brought together by their combined efforts to avert disaster, arrived Mick's brother. With his rain jacket open at the neck to reveal a shirt and tie, and his suit trousers tucked into his wellies, he peered down into the open manhole, just as the last slops of the floodwaters were being swallowed up.\n\n\"You might want to put the cover back on that,\" he said. \"That's a danger to small children the way it is.\"\n\n\"You should have seen your face.\" Even now Mick was heaving with childish laughter; he had to clutch a hand to his ribs to contain it. \"Fuck me,\" he said. \"It was worth anything to see your face.\"\n\n\"You looked like Paddington Bear in that raincoat,\" said Liam drily. He picked up his water and sipped at it.\n\n\"Would you not have a pint?\" Mick had asked him.\n\nThe two of them were standing at the bar; Liam was looking anxiously around him, alert to the potential damage of being seen in his brother's company. Three years out from the next election, but already he was shaping up for it. Even after the beating he'd taken, even after the ritual humiliation of his recent defeat, he couldn't wait to get back in the ring. Mick could see it in his eyes.\n\n\"Ah, have a pint with me,\" said Mick.\n\n\"I'm happy with the Ballygowan,\" said Liam. \"I'm watching my glucose levels. You know yourself.\"\n\nMick looked at him. Noticed that he was thinner. He looked older, too. His cheeks slack, like an empty hammock, his complexion gray in the yellow light of the pub.\n\n\"What prompted this?\"\n\n\"Ah, I've been seeing this dietician. She has me off gluten. Dairy, you know, the usual.\"\n\n\"And when you say _seeing_?\"\n\n\"Jesus, Mick. Is that all you think about? I'm seeing her for my cholesterol levels. I'm trying to get the cholesterol down. Our father died of a heart attack at fifty, or had you forgotten that? It's time we started minding ourselves.\"\n\n\"Well in case you hadn't heard, Liam, my cholesterol is the least of my fucking problems.\"\n\nSo there they were, back to square one. Fighting each other for space in the back of the car. Measuring their MiWadi glasses against each other, using an upended ruler to mark out the slightest discrepancy in the levels. Setting the alarm to be the first to wake on Christmas morning so as to plunder the other one's stocking. From the moment they arrived into the world, seventeen minutes apart and roaring the both of them, from that moment on they had been out to get each other.\n\nThey collected their drinks from the bar and carried them over to a table in the corner.\n\n\"So, are you not going to ask?\"\n\nLiam shrugged. Took another sip of his water.\n\n\"I don't have to ask. I saw it on the telly.\"\n\n\"Oh, and that's it?\"\n\n\"What more could there be?\"\n\n\"Well, you might let me try and explain.\"\n\nLiam dipped two fingers into his water glass and drew out an ice cube. Putting it into his mouth, he crunched on it.\n\n\"I don't need to listen to you explain. I'm your brother, Mick. I know you. You're the guy who used to steal robins' eggs out of their nests just for the crack. You're the guy who used to nick bottles of milk off old ladies' doorsteps. You're the fucker who robbed my hurling medal, for God's sake. You robbed it out of my school bag and you let Tommy Mangan take the blame.\"\n\nMick let a deep breath out of him.\n\n\"I did not rob that medal.\"\n\nAnd in so far as he knew, it was true. He had no memory of ever robbing that bloody medal.\n\nLiam was staring at him, staring right into his eyes.\n\n\"I'd still love to know what you did with it. You must have hidden it away somewhere, somewhere you knew I'd never find it. It had my name engraved on the back of it, so you couldn't even go showing it off to anyone. Why would you bother? That's what I never understood. Was it just for the pleasure of knowing that you had something that belonged to me?\"\n\nListening to him, Mick found himself wondering was it possible that he _had_ robbed the medal? Was it possible that he had robbed it and didn't remember?\n\n\"This is ridiculous,\" he said. \"I don't even remember the bloody thing. It seems only to exist in your memory.\"\n\n\"You see? You're still denying it.\"\n\nMick picked up his pint and took a gulp, trying to keep a lid on his rage. It was ridiculous for them to be fighting over this. Jaysus, it was embarrassing at their age.\n\n\"Would you listen to us,\" he said. \"And us in our fifties.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Liam, but he was determined not to let it go. \"Fifty-seven years old, but some of us still have some growing up to do.\"\n\nAnd it was a mark perhaps of the doldrums that Mick found himself in that he let his brother have the last word.\n\n\"Well,\" he said. \"None of this has turned out exactly how we planned it, has it?\"\n\nLiam shrugged, his face grim as he answered.\n\n\"We've been thrown a few curveballs all right.\"\n\n\"Ah, come on. We dropped the fucking ball, Liam. We stood on the shagging thing and burst it. We took it and stuck a pin in it.\"\n\nLiam's eyes took on an opaque quality.\n\n\"It's been a tough time, I'm not denying that. It's been a tough time for the whole country. But we need to look on our present troubles as an opportunity. There's a great opportunity now for a fresh start.\"\n\n\"Jaysus,\" said Mick, with a bark. \"You're starting to sound like a fucking politician.\"\n\nLiam turned his face to look at his brother head-on. Defensive now. Accusatory.\n\n\"What else am I going to do, Mick? What else _can_ I do? Head up a charity? Go and write a crime novel? Politics is my trade, Mick. It's what I do. It's the only thing I know how to do. I don't see any other options out there for me. There isn't exactly a queue at my door for my services. I can hardly retire at fifty-seven. I have to find some way of filling the next ten years.\"\n\nThere was panic in his voice and Mick almost felt sorry for him.\n\n\"I hear you,\" he said. \"Sure, aren't we in the same boat, the two of us? Two washed-up old farts.\"\n\nBut Liam didn't like that. He didn't like to think their predicaments were in any way comparable.\n\n\"Speak for yourself,\" he said, the fucker.\n\nMick let it go.\n\n\"So, what's your plan?\" asked Liam.\n\n\"I don't really have one,\" said Mick. \"Sure, my term was up soon anyway. They were only dying for an excuse to get rid of me.\"\n\nLiam weighed that up.\n\n\"Yeah,\" he said. \"But at least while you were in Brussels you were still inside the tent, instead of outside it pissing in.\"\n\nMick laughed, a laugh that stayed trapped inside his chest.\n\n\"Have you not heard?\" he said. \"The tent has been blown away in the storm. There is no fucking tent!\"\n\n\"So, we pitch a new one,\" said Liam, with grim determination.\n\nWhere was he getting this shit from? Some counselor? Some overpriced life coach? Some change-management guru that he'd signed up to?\n\n\"Do you know what, Liam? I think I'd prefer to sleep out in the open.\"\n\nMick picked up his pint and drained it, his eyes on his brother the whole time. He beckoned to the barman for another.\n\n\"Tell me,\" said Liam, as they waited for the pint to arrive. \"How's Alma doing?\"\n\nMick dropped his head to the side. Thought about it for a minute.\n\n\"Physically,\" he said, \"she's grand. She went and chopped all her hair off, but otherwise she's grand. Mentally, though, I think she's very fragile.\"\n\nLiam raised his eyebrows.\n\n\"That's not a word I'd ever have associated with Alma.\"\n\nMick laughed.\n\n\"Fierce, yes. Fearless. Ferocious. All the F words. But not fragile.\"\n\n\"Yes, it was always Acushla was the fragile one.\"\n\nAnd they were both of them silent for a moment, thinking not of Acushla as she was now, but Acushla as she was when they first met her.\n\nMick remembers her in her pale pink bridesmaid's dress and her gold strappy sandals walking across the lawn at his wedding. She was holding her sandals by their straps in one hand, the way a poacher carries a brace of game birds. Later, when she was dancing barefoot, he saw that the soles of her feet were stained green by the grass. He saw his brother watching her and he knew instantly what was going to happen. Two brothers marrying two sisters: it seemed like it was meant to be.\n\n\"How is she?\" asked Mick. \"Acushla.\"\n\n\"How's Acushla?\" repeated Liam. \"The truth is, Mick, I'd be the last person to know. We live in the same house but we hardly have a word to say to each other.\"\n\nMick looked at his brother as if he was only seeing him for the first time.\n\n\"I'm sorry to hear that,\" he said. \"I really am.\"\n\nAnd it was true, he _was_ sorry. He was surprised at how sorry he was. He had assumed that Liam and Acushla were happy. Despite everything, he had imagined their marriage to be a success, holding it up against the very public failure of his own. To find out now that it was not what he had imagined it to be, there was no satisfaction in it for him. He felt only sorrow.\n\nAs his brother looked back at him, Mick made a conscious effort to hold his gaze. Eyeball to eyeball for five seconds. Eyes open wider. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Just like that game they used to play when they were kids: the first to blink would lose. Staring into Liam's steady blue eyes, it seemed to Mick that he could see his brother's feelings moving like dancers behind a screen. Resentment, self-pity, suspicion.\n\nLiam blinked and Mick spat out a laugh in triumph.\n\n\"You fucker,\" said Liam, picking up his water glass.\n\nIn the far corner of the pub, unbeknownst to either of them, a man was holding his phone up in the air to take a photograph of them. Bending down low over his lap, the man posted the photograph on Twitter, wondering with a happy burp of warm hops how long it would take someone to pick up on it.\n\n# Acushla MacEntee At Home\n\nHer name is synonymous with understated glamour, so it's no surprise to find Acushla MacEntee Collins immaculately clothed in a gray silk shirt-dress and simple gold jewelry on a Monday morning in early summer. Welcoming Style magazine into her home in Dublin 4, the 45-year-old wife of the former Minister for Justice says the key to her look is simplicity. \"I think the most important thing is to dress for yourself. At my age, I don't care what anyone else thinks. I'm very comfortable in my own skin.\"\n\nAcushla has a grown-up daughter and two small grandsons but she hardly looks old enough to be a mother, let alone a grandmother. So what's her secret? \"If you're asking me whether I've used Botox, then the answer is no,\" she replies, with disarming candor. \"I'm afraid I'm too squeamish to allow anyone near me with a needle. I'm terrified of going under the knife. So the only alternative is to grow old gracefully. I try to drink a lot of water, and I stay out of the sun. Apart from that, it's all down to genes. I have my mother to thank for that. She's about to turn eighty and she still has the complexion of a teenager.\"\n\nOf course, Acushla's mother is none other than Deirdre O'Sullivan, star of the Abbey stage and a legendary figure in Irish theater. \"From an early age, my mother instilled in us the importance of presenting your best face to the world. We were always taught to walk with our heads held high and our shoulders well back. You might be wearing rags, but if you walk like a queen, then that's what the world will take you for.\"\n\nIt's salutary advice for the times we live in. And Acushla MacEntee is no stranger to hardship. Two years ago, she was the wife of a senior member of the Cabinet. Now her husband is fighting to win back the seat he lost in the last election. \"Politics is such a tough game,\" she says, \"and it's very hard watching someone you love take a knock like that. But Liam is a remarkably resilient person. I'm so proud of the way he has picked himself up and started again. He really cares about the future of this country and he wants to be a part of it.\"\n\nFor her part, Acushla is content to support him. \"I've always been more comfortable playing the supporting role than the lead. Even when my sister and I would put on little plays as children, she always took center stage and I was left with all the bit parts! Since I married Liam I've been very happy to let him occupy the limelight. My job is in the wings, but it's an important job, the job of wife and mother. Now I'm a grandmother as well, so I find I've plenty to keep me occupied!\"\n\n# Acushla\n\nAcushla stood at the kitchen window and watched as Connie unloaded her grandsons from the back of the car. She was short of breath, her heart beating too fast in her chest, like a distressed bird. Instinct and counter-instinct battling it out with each other. She was looking forward to the morning ahead of her\u2014she always looked forward to these Friday mornings with the boys\u2014just as a part of her was dreading it. Already she was anticipating the droop of their heavy little heads over the kitchen table. Their pudgy fists clutching the crayons, and the frantic windshield-wiper motion of their hands across the page. The voracious appetite for fresh paper.\n\nShe had it all ready for them\u2014a neat stack of foolscap pages in the center of the table, and on top of it, acting as a paperweight, the tub of crayons. The Ribena was already mixed, the plastic beakers standing by on the kitchen counter to receive it. The boys would knock the beakers over, of course. They would spill the Ribena all over their artwork and Acushla would be forced to hang the pages out like wet laundry, draping them over the backs of chairs and radiators. Later, the dry drawings would flutter to the floor, enjoying a moment of flight before coming to land under the kitchen dresser, or the Aga, from where Acushla would gather them up and stash them outside in the green bin.\n\nOh, she was tired just thinking about it. She was tired and apprehensive at the same time. As she watched the boys tripping along the gravel path toward the kitchen steps, her heart was in her mouth. The way they walked, with the weight of their bodies thrown out over their feet, it was inevitable that one of them would fall. And sure enough, as Acushla watched, Oscar went tumbling down. Connie swept up behind him with Ernie hanging on to her right hand, a huge shoulder bag acting as a counterbalance on her other side. With a scoop of her free hand she set Oscar on his feet, and with the same tipping motion he began to tumble forward again, tripping over his own toes. Acushla watched him spill down the stairs and wondered should she have taken a whole Valium this morning instead of a half?\n\nShe opened the kitchen door and stood aside as Oscar stormed in, his brother following fast behind him. They kicked their shoes off and together they made straight for the far side of the kitchen, pulling a stool alongside the counter so they could climb up to the biscuit tin.\n\n\"Boys!\" said Connie. \"Are you not going to say hello to your granny?\"\n\nThey turned around, just.\n\n\"Hi, Ganny.\"\n\nA biscuit in each hand, they scrambled back down, leaving the lid off the tin. Helplessly, Acushla stood and watched them. She'd be the whole afternoon cleaning up.\n\n\"Oscar needs to take his antibiotics,\" said Connie. \"And I'll leave you some Calpol, in case the fever comes back.\"\n\nHer daughter was rooting around in her handbag, the loose waves of her hair falling down over her long, thin face. She was wearing a vintage raincoat, open on to a short green dress that had the look of a charity shop about it. The matching green leather gloves she wore made it difficult for her to negotiate her way around the inside of the handbag. Impatiently, she pulled one glove off with her teeth and dipped her naked hand back inside. She unpacked half a dozen loose nappies on to the table, along with a blister pack of Calpol fastmelts and a small brown bottle of medicine.\n\n\"How much Calpol should I give him?\" asked Acushla anxiously. You'd think she would know this. She was a mother herself; surely she would know this? When she became a grandmother, it was as if everything she had once known about babies had been wiped clean and she was forced to start over again. She was as nervous minding Connie's boys as she would have been minding a complete stranger's children. More so, maybe. She was terrified she would let something happen to them.\n\n\"Give him five mil of the antibiotics,\" Connie was saying. \"And one fastmelt every four hours.\"\n\nAcushla was sorry now that she'd taken the Valium. She was struggling to absorb Connie's instructions. A breeze blowing through her head, it picked up the words and swirled them round inside her skull.\n\n\"Shit,\" said Connie. \"Look at the time.\"\n\n\"Where do you have to be?\"\n\n\"Oh, I've to do a feature piece for the _Indo_ about this abortion thing. I've found a woman who's willing to talk about it. They need the piece by tomorrow, so I'll have to write it up tonight when the boys are in bed. These people think that freelancers have no lives...\"\n\nConnie was still talking, but Acushla's head had emptied of everything but that one word. A word that was on the radio every time she turned it on these past few weeks. On the front pages of all the papers, again. On her daughter's lips, even now, as she rooted around in her handbag, her voice muffled by a tumble of hair.\n\n\"This woman was raped, but she had to go to England earlier this year for an abortion because she couldn't get one here. I swear to God, there are times when I think this country is still in the Dark Ages.\"\n\nAcushla didn't answer her, but Connie didn't seem to notice. She had her head in her handbag. A reporter's notebook coming out on to the table, and a hooded fleece. A freezer bag bursting with Lego.\n\n\"Finally,\" said Connie, pulling out a glossy magazine, its spine doubled back on itself to reveal a photograph of her mother sitting elegantly balanced on the arm of the drawing-room couch.\n\n\"I thought you might want a spare copy. For Grandmother's scrapbook.\" (From the moment Connie had arrived in the world, it had been made clear to her that her grandmother's title was not to be abbreviated. Under no circumstances was anyone to call her \"Granny,\" or \"Nana.\" Nothing short of \"Grandmother\" would do. Whereas Connie's mother delighted in being \"Ganny\" to her boys.)\n\nAcushla made an effort to smile.\n\n\"The photo's nice,\" said Connie, leaning in for a second to plant a kiss on her mother's cheek before rushing for the door. She paused and looked back, with a wink. \"I have to say, you're looking pretty good. For _forty-five_.\"\n\nAs her daughter swept past, Acushla swayed, and for a moment she feared she might topple over.\n\n\"You're an angel, Mum. I don't know where I'd be without you.\"\n\nHer head disappeared past the kitchen window. Looking up at the clock on the wall above, Acushla saw that it was only two minutes past ten. That left two hours and fifty-eight minutes before Connie would be back. It seemed like an awful long time.\n\nBy eleven o'clock, they were in Accident and Emergency.\n\n\"He's got a piece of Lego stuck up his nose,\" Acushla told the nurse. \"I don't know how he managed it. I was with him the whole time.\" She was desperate not to appear negligent.\n\n\"Let's have a look,\" said the nurse, dipping down to see.\n\nObligingly, Oscar tipped his head back for her. This was not the first time he had stuck things up his nose, so he knew the drill.\n\n\"Well, I can see it up there,\" said the nurse. \"But we're going to have to wait for the doctor to take it out.\"\n\nOscar whirled off to join his brother, who was pulling a stream of tickets out of the dispenser.\n\n\"Lads,\" growled the nurse, her index finger raised.\n\nAcushla kneaded the handbag on her lap.\n\n\"How long do you think the wait will be?\"\n\nThe nurse shrugged, unsympathetic.\n\n\"There's a few people ahead of you. You're looking at an hour at the very least.\"\n\nWispy thoughts floated unbidden through Acushla's mind. The thought of the amount of money she'd raised for this hospital over the years. The thought of the fund-raising dinner that was taking place this very night. She had the hospital CEO's number in her phone. In a matter of hours he would be sitting across the table from her; she could ring him right now if she wanted to. The thought roamed around her head like an unwanted guest. Of course she would not ring him! Not in a million years would she ring him about something so trivial. But it would make a good story for later, the story of her morning in Accident and Emergency. She pictured herself regaling the table with it. It gave her great buoyancy to think that she had this story to tell.\n\nShe picked herself up and moved toward the row of plastic seats in the waiting area. The boys were kneeling on the ground, making imaginary pancakes on a brightly colored plastic stove. Acushla picked up a tattered copy of _Hello!_ magazine and sat down to read about Kate Middleton's pregnancy, but the words kept jumping around on the page. Pressing in around her, the presence of the other people in the waiting room.\n\nThere was a fevered baby screaming. A toddler pedaling a plastic tractor up and down the corridor in a frenzy. There was a little girl in pink pajamas curled up on her mother's lap, her eyes silently roaming the room. The mother looked young and poor. She kept petting the little girl's head, planting kiss after kiss on her threadbare skull. Acushla felt guilty looking at them. With her designer handbag in her lap, and her expensive coat folded inside-out across her knees\u2014with her boisterously healthy boys and their frivolous medical emergency\u2014she felt overprivileged and unworthy by comparison. She vowed to cede her place in the queue to the woman if her ticket happened to be called first.\n\nShe thought about ringing Connie, but, heroically, she didn't. Every five minutes she thought about ringing Connie, but she resisted the temptation each time, proud of herself every moment that went by for holding the line. Anticipating already the pride she would take in telling her daughter there had been no need to ring.\n\n\"Oh, we managed just fine,\" she would say. \"Didn't we, boys? We managed just grand.\"\n\nFrom her handbag she produced two bags of popcorn to keep them going, and dipping into the inside pocket she fished out a Valium for herself. As she broke the little yellow pill in half, she saw that the polish on one of her fingernails had chipped away. She felt a rising sense of despair at the thought that she would have to do her nails again before the dinner tonight. She still had her dress to collect from the dry-cleaner's, and she had promised to stop by the hotel to check the flowers. The goodie bags would need to be stashed under the chairs, the chocolate favors distributed around the tabletops. What had seemed on paper a simple list of chores now began to take on a nightmare complexion. Too late, Acushla realized that she had taken on too much, again.\n\nThe dinner was in aid of the children's hospital, one of half a dozen charities that Acushla patronized. The venue was a five-star hotel barely a mile from her home. A brand-new, purpose-built palace, its completion had coincided with the high-water mark in the country's fortunes. No sooner was the red carpet rolled out, no sooner was the first Rolls-Royce pulling up outside than the nation's finances were in free fall.\n\n\"We'll have a job getting money out of people tonight,\" said one of Acushla's fellow committee members as they moved around the tables checking place names. An angular beauty by the name of Laura, this woman had been a model in her past life. Small-town stuff, standing around Stephen's Green in a skimpy bikini, covered in fake tan and goose bumps. She'd gone on to become the wife of a well-known cardiologist. The mother of a child with cancer, she was a tireless fund-raiser for the children's hospital. Acushla couldn't help but feel inferior to her, as if her suffering had earned her extra points in the game of life.\n\n\"You look gorgeous,\" said Acushla, surveying the simple satin gown, the effortlessly twined hair, the barely there makeup.\n\n\"So do you,\" said Laura. \"But then you always look lovely.\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't know about that,\" said Acushla breathlessly. \"I had to throw myself together. You know yourself\u2014one of those days.\"\n\nShe had not had time to put rollers in her hair and she had been forced to patch her chipped nails rather than redoing them from scratch, little chinks in her armor that left her feeling horribly vulnerable.\n\n\"That's a great dress,\" said Laura, as they moved on to the next table.\n\n\"Well, the sleeves do wonders for the bingo wings,\" said Acushla, with deliberate self-deprecation.\n\n\"Oh, get away out of that,\" said Laura. \"You don't have a pick on you.\"\n\nWas Acushla imagining it, or was Laura's tone a little impatient? Irritated, even?\n\n\"Your sister was very good to honor her commitment to us. Everyone would have understood if she hadn't felt up to it\u2014under the circumstances.\"\n\n\"Oh, Alma's a real trouper,\" said Acushla. But the words sounded a big hollow clang in the air. She tried them again, like a showjumper coming around for a fresh attempt at a fence. \"She's an absolute trouper,\" she said. \"She wouldn't dream of letting us down.\"\n\nAs soon as Alma's name was announced, there was an explosion of applause. Heads turned to see, arms draped over the backs of chairs. As she stood up and weaved her way toward the stage, a low outbreak of commentary rose from the tables.\n\n\"Fair play to her,\" said the man on Acushla's right. \"That's courage for you.\"\n\n\"Oh, she's got mettle,\" said someone else. \"I'll say that for her.\"\n\nAcushla twisted from the waist, clapping with what she hoped looked like genuine affection.\n\nAlma reached the podium and paused, expertly adjusting the microphone while she waited for the applause to die down. She was wearing a simple black tuxedo suit with a pair of ankle-strap stilettos. The double-breasted suit jacket was fastened by a single button, and she was wearing nothing under it.\n\n\"She looks ay-may-zing,\" mouthed the woman to Acushla's right.\n\nAcushla gave a nodding smile, crinkling her eyes in agreement as her sister's voice, familiar as a shiver, slunk around the ballroom.\n\n\"You're too kind,\" said Alma into the microphone, quelling the last of the applause with the power of that beautiful voice. A voice like honey in the sun, as one columnist had famously observed; it was a voice with the power to make a man lie down at her feet and lick them, he had written. For years Alma had kept that clipping tacked up on the door of one of her kitchen cupboards, along with a letter from another fan who wrote to tell her that he liked to close his eyes and jerk off to the sound of her reading the news. She took great pride in that letter, much to the horror of her sister.\n\n\"There is no more worthy cause,\" said Alma, her voice all the more powerful for its unsentimental tone, \"no battle more worth the fighting than the battle to provide state-of-the-art health care to our sickest children. Among us tonight are some of the doctors and nurses who work at the coalface of our hospitals, as well as the dedicated volunteers who support them in their mission. Truly, this is the work of the angels.\"\n\nAlready the waiters were going round the tables topping up people's wineglasses, the committee members rising out of their chairs and gathering at the foot of the stage, ready to bear the auction items around the room.\n\n\"Never has the funding of our hospitals been a more critical issue,\" said Alma. \"Never has the task of fund-raising been more arduous. But rest assured, never has your generosity been more gratefully appreciated.\"\n\nBy the end of the night the auction had fetched forty-nine thousand euro. Which was good money, everybody said; it was a great result for the times that were in it. But it was a far cry from the night that someone paid a hundred and fifty grand for a round of golf with P\u00e1draig Harrington.\n\n\"I have one remaining item to auction,\" said Alma, leaning in to the microphone in conspiratorial fashion. She took something out of her jacket pocket, a small, transparent object that she placed on the podium in front of her.\n\n\"For those of you who can't see, this is an unremarkable but rather infamous glass pepper grinder. Now, can I start the bidding at a hundred?\"\n\n\"That was a bit of a showstopper,\" said Acushla, when she ran into her sister in the powder room.\n\nAlma was sitting in front of the mirror touching up her foundation. Acushla slid on to the seat next to her and took out her own makeup bag, delving into it for her concealer.\n\n\"Sorry,\" said Alma unapologetically, as she dabbed at the side of her nose with the index finger of her maimed right hand. She was looking at Acushla through the mirror. \"I'm afraid I couldn't resist it.\"\n\nAcushla avoided looking at her sister's reflection. She had always been squeamish, and the sight of her sister's wounded hand was more than she could stomach. It seemed to her a little inconsiderate of Alma not to be more discreet in her use of it. She could easily have used her left hand to do her makeup.\n\n\"I don't know why you're apologizing,\" she said coldly. \"It brought the house down. It'll be the talk of the town tomorrow.\"\n\nSitting poker straight on the upholstered stool, she sucked her cheeks in and swept a slick of fresh blusher across her cheekbones, the reflection of her sister's face hovering at the edge of her peripheral vision.\n\n\"Are you annoyed with me?\" asked Alma, brandishing her uncapped lipstick in midair. She appeared bemused by the idea.\n\n\"Why would I be annoyed with you?\" said Acushla, still without making eye contact. She was shaping her eyebrows with her index finger now, licking the finger and smoothing. \"No,\" she went on, in a tinny voice. \"It's just it would have been nice to know that Mick was staying with you. I seem to be the only person in the room who didn't know, that's all.\"\n\n\"Sure it's all over Twitter,\" said Alma, her eyebrows hoisted high. \"And anyway, I assumed your husband would have told you.\"\n\nAcushla felt as if she'd been backed into a corner.\n\n\"Yeah, well, I haven't seen him,\" she said, aware of what this revealed about her marriage. \"We're both so busy these days, we hardly ever see each other.\"\n\nShe zipped up her makeup bag and combed her hair back with her fingers. She looked across at her sister's reflection in the mirror. Alma was looking back at her, with no effort to disguise her humor now.\n\n\"Don't tell me you're jealous. I swear to God, I think you're jealous that he came to me rather than to you.\"\n\n\"Don't be ridiculous,\" said Acushla, stretching out her spine.\n\n\"After all these years,\" said Alma, \"you're still trying to steal my husband!\"\n\n\"Oh, for God's sake,\" said Acushla, and for want of anything else to say, she stood up and made for the door.\n\nOutside in the corridor, a photographer stopped them and asked them to pose for a picture. Without a word, the two sisters draped their arms around each other's waists and inclined the crowns of their heads a little toward each other, to catch a flattering angle. Too late, it occurred to Acushla that she'd been caught on the wrong side of the picture. Her left-hand side had always been her bad side, but she couldn't swap places now. As the flash erupted, she was drowning in the certainty that her sister had stolen a march on her, again.\n\n\"Poor Acushla,\" Acushla's mother liked to say. \"She spent her entire childhood trying to catch up with Alma. She used to follow her around like a lost puppy. Oh, it was painful to watch.\"\n\nAnd it's true, Acushla's earliest memories are all of Alma moving ahead of her like a figure in a dream. Alma in the playground, making for the empty swing. Alma on the street, chasing after the ice-cream van. Alma on the beach, heading for the waterline. In her memory, Acushla is always running after Alma, calling out to her but never catching up.\n\nWhen Alma started school, Acushla took it so badly that her mother had to buy her a school bag too, and a lunch box just like Alma's. When Alma started swimming lessons, Acushla was so determined to prove she could swim that she jumped into the deep end and nearly drowned. When Alma started wearing a bra, Acushla stuffed socks inside her vest to make it look like she was wearing one too, and when Alma got her period, Acushla lay in bed and willed hers to come, to no avail. When Acushla's own milestones did eventually come around, in their own good time, they brought her no satisfaction, coming so long after her sister's as to have no value to her at all.\n\nAcushla was fourteen when she faced up to the fact that she was never going to catch up with her sister. No matter how hard she tried, Alma was always going to be smarter than her at her schoolwork, better at sports, more popular with the boys. And it occurred to Acushla how futile it was for her to continue trying to beat her sister at her own game. Instead of focusing on Alma's strengths, Acushla adjusted her sights, forcing herself to study her sister's weaknesses instead. In everything that her sister was not, she carved out a whole new personality for herself.\n\nThe new Acushla would be gentle where Alma was rough. Meticulous where Alma was careless. Thoughtful toward people where Alma was casual. With absolute determination, Acushla sat down and designed a new style of handwriting for herself. She acquired a watch and took pride in her newfound punctuality; she even started making lists, to overcome her tendency toward forgetfulness. She remembered people's birthdays, and made cards for them, something Alma would never have dreamed of doing. When Alma was drawn into the debating club at school, Acushla volunteered for the benevolent society. While Alma was launching a school newspaper, Acushla was preparing to accompany a group of handicapped people on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. In her final year of school, Acushla was chosen to be head girl, and there was an added satisfaction to her achievement because Alma had never even made prefect.\n\nThat was the year their father left home, moving in with his as-yet-nameless Moroccan lover in a scandal that was passed around the country and parsed with glee, bringing a splash of much-needed color to the otherwise drab winter of 1980. Their brother was sent off to boarding school in a disastrously misguided attempt to insulate him from the jibes of his contemporaries. And while Macdara had done nothing but irritate Acushla when he was in the house, once he was gone she found that she missed him. She missed the physicality of their horseplay. A bump of the shoulders as they passed each other on the stairs, a shin kick under the table at dinner. When Macdara was living at home, he and Acushla had played at hating each other, but without that game to play she was strangely bereft. She missed him most at breakfast time, when they would set up the box of cornflakes as a wall between them so they wouldn't have to look at each other; with Macdara gone, there was no need for the box of cornflakes.\n\nAlma was in college by then and seldom surfaced until midday. Acushla's mother took her breakfast in bed, to recover from the exertions of the night before. She had chosen that winter to relaunch her stage career, with a triumphant run as Grace in Brian Friel's _Faith Healer_ at the Abbey\u2014a part that one critic said was made for her. She dined out most nights after the show, with the result that Acushla ate alone every evening as well as every morning, with the exception of Sunday.\n\nShe was supposed to be studying for her Leaving Cert. Everyone had assumed that she would go to college, perhaps to study Arts, but Acushla was brewing a different plan, one that she had stored up secretly and nurtured during those long winter evenings with the food of her family's neglect. When she should have been memorizing the life cycle of the liver fluke, or committing Cordelia's words to heart, she was filling out application forms for Aer Lingus, and rehearsing for her interview.\n\n\"You're going to be an _air hostess_ ,\" her mother repeated, when Acushla made the announcement. \"What do you mean you're going to be an _air hostess_?\"\n\nThey were all of them gathered round the dining table to celebrate Macdara's sixteenth birthday. It was the first time he'd been allowed home from school for the weekend. The first time they'd all been together since their father had left. Sam had been included in the party, purely it seemed to Acushla because it gave her mother such pleasure to think of the fuss it would cause when people heard that she'd invited her husband's gay lover to dinner.\n\n\"I've been offered a job by Aer Lingus,\" announced Acushla. \"As soon as I've finished my Leaving Cert, I'll be starting my training.\"\n\n\"You must like to travel,\" said Sam, agreeably.\n\nDeirdre gave him a withering look.\n\nOh, what a scene there was that night. One parent a draper's daughter from Ennis, and the other the son of a penniless estate manager from County Kildare, they had their snobberies in common and they were agreed on one thing. No daughter of theirs was going to become an air hostess. They would have preferred her to announce that she was joining the circus, or the chorus line at the Folies-Berg\u00e8re; they would have seen the glamour in that. They wouldn't have minded her falling pregnant outside of marriage, or running off with some dissolute poet, if only he had an ounce of talent. But for her to become an air hostess? God, no. There was absolutely no question of it.\n\nBy the time September came round, Acushla was safely enrolled in First Arts in UCD. She staggered through two years of college, each summer sacrificed to the misery of repeats, until a reprieve came her way in the form of Liam Collins. They were married the Christmas of Acushla's final year and Connie was born the first week in May, providing Acushla with the perfect excuse not to sit her finals. And while the lack of any letters after her name never caused her a moment's regret, while it never once occurred to her to go back and finish her degree, she always felt a pang of something not unlike pain whenever she caught a glimpse of an Aer Lingus uniform. The sight of that petrol-blue coat, with the leather gloves and the sensible low-heeled shoes, never failed to stir something in her. It seemed to Acushla that there was another life that she might have lived, a life beyond that uniform. She could imagine that there existed a house somewhere full of rowdy children and a handsome pilot husband. A laughing version of herself dressed carelessly in a pair of jeans and a sweater, with her hair tumbling down her back in effortless, unkempt curls. It seemed to Acushla that all of this could have existed for her, if only she had managed to defy her parents' prejudices.\n\nThe house was in darkness when she got home, the windows staring out at her, large and black and empty. She went into the kitchen and switched on the kettle to make herself a cup of valerian tea, lining up her vitamins on the counter while she was waiting. Two multivitamins for her general health, extra calcium for her bones, and Siberian ginseng for the stress. She washed it all down with a double dose of soluble vitamin C. The fizz of the orange flavoring gave her an instant feeling of well-being, like the comfort a child takes in a sucky sweet.\n\nAt least she has her health, that's what she tells herself. She has friends who've had chronic back trouble, friends who suffer from diabetes. Friends who've had emergency hysterectomies, and double mastectomies\u2014their bodies papered over again but still bearing the scars. Alone among the women she knows, Acushla remains miraculously unscathed. Her belly is flat and trim, her breasts still small and upright. Her nipples in particular are triumphantly youthful, suckled as they were by just the one baby. Such scars as Acushla bears are all on the inside, and invisible to anyone but herself.\n\n\"Would you describe what you feel as guilt?\" a therapist asked her once.\n\nAnd Acushla has been thinking about that ever since. Can you feel guilty and still have no regrets? Can you be remorseful even though you wouldn't have done anything differently?\n\n\"I would suggest that what you're feeling is grief,\" suggested another therapist. \"Grief that has never had a chance to find its expression.\"\n\n\"Betrayal,\" said another. \"You were betrayed by the very person you should have been able to trust.\"\n\nAnd of course they were right. They were all right, every last one of them. Acushla does feel betrayed. She feels sad and guilty; she feels full up with grief. But it's anger that she feels more than anything. Anger like the stagnant water in a pond, or the toxic liquid that's left behind in an old mine tailings dump. For twenty years it has been seeping silently out into her life. Poisoning her slowly, without anyone noticing.\n\nOf the five people who know, it was her mother she told first. Her sister, who took care of all the arrangements. Her husband, who imposed a rigid code of silence on the whole thing, as if the silence were paramount and not the thing itself. Her father was away at the time and only found out after the fact; it was Acushla who told him, spilling the story out of her in spite of her husband's directive. Over and over again Liam said that no one must know and Acushla never thought to defy him. Not at the time, and not since\u2014only once in all the years that followed did she ever tell another soul what had happened to her, and that was when she told Mick. Mick is the fifth person who knows\u2014something that in Acushla's mind creates a bond between them that can never be broken. Mick's kindness to her, and the sweet, brief friendship that grew out of it, this is a holy thing to Acushla. A memory that she treasures, despite all the trouble it brought down on them. Mick salvaged her faith in men.\n\nIt was three male doctors who broke the news to her\u2014all of them middle-aged, all of them wearing pinstripe suits. They leaned away from her as if it was radioactive, this thing that she had inside her. One doctor was sitting, the other two standing. Arms behind their backs, they kept looking at each other rather than at her. Talking in sentences that trailed off in the middle. The words they used seemed to form some kind of a code, but Acushla was not able to make out what it was they were trying to say. They seemed to be circling something, but before they got to the center of it, the consultation was over. They sprang to action, one of them jumping up to grab her coat for her as his colleague dashed to hold the door open. Out in the corridor a nurse slipped her a torn-off piece of paper with an English telephone number written on it in blue biro. \"I could be fired for doing this,\" she whispered.\n\nWhen Acushla told her husband, he said the same thing.\n\n\"I could lose my job,\" he said. \"I'd have to give up my place in Cabinet. I'd never be reelected.\"\n\nHis career was riding on Acushla's silence. A silence that she maintained through election after election. Through abortion referendum after abortion referendum\u2014referenda that convulsed the country for weeks and months on end, filling the streets with protesters and the airwaves with rage and outrage. Acushla took to turning the radio off during those times. She started switching the TV channel away from the news. She avoided buying a newspaper or answering the door, rushing away from shop counters without her change and standing back from the other mothers outside the school gates so as to stop herself coming into contact with this one word that could not be spoken.\n\nA word that in Acushla's head reverberates even now with hard consonants, bouncing off the walls of her skull like a small ball bearing, rolling around in her head with no way of escaping. A word that is never spoken between her and Liam\u2014if ever they refer to it, which they seldom do, they speak of when she \"lost the baby.\" The other word is deployed only in the context of the legislation that Liam voted against time and time again over the years, in line with his party whip. In line with the views of the majority of voters, views that were carefully calibrated in poll after poll, while what happened to Acushla was submerged in a dense solution of secrecy. Even now that Liam's career is in tatters; now that his reputation is on the floor with the nation's finances and any hope of ever salvaging either of them hanging by a frayed thread\u2014even now the secrecy remains.\n\nAcushla was sitting at her dressing table when she heard him come in. The silver raw silk curtains were only partially drawn, and outside, the stadium occupied the night like a huge paper lantern. Stars speckled the sky above it, surprisingly bright for the city; their presence made Acushla feel very small.\n\nShe sat and listened as her husband closed the front door behind him. She heard the sound of a light switch being turned on, and a pause while he checked the post on the hall table. Then his footsteps moved across the wooden floor, and she heard creaking treads as he climbed the stairs.\n\n\"You're up,\" he said as he came into the room, his shoes moving noiselessly over the thick-pile carpet.\n\nShe didn't answer. She removed her pearl earrings, dropping them one by one into the crystal ashtray that she kept on her dressing table for this exact purpose.\n\nLiam crossed the room behind her, the mirror reflecting only the middle section of him, from the shoulders to the knees. Acushla gave no indication that she had seen him.\n\nHe removed his jacket and draped it carefully over the garment butler. His trousers he took off and folded neatly along their crease, sliding them legs first into the trouser press and letting the waist fall over the edge. With his hand cupped in the manner of a man rolling a pair of dice, he dropped his cuff links into a small silver bowl on his dressing table and rolled his shirt into a ball, stashing it in the laundry basket beside the window, along with his socks.\n\n\"Jesus,\" he said, \"that was a long day.\"\n\nAcushla watched him in the mirror as he moved across to the bed and slipped his hand under the pillows, where he found a pair of pajamas that had been neatly folded and stowed there for him. He put them on, taking the time to fasten all the buttons. He got into bed and plugged his phone into the charger before switching on the lamp and taking his reading glasses out of the case that he kept on his bedside table. Putting on the glasses, he reached out for a copy of a satirical magazine he subscribed to. He didn't seem to have noticed that she wasn't speaking to him.\n\n\"I saw Alma tonight.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"She was doing the auction for us.\"\n\n\"Oh, right.\"\n\n\"I gather Mick's staying with her.\"\n\nNo answer.\n\n\"I hear you met up with him for a pint.\"\n\nAt last he lowered his magazine and looked up at her. Their eyes met through the mirror, and his reflection started talking to hers.\n\n\"Do you know what kills me? He's wandering around like he doesn't have a care in the world. He doesn't seem to have any idea of the impact this has had on the party. It's the last bloody thing we need.\"\n\nA high-pitched wobble in his voice, as if his brother had given him a shove and he was struggling to retain his balance.\n\n\"I wouldn't mind, but we were just starting to see a bit of a bounce in the polls. We were just starting to alter people's perceptions of us. We'll be back to square one again after this.\"\n\nWhen she didn't say anything, he sighed and raised his magazine again, leaving their conversation hanging in the air.\n\nAcushla stood and turned off the overhead light, then hung her robe on the hook on the back of the door. Wrapping her nightdress around her legs, she climbed modestly into the bed, staying as close to the edge as she could. Without saying good night to him, without saying anything to him at all, she turned to lie facing the door. She reached a hand out for the small plastic pill jar that she kept on her bedside table; taking the lid off it, she tipped out a Valium, popped it into her mouth and washed it down with a swig of water. As she waited for the tranquilizer to take ahold of her, it seemed to her that she could not survive another second of the silent scream that was her marriage.\n\n\"Why did you marry him in the first place?\"\n\nThat's what a therapist had asked her once. And Acushla had paused on the question, pretending to puzzle over it. She had sighed, and fiddled with her wedding ring, and said it was hard to remember.\n\n\"I think I was trying to get one up on my sister.\"\n\n\"Seriously?\" asked the therapist.\n\n\"Oh, I don't know,\" she said wistfully. \"We were young. We hardly knew each other. We neither of us had a clue what we were getting ourselves into.\"\n\nIt was at Mick and Alma's wedding that she met him. Six foot two and lean as a greyhound, with his hair falling down over his eyes and his face tanned the color of a ripe red apple from the hay harvesting, he was the image of his brother, only better-looking. As soon as she caught sight of him, Acushla became acutely aware of him, and everyone else in the room disappeared. A feeling more like danger than love, although at the time she did not distinguish between the two.\n\n\"Watch out for that fella,\" Mick warned her. \"He's a cool customer.\" To Acushla's ears it sounded like he was giving her his blessing.\n\nAcushla was the bridesmaid and Liam the best man. Liam was supposed to ask her up to dance, but he didn't. He stood against the bar instead, smoking cigarette after cigarette and watching her on the dance floor. When she drifted out into the garden, she could feel his eyes on her back and when she came back into the room there he was, still watching her. By dawn the next day, his face drained pale and deadly serious from the night's drinking, he had announced his intention to marry her.\n\n\"We'll see about that,\" she said, and she whirled away from him, determined to test the measure of his love. The measure of her own she did not think to take, so giddy was she with the notion of being loved.\n\nHe started phoning the house every day; when Acushla came on the phone she found he had little to say to her, but somehow this only made his persistence all the more touching. \"It's him,\" her mother would say, with her hand over the mouthpiece, and her eyes thrown up to heaven. \"The poor eejit.\"\n\n\"He's out there again,\" she would say, looking out the front window to where Liam had taken to standing under the branches of the acacia tree, lighting one cigarette off another as he waited for Acushla to come out and give him her answer. Crouched on the threadbare rug in her mother's darkened bedroom, peering out over the base of the window frame, Acushla could see the burning tip of his cigarette glowing orange in the shadows of the garden.\n\n\"Away with you,\" her mother would shout, leaning out of her bedroom window with her hair falling down over the front of her nightgown like some middle-aged, never-rescued Rapunzel. \"Away with you now,\" she would say, as Acushla peered out from behind her shoulder. \"This is no time to come calling on anyone, sure it's after midnight.\"\n\nThrough the gap in the curtains her mother would monitor his eventual retreat with all the satisfaction of a conquering general. It played to Deirdre's sense of vanity for her daughters to drive young men to lose the run of themselves. It played to her insatiable appetite for drama.\n\n\"It all sounds very romantic,\" ventured one therapist.\n\n\"Oh, I don't know if I'd describe it as romantic,\" said Acushla, racking her brains for a more accurate word. \"It was thrilling all right. It was very flattering. But I don't think I'd call it romantic.\"\n\n\"I was starting to feel like the boring one in the family,\" she told another therapist. \"There was my dad, shacked up with a Moroccan man half his age. My mother was in the Trocadero half the night being serenaded by opera singers. My sister was just married and fast becoming a TV star. And I was still stuck in college. I was impatient for something to happen to me.\"\n\n\"And that's when he came along?\"\n\n\"That's when he came along.\"\n\nIn a way, it was funny.\n\n\"He thought he was getting a younger version of my sister. And I thought I was getting a more handsome version of his brother. And by the time we both realized our mistake, it was too late.\"\n\n\"Well,\" said her father. \"Never a dull moment.\"\n\nHe was studying the newspaper Acushla had brought him. The photograph on the front page was a picture of Alma standing at the auction podium brandishing the famous pepper grinder. A wing of white hair fell down over her face; her neck was as long and pale as a swan's.\n\n**STOLEN PEPPER MILL  \nSELLS FOR THOUSANDS  \nAT CHARITY AUCTION.**\n\nHer father chuckled.\n\n\"I'll say one thing for her. She certainly knows how to throw the cat among the pigeons.\"\n\nHe was fumbling with the coffeepot. He insisted on using one of those tin Italian espresso makers that you have to assemble and place on the gas ring. The Nespresso machine that Acushla had bought him for Christmas was sitting gathering dust on the kitchen counter.\n\n\"I hear Mick's staying with her?\" said Acushla.\n\n\"So I hear.\"\n\nAcushla took the pastries she'd brought out of their paper bag and arranged them on a plate. This was their regular Saturday-morning ritual. He made the coffee; she brought the pastries.\n\n\"Naturally, she wouldn't admit it, but I gather she's quite pleased to have him back.\"\n\nAcushla studied the things on his shelf. There was a disturbing number of jars of Branston Pickle. Various chutneys and unopened pots of English mustard. He seemed to be stockpiling them, but for what?\n\n\"She has him in Nora's room,\" he said, as the coffee began to hiss and splutter on the cooker. \"But I predict it's only a matter of time before he makes the journey across the landing.\"\n\nAcushla became aware of a pain in her side. Clamping her hand to her belly, she made a pretense of studying the collage on the kitchen wall. A patchwork of postcards and photographs from all the places they had been over the years, it told the story of a life of travel and culture, a life of love. There were opera tickets from Verona and La Scala and matchbooks from Raffles in Singapore and the Algonquin Hotel in New York. There was a cartoon of Sam sketched in around the margins of a Los Angeles restaurant menu by David Hockney and a snatch of verse by Seamus Heaney written in seeping fountain pen on to a white paper napkin and dedicated to Manus. Here they were standing on the terrace of the Peggy Guggenheim museum in Venice, both of them wearing black polo necks and dark glasses, while another photograph pictured them on a Tokyo street in a snowstorm. From the evidence on the wall, it seemed they had been to every country in the world. The only place they had not been to was Morocco. Once Sam made the decision to move in with Acushla's father, the country of his birth was the one place in the world he could never visit.\n\n\"How's Sam?\" Acushla asked, glancing toward the open kitchen door.\n\n\"Oh, you know Sam. He's as sweet as ever, thank God. He may be losing his marbles, but he still has his lovely temperament. Now. I'll carry the tray, if you'll follow with the pot of coffee.\"\n\nAcushla trailed after him into the living room, her head struggling to keep up with her heart. She was overwhelmed, as she often was, by the richness of her father's life. The love that was vested in every word he spoke about Sam. The tenderness, even the tragedy of it, was all thick and rich. Every time she visited her father and Sam in their home, Acushla felt like a lonely little cold-water fish who has ventured into the tropics. She didn't know whether to be pleased for them that they had found this happiness, or sad for herself that she hadn't.\n\n\"Sam,\" said her father, as he set the tray down on the dining table. \"Look who's here. It's Acushla.\"\n\nSam was sitting over by the vast glass wall of the apartment, his armchair angled to face out, a pack of Marlboro Red and an overflowing ashtray on an occasional table beside him.\n\n\"Oh,\" he said, getting to his feet. \"Acushla.\" As if he had just heard her name for the first time.\n\nShe came forward to kiss him, first on one cheek, then on the other.\n\n\"It's almost warm enough to sit out on the balcony,\" said her father. \"But I'm afraid it's not safe. Those bloody seagulls seem to think this is a cliff. You're taking your life in your hands venturing out there. Poor Sam got a nasty cut on his head the other day when one of them made a dive for him.\"\n\n\"Isn't there anything you can do about it?\"\n\n\"Short of shooting the bastards?\"\n\n\"I was thinking more along the lines of an awning, or a sun umbrella. I could get one for you, if you like.\"\n\n\"Your sister suggested we hang up some old CDs. Apparently the seagulls are repelled by their own reflection.\"\n\n\"When was Alma here?\" asked Acushla, trying to keep her voice breezy and light.\n\n\"Yesterday,\" said her father. \"She brought Michael with her.\"\n\nThere was no getting away from it, she had that stitch in her side again.\n\n\"I always said those two would get back together,\" said her father, oblivious to the pain he was causing her. \"They're much too well suited to be apart.\"\n\nAnd Acushla said nothing, even though she had thought many times over the years that it was Liam and Alma who would have been better suited to each other. It was Liam and Alma who should have been married, they would have been perfect for each other. And Acushla would have been perfect for Mick.\n\nThe amazing thing was how two men who had emerged from the same womb, at the same time, could be so very, very different.\n\nThe cartoonists got it straightaway\u2014the difference between them\u2014and they delighted in exaggerating it. Whereas Mick was always depicted as fatter and more jovial than he really was, Liam was leaner and more menacing. Mick was the bon viveur, always holding a bottle of wine and a fat cigar. Liam was the worrier, with his pinched face poring over the latest polls. \"Mick Collins is too likable to be party leader,\" wrote one newspaper pundit at the time of a party heave, \"and Liam Collins isn't likable enough.\"\n\nPoor Liam! The moment that line was printed, it came to define him. No matter what he did after that, no matter how hard he worked, and what political points he scored, he was never able to throw off the notion that there was something lacking in him, some essence of charm that was a prerequisite for the top job and that was inexplicably absent in him. When the final meltdown came, on the night the electorate rose out of its stupor and punched the party of government full square in the face, Liam Collins earned himself another epithet, one he would never live down. He showed himself to be a poor loser.\n\nThe night Liam lost his seat, he stormed out of the count center without speaking a word to the waiting media. Without shaking the hand of the young woman who had displaced him. Without stopping to accept the commiserations of his election workers, or to thank them for their efforts. He climbed into a waiting car and went straight home, where he walked wordlessly past Acushla and straight up the stairs to bed. The next morning he wouldn't get up. It was three weeks into his collapse before she managed to persuade him to see a doctor.\n\nShe drove him to the appointment, and waited for him while he went in. On the way home, she left him sitting in the car while she filled the prescription the doctor had given him. Incomprehension in his eyes, and desperation with it, he was more like a sick animal than a man. And heartbreaking as it was to see him like that, Acushla found herself hoping that this illness was the chance she had been waiting for, the chance at last of a fresh start.\n\nThere was one evening in particular when they sat up late and talked. They opened a bottle of wine, and before they knew it, they had finished it. They opened another, and for the first time Liam talked to her about his humiliation. He told her about the panic attacks, how for days after the election he had woken in the dead of night with the weight of a concrete block on his chest. The first time it happened, he thought he was having a heart attack.\n\n\"Why didn't you tell me?\" she asked, her head inclined toward his in sympathy, her hand on his freckled, feathery arm.\n\n\"Oh, I don't know. I suppose I didn't want to admit to you that I was scared.\"\n\n\"Oh, Liam...\" she said. And it seemed to her in that moment that something was opening up for them, a tiny crack through which, in time, the love might pour.\n\nHe cried that night, big wet baby tears that slid out of him without a word. She cradled his head to her chest and stroked his hair. She kissed him on the forehead, and for the first time in a long time she felt strong. For the first time in a long time they made love, and after they were finished, they wrapped themselves up face to face in each other's arms, like they used to do when they were first married. And Acushla remembered something that she had long ago forgotten, something that had existed between them before everything went wrong. She remembered that they were once allies.\n\nWhen she woke the next day, she was curled in toward the center of the bed, with her face up against her husband's back. She slid in closer to him, snaking her hand around his waist and nestling the fronts of her knees into the backs of his. It seemed to her that morning, as she breathed in the familiar smell of his skin, that the past twenty years had been left behind them and they could pick up again from when last they had a chance of happiness.\n\nThat evening Acushla prepared fillet steaks for them, as a treat. She pulled the cork on a bottle of wine, leaving it on the kitchen counter to breathe. She freshened up her makeup and reapplied her lipstick, and when Liam came in the door from his counseling session, she turned expecting a kiss.\n\nHe walked straight through the kitchen and into the living room, bending down to pick up the remote control off the coffee table.\n\n\"There's a poll out,\" he said.\n\nHe stood in front of the TV, pointing the remote at the screen.\n\n\"Jesus. It's even worse than I thought.\"\n\nThe lowest poll ratings since the foundation of the party, the future of the very organization was now in doubt. The penalty to be exacted for their role in the country's economic collapse, this ruthless mob vengeance.\n\n\"Like it was all our fault,\" he growled.\n\n\"Here,\" said Acushla, moving toward him with a glass of wine. \"Have a drink.\"\n\nHe turned and looked at her as if she was a stranger.\n\n\"You know I'm not meant to be drinking, with all the medication I'm on.\"\n\n\"Oh. I just thought...\"\n\nHis jaw was clenched as he spoke to her, his eyes cold.\n\n\"I shouldn't have drunk that wine last night. I can't afford to be doing that, in my situation. I can't afford to let my guard down.\"\n\nSo it was a mistake, that moment of weakness. It was a regret to him how he had unburdened himself to her. That brief oasis of tenderness they had happened upon, that little patch of warmth in the cold waters of their marriage, he was determined not to venture into it again.\n\nThe next thing he had himself going to a dietician who took him off gluten. He took up Pilates on the advice of Connie, and meditation on the advice of the Pilates teacher. He gave up coffee and tea, and slowly, over the course of the next year, he constructed a new narrative for himself. A narrative of recovery and rebirth. Through sacrifice and self-discipline Liam would build himself up again. He would become a tougher and wiser person and, like the country itself, he would live to fight another day. What saddened Acushla most, what she could not bear to watch, was the complete success with which he managed to rehabilitate himself. By the end of the year he had made a full recovery; if anything, he was harsher than he had been before, and more brittle. He had the added arrogance, too, of a man who has battled his demons and won, where another less capable creature might have lost. To her infinite sorrow Acushla was forced to accept the fact that the man who had hauled himself out of the wreckage of her husband's career was not going to turn out to be a nicer man than the one he had been before.\n\nAcushla was coming out of the nail salon when she met Macdara.\n\nHands held out either side of her, with her fingers splayed to keep her newly painted nails clear of danger, she was just wondering how she'd get her car keys out of her handbag when she saw him. Unaware that he was being observed, Macdara was waiting at the pedestrian crossing, dressed in his usual gentlemanly fashion, in corduroy trousers with a slightly-too-small tweed jacket and a wide wool scarf wrapped several times around his neck. There was an innocence about him as he raised his face to check for the green man. Something of the little boy he had once been. Acushla was overcome by a wave of tenderness toward him. A wave of love for this brother whose world had drifted so far away from hers.\n\n\"Acushla!\" he said, when he reached her.\n\n\"Macdara.\"\n\nShe would have liked to hug him but she didn't want to smudge her nails, so instead she reached up to kiss him, bumping her cheek against his clean-shaven chin. Her lips brushed against the soft-coiled wool of his scarf. A smell of extra-strong mints off him, he had a brown paper bag tucked under his arm in a way that suggested something clandestine. Briefly, Acushla thought of pornographic magazines, of discount double packs of chocolate biscuits, before her imagination ran aground.\n\n\"I was planning on taking the bus,\" said Macdara. \"But if you have your car with you, I might take a lift.\"\n\nThis curious directness of his, it was a result of his spending so much time alone. Acushla knew this, but even so it struck her as odd.\n\n\"Would you like me to drop you home?\"\n\nMacdara paused, studying her with his steady eyes.\n\n\"Are you not going down to the court hearing?\"\n\nAcushla began to grow concerned for her brother's state of mind.\n\n\"What court hearing?\"\n\n\"Haven't you heard?\" he said, speaking with great gentleness. \"They've arrested someone for the attack on Alma.\"\n\n\"Really?\" said Acushla, struggling to regain her grip on the conversation. \"That's great news.\"\n\n\"He's going to be charged this afternoon.\"\n\n\"But it's Saturday...\"\n\n\"There's a special sitting.\"\n\n\"I had no idea.\" (Later she would find a clutch of missed calls on her phone, and a message on her answering machine from her father, but for now Acushla was under the impression that she had not been informed.)\n\n\"The court appearance is at two,\" said Macdara, slowly stretching out his left arm to check his watch. Everything Macdara did, he did slowly. \"If you're happy to give me a lift, we can go down there together.\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't know,\" said Acushla, shy all of a sudden at the thought of going, and a little petulant at not being told. \"Do you think she'd want us there?\"\n\nIn her mind she was still nursing the sting of last night's brush with her sister. The offer Acushla had made her of a lift home, Alma had refused it out of hand. Acushla couldn't help thinking of all those salads she'd bought Alma when she was off work\u2014salads Alma had invariably tried to return to her as she was leaving. The orchid she'd bought her\u2014the color chosen so carefully to cheer her sister up\u2014Alma had dumped it in her dark downstairs loo. And back, and back, through all the little hurts her sister had inflicted on her over the years, not a one of them ever forgotten.\n\n\"I'm not sure she'd want me there,\" she said, wary of incurring yet another wound.\n\n\"Of course she would!\" said Macdara.\n\nAnd he spoke with such emphasis, and such conviction, that Acushla couldn't but be drawn into the beautiful orbit of his innocence.\n\nThey arrived late because of the traffic and got caught up in a one-way system that brought them in a wide loop around the Four Courts; it was only when they'd finally found a parking space on the quays that they realized they should have been in the new courts building, and by the time they walked up there it was all over.\n\nRain falling down out of a strangely cloud-free sky, they arrived to find everyone gathered in a small circle out on the street. The circle wobbled on sight of them, with Mick shuffling in closer to Alma, and Deirdre stepping back to make space for Macdara. Acushla squeezed in under her father's umbrella, his free arm pulling her in so close that she could smell Pears soap off him, and burned toast. A dry gloom prevailed under the canopy of the umbrellas.\n\n\"Well,\" said Deirdre, with a grim expression.\n\n\"Well?\" said Macdara, his transparent eyes roving from one to the other of them. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"He got bail.\"\n\nAcushla ventured to look across at Alma. Alma raised her eyebrows and glanced around at them all. Everyone seemed to be waiting for her to speak.\n\n\"Well, I don't know about the rest of you,\" she said, using her left hand to fasten the buttons of her raincoat all the way up to her neckline. \"But I could do with a drink.\"\n\nThe circle splintered as the family drifted in twos and threes across the slick wet street toward the nearest pub. Mick yanked the door open, standing out on the pavement to let them all through. First Deirdre, stamping her boots and shaking out the dripping hem of her cape, followed by Macdara, who bent his head down low, like someone entering a cave. Then Alma, on three-inch heels, with her raincoat tightly belted in the manner of a spy, or a stripper. Manus stumbled after her, managing to right himself again just inside the door. Acushla was left until last, with Mick holding the door open for her. Placing the palm of his hand briefly on the small of her back, he ushered her into the pub, and Acushla closed her eyes briefly as a memory ran through her. A shiver of a memory, it served to remind her how much she had once desired him.\n\nNothing happened between them.\n\nShe had assured Alma of this, at the time and many times since, indignantly at first, then with impatience and finally tears. Nothing had ever happened between them, that was the honest-to-God truth; they just had lunch together. A lunch that came about entirely by accident\u2014Acushla had been in town shopping, and she was on her way back to fetch her car when she ran into an anti-abortion demonstration. Old men bearing placards with photographs of dead fetuses. Young women brandishing buggies with healthy babies in them. She found herself trapped among them and she panicked. Holding her hands up in front of her, she began to push her way out, her eyes squinting to block out the images, her head shaking the sounds away. She fell out of the crowd and straight into the path of her brother-in-law, who was slipping out the side gate of the D\u00e1il. He took one glance at her and grabbed her by the arm, steering her up the street and in through the doors of the Shelbourne Hotel.\n\nThe air inside was a comforting hush. The pile of the carpet a thick bed of grass under her feet. Acknowledging the doorman with a nod, Mick guided Acushla to a low table in the corner of the lounge. The trees of Stephen's Green filled the enormous window. A piano in the corner, its notes little more than a watery trickle.\n\n\"The baby had no brain,\" she said. \"Did you ever hear of such a thing?\"\n\nHis face crumpled, as if she'd kicked him.\n\n\"Ah, Acushla. He never told me.\"\n\n\"And Alma didn't tell you either?\"\n\nShe had always assumed that Alma would have told him.\n\nHe shook his head.\n\n\"When did this happen?\" he asked her.\n\n\"Last year.\"\n\nHe nodded slowly and she could see that his mind was working on multiple tracks, as always. The personal and the political.\n\n\"Was it Liam who went to England with you?\"\n\nShe paused, ashamed of the answer. Not so much for Liam as for herself.\n\n\"He let you go alone, the fucker!\"\n\n\"My mum came with me,\" said Acushla quietly. \"But that's not the point. The point is that this happens to people. That's what you need to understand. This happens to people you know.\"\n\n\"Can you tell me about it?\"\n\nLeaning forward in his chair, he made a steeple of his fingers and held it to his lips, and Acushla had the impression that never in her whole life had anyone ever listened to her so intently. It gave her great strength to be listened to like that. It gave her eloquence.\n\n\"Thank you for telling me,\" he said when she was finished. \"I'm very grateful to you for telling me that story.\"\n\nAs they were leaving, he placed his hand on the small of her back and guided her out through the revolving door. A gesture that flooded her with longing. She had a great desire to be close to this man who had shown her such kindness. (\"He has the Mickey gene,\" Liam always said. \"He never met a woman he didn't want to sleep with.\") At that moment Acushla found herself imagining what it would be like to be one of those women.\n\nOut on the street, Mick drew her into a fierce embrace. Once he'd released her, he gripped her upper arms with his big bear hands, as if he was about to pick her up.\n\n\"You know where I am,\" he said with great seriousness. \"If ever you need anything, you know where I am.\"\n\nThen he took her face in his two hands and bent down to kiss her. A kiss that was aimed at her forehead perhaps, or the bridge of her nose; it was Acushla who angled her head back in order to receive it on the lips. The kiss lasted only a second or two, no more than that, but it was long enough all the same for each of them to be aware of a terrifying and thrilling possibility. The possibility of something more.\n\nThe kiss was witnessed by Alma as she passed by the hotel in a taxi. She told the taxi driver to go around the block but by the time they had passed the hotel again, her husband and her sister were gone. Nothing that Acushla said to Alma afterward succeeded in convincing her that the encounter she had seen was entirely innocent.\n\n\"I saw you!\" she said. \"I saw you with my own two eyes.\"\n\n\"You won't tell Liam, will you?\" said Acushla. An unfortunate reaction, and one that seemed to imply guilt where there was none. From that moment on, it was a losing battle. \"It's not my fault if you can't trust your husband,\" she said to Alma, unwisely choosing to mount an offensive instead of defending herself. \"Oh, for God's sake,\" she said when it came up again. \"How many times do we have to go over this? Nothing happened.\" Until the time came when she was reduced to tears of frustration at being so endlessly misunderstood.\n\n\"He was just being nice to me,\" she said plaintively. \"Nobody in my whole life has ever been that nice to me.\"\n\nInside the pub, Mick ordered whiskeys for Deirdre, Manus and Alma. A pint for himself, and a white wine for Acushla. For Macdara, he called up a ginger ale. (Macdara always was a useless drinker.)\n\n\"Let me give you a hand,\" said Acushla, while the others made for a corner seat. Coats and raincoats stacked behind their heads, they settled on to the plush velvet banquette. The feeling of a railway coach about it. Something of the rain was still present in the air inside the pub.\n\n\"Well, kid,\" said Mick, as they waited for the barman to assemble the drinks. \"You look a million dollars.\" (From the night he first met her, in her mother's kitchen, he had always called her \"kid.\")\n\nShe looked down at herself, as if to check, and saw the camel cashmere coat she was wearing. The hem of her burned-orange silk skirt peeping out from under it. She had one tan leather boot planted up on the brass foot-rail under the bar, the other on the red tiled floor.\n\n\"You don't look too bad yourself,\" she said, tilting her face up to his. \"Despite everything.\"\n\nHe laughed.\n\n\"Ah, you know me. I thrive on adversity.\"\n\n\"Seriously,\" she said, lowering her voice. \"Are you all right?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" he answered lightly. \"I'm having a grand time. The life of leisure suits me nicely.\"\n\nAcushla nodded, not sure whether to believe him or not.\n\n\"What about yourself, kid?\"\n\n\"Oh, you know. I'm grand.\"\n\nShe caught his eye, hoping he might see just by looking at her that she was lying. But he was distracted. He was pulling banknotes out of his sagging trouser pocket to pay for the drinks. Reaching along the bar, he corralled the three glasses of whiskey, one finger inside the rim of each, so that he could pick them up together. With the other hand he grabbed Macdara's ginger ale.\n\n\"Just take your own glass of wine,\" he said. \"I'll come back for the pint.\"\n\nApproaching the table, Acushla realized that something was wrong. For a moment she wondered was it something she had done, but then she saw that they were all looking off to one side, their eyes rooted to the spot where two men had taken up position on high stools at the bar.\n\n\"What's going on?\" she whispered, as she slipped on to a low seat beside Macdara.\n\nHer father was the first to speak.\n\n\"It seems your sister's assailant is celebrating his freedom by treating himself to a drink.\"\n\nAcushla turned her head briefly to the side. One of the men had his back to her, but she could see the other clearly. In the second or two that she had him in her sights, she formed an impression of a round white face. A pair of restless little eyes.\n\n\"It's unacceptable that he can just walk in here,\" Manus was saying. \"It's simply unacceptable.\"\n\nWith his knees all knobbly inside his thin cotton trousers and his knotty old hands lying clenched on his thighs, he looked very old all of a sudden. Old and vulnerable; a gust of wind would be enough to topple him over. Deirdre was sitting next to him, bullish by comparison. She was looking in the direction of the two men. She had her eye teeth gritted on one side, as if she was biting off a loose thread.\n\n\"I've a mind to go over there and have a word with them,\" she said, in a loud voice.\n\nYou and whose army? thought Acushla, wondering even as she did so where she had heard that phrase before.\n\n\"Perhaps we had better leave,\" said Manus tentatively. The electric blue of his eyes sparking with alarm.\n\n\"The fuck we will,\" said Mick. \"If anyone's going to leave, it's him.\"\n\n\"We can't just sit here and ignore him,\" said Acushla, horrified at the thought.\n\nBefore anyone knew what was happening, Alma had picked up her whiskey glass and drained it in one go. She took her raincoat in her poor right hand, and slid out along the banquette. Raising herself out of the seat and on to her heels, she walked slowly and deliberately toward the bar. The two men turned on their stools to face her, their backs rounded, knees splayed. Alma drew level with them and stopped. Ignoring one, she stared the other straight in the face. Standing four feet away from him for one second. Two. Three. Then, without a word, she walked on toward the door. Her attacker turned back to his companion and muttered something inaudible, his head bent down over his pint.\n\nIn the stunned seconds that followed, Acushla jumped up and ran for the door.\n\nThere was no sign of her sister on the footpath outside. Acushla looked left and right, twice, before she spotted her on the far side of the road. Alma was leaning back against the river wall, three lanes of traffic passing between them. Acushla stepped into it, giving the cars no choice but to stop.\n\n\"Alma,\" she said, when she got to the other side. \"Are you all right?\"\n\nAlma's face had drained of all color. The bones of her jaw were rigid, and her mouth was slightly open, her breath coming out in shallow gasps. She had her raincoat draped over her shoulders and Acushla saw that great shudders were passing through her, as if she had just been rescued from a cold sea.\n\n\"Oh, Alma,\" said Acushla, in surprise more than anything, and she opened her arms up wide. Her sister stepped toward her, and Acushla wrapped her in tight and whispered into her hair. \"Alma, sweetheart. It's going to be all right. I promise you\u2014it's going to be all right.\"\n\nAs the others spilled out of the pub behind them, their familiar voices bubbling above the sound of the traffic, Acushla held her sister in her arms. Aware of Alma's birdlike bones under her clothes. Her sister's skull against her cheekbone. A stray strand of her hair streaking her lips. Alma's heart was thumping against Acushla's chest. Her breath hot and wet against her neck. Her perfume raising dust-cloud memories in Acushla's mind of the perfume they used to make as children by crushing rose petals and water in an empty jam jar. Not since they were children had they been this close.\n\nAt dinner that night, Liam sat, as he always did, at the head of the long dining table. A table they had bought early on in their marriage in the expectation of having a clatter of children. Acushla sat as always to his right, facing the empty chair Connie had once occupied. When Connie left home, Acushla had suggested to Liam that he take Connie's place, so they would be looking across the table at each other as they ate instead of sitting at right angles to each other, with Acushla staring at the wall. But Liam dismissed the suggestion out of hand, determined to retain his position at the head of the table. And while Acushla never mentioned it again, it never ceased to bother her. Every time she sat down, it was with a stirring of anger that she was forced to sit to one side of him at the table while he occupied the head. Day by day that anger gathered, like drops of rain falling one by one into a bucket until suddenly the bucket was full to the brim and threatening to spill over. Sometimes Acushla feels like she's waiting for it to spill over.\n\n\"I presume you heard what happened in court today,\" she said.\n\n\"I heard he got bail.\"\n\nHe had his fork in his right hand, using it as a shovel to scoop up a load of mashed potato. Acushla couldn't bear it when he did that; in her mother's house it would never have been considered acceptable to take your fork in your right hand.\n\n\"He came into the pub while we were there,\" she told him.\n\n\"Really?\" he asked, looking up at her now.\n\n\"How can it be,\" she said, \"that he can just walk into the same pub as her like that? Surely that shouldn't be allowed.\"\n\nHe raised one shoulder and dropped the other as he weighed it up.\n\n\"I suppose if he was allowed out on bail, without restrictions...\"\n\n\"But how can it be,\" she said, \"that she has to go on with her life now, knowing that he's out there.\"\n\n\"Well hang on, he hasn't been found guilty of anything\u2014\"\n\n\"I swear to God,\" said Acushla, without allowing him to finish, \"this country does my head in sometimes.\"\n\nHe sighed.\n\n\"We do have a justice system.\" In his voice was that air of weary exasperation he liked to use with her, as if he was tired of always having to explain things to her. \"It may not work perfectly, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Nothing ever changes,\" she said, and her voice was shrill now with her own barely understood rage. \"Nobody in this bloody country ever does anything to bring about change.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" he asked, his impatience getting the better of him.\n\n\"Oh, forget it,\" she said, shaking her head.\n\nHe placed his knife and fork together and stood up, his chair making a loud, angry sound as it scraped against the kitchen tiles. Without saying another word, he went into the living room, where he picked up the remote control, turned on the TV and flopped down on the couch. Through the open double doors Acushla could see the large flat-screen, with the graphics whirling for the nine o'clock news. As she picked up his plate, she heard the newsreader starting in on the headlines: \"Protests in Dublin city center as the D\u00e1il prepares to hear submissions in relation to abortion legislation.\"\n\nWith the plate in one hand and his dirty cutlery in the other, Acushla turned to face the TV. On the screen she saw shots of people bearing placards\u2014some printed, others homemade. A close-up of a young woman with WOMEN'S RIGHTS NOW written in blue marker on the skin of her cheek. Another woman had an empty buggy with her, a placard propped where a baby would normally be. The reporter's voice ran over the pictures: \"... more than twenty years after the constitutional referendum on the X case, and Ireland still has no legislation on the circumstances under which doctors are permitted to terminate a pregnancy.\"\n\nAcushla took a few steps forward, so that she was standing on the threshold between the kitchen and the living room. Liam was slumped on the couch with the remote control on his knee, his expression perfectly impassive. When the story came to an end, and the newsreader introduced a report from Syria, he didn't even blink. He remained motionless on the couch, the images on the screen reflected in his stubbornly opaque eyes.\n\nFor a second Acushla contemplated flinging the plate she was holding to the ground. She imagined it crashing against the kitchen tiles, a projectile of china splinters flying through the air. She imagined Liam turning toward her in shock. \"What the bejeezus?\" he would say.\n\nHer fingers tightened on the steak knife she was holding, and for one terrifying moment she contemplated stabbing him with it. She imagined herself closing in on him, her hand raised high over her head. By the time Liam realized what was happening, it would be too late. She would have brought the knife down on him in a single stab, driving it into the soft spot between his shoulder blades. She had seen a TV chef kill a lobster that way once.\n\nThis is how murders happen, she thought, as her thoughts spun out of control. Like a washing machine with its transit bolts loose about to enter the spin cycle, or a space shuttle malfunctioning as it left the launch pad, something seemed to have come unstuck inside Acushla's head, some small thing that nevertheless had the potential to cause a catastrophe.\n\nShe turned and walked back into the kitchen, where she forced her fingers to release the knife into the dishwater. She let the plate she was holding slide into the limp suds, drying her hands on a tea towel that she found on the kitchen counter. As she climbed the two long flights of stairs to her bedroom, she felt that her skull might explode, splattering blood and brain matter all over her spotless paintwork.\n\nReaching her bedroom, she walked to her dressing table. She sat down in front of the mirror, but for once she did not look into it. She did not unscrew the lid of her cleanser, as she normally would, to go about the task of removing her makeup. She did not brush her hair, or change her diamond earrings for sleepers. She did not reach for the little jar of Valium she kept hidden in her cosmetic bag. Instead she opened the right-hand drawer and took out a pad of ivory writing paper. Locating a biro at the back of the drawer, she began to draft a letter. Imagining for a moment that it would be a difficult letter to write, she was surprised to find how easily the words came tumbling out of her. It was almost as if she had it written already, inside her head.\n\n_Dear Sir,_\n\n_Like many women in Ireland, I have been taking a personal interest in this week's Oireachtas committee hearings on abortion._\n\n_Twenty years ago, I was forced to travel to England for an abortion because I could not get one at home. The baby I was carrying had no chance of surviving outside the womb, but my doctors said there was nothing they could do to help me, so I went to England._\n\n_I was heartbroken to lose my baby and I felt very let down by the doctors who were supposed to be looking after me. I was also angry with the politicians who were responsible for making the laws that turned women like me into common criminals. Twenty years later and nothing has changed._\n\n_Shame on them all._\n\n_Yours sincerely,_\n\n_Acushla Collins_\n\n# Connie\n\n\"Oh, Mum,\" said Connie. She was about to ask if it was true. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask, but she stopped herself just in time. By the silence in her grandmother's kitchen she knew, by the look on her mother's face, and the loopy convent-girl handwriting. Connie had only ever seen her mum's handwriting on shopping lists before, or on birthday cards, never in a letter, and it was the spelling mistakes that broke her heart. She had always suspected that her mother was dyslexic, a suspicion she had never had the courage to voice for fear of hurting Acushla's feelings. It reared its head again now as she looked down at the letter in her hand.\n\n\"Oh, Mum,\" she said, grasping at a small handful of words among the millions and millions that were at her disposal. There was a vast world of words out there, and Connie wanted to pick the exact right ones. It seemed tremendously important that she say the right thing.\n\nShe looked down at the letter again, not because she had failed to understand it the first time, but because she needed to buy herself some time. She leaned in over the table, tilting the page backward to catch the light, but the words scrambled in front of her eyes, and the longer she stared at it, the less sense she was able to make of it.\n\n\"It's a good letter,\" she said, looking up again. \"It's a really powerful letter.\"\n\nThe kitchen was lit by a single pendant light that hung down low over the large round table. Encircled by a black linen shade, the bulb threw a small spotlight over the table, leaving the rest of the room in darkness. In the corners, piles of books rose from the floor in spindly towers, while spider plants spilled down from the side tables and cobwebs older than Connie formed a canopy overhead.\n\nConnie's mother, her grandmother and her aunt were sitting opposite her, their faces pale. Three versions of the same face, carved in white stone out of the darkness; Connie had never noticed before how alike they all were. As they waited for her to say something, she had the sense that she was at a job interview. A formality hanging in the air, she found herself suddenly deprived of her fluency.\n\n\"I never knew,\" she said. But even as she said it, the memories were raining down on her. Little morsels of memories, like feathers, or snowflakes falling down out of the skies, they settled into the empty spaces in the story of her mother's life. Spaces Connie had never even noticed were there, until now.\n\nA memory of the day Ernie was born. Connie was sitting up in her hospital bed and her mother was leaning in over the bedside cot where Ernie was swaddled in a blue blanket. Acushla was wearing an oversized pair of sunglasses, which she did not remove, and behind the sunglasses Connie could see that her eyes were swimming with tears. At the time Connie had thought her a little overwrought by the experience of becoming a grandmother.\n\n\"You've been carrying this around with you all these years,\" she said, as the understanding of it continued to fall down on her. \"All these years, you've been carrying this around without telling anyone.\"\n\nHer mother nodded, and Connie watched in amazement as Alma rubbed her back in a gesture of support. Self-conscious as a mourner at a funeral, Connie reached across for her mum's hand. She took the brittle fingers in her own and held on to them, so that they were chained together across the table. She squeezed them tight, by way of apology, as she remembered with a flush of shame how hard she had fought her mother's love when she was a child.\n\nWhen Connie was a child, it was her mother's watery voice that woke her for school every morning. Her mother's anxious face was the first thing she saw at the school gates every afternoon. Her mother's fussing hands helped her into her pajamas at night, and brushed her hair, and with every gesture her mother poured out of her a love that was too weighty for one little girl to bear. Love enough for two children, it seemed to Connie now, and it grieved her to think how little of that love she had returned.\n\n\"I'm so sorry,\" she said. Her mother's fingers were grasping hers so tightly that they might have been bound together by a thin, taut piece of wire.\n\n\"Sure, you weren't to know,\" said her mum, mildly.\n\nBut that wasn't entirely true either. As a child, Connie was aware that her mother was sad, but she never stopped to wonder why. No more than she stopped to wonder why her grandmother was so eccentric. Or why her aunt Alma was so harsh. That was all just part of the landscape of her childhood, along with the endless catfights between her mother and her aunt, fights that saw Connie forever being thrown into the back of the car to be barrelled away from Alma's house as her mother babbled a litany of petty grievances at the rain-streaming windshield and other cars beeped at them and her mother started crying, again. Those arguments were always followed by reconciliations, which were followed by more arguments and more reconciliations, until the last, big argument, one as deadly serious as the others had been frivolous. (\"I knew you were a fool,\" said Alma. \"I knew you were a jealous little cow, but I never knew you were a treacherous bitch.\") Connie never did find out what that argument was about, but those words still play out in her head, all these years later. Looking at her mother now, it occurred to Connie to wonder what else there was about her that she didn't know.\n\n\"So, what happens now?\" she asked, remembering the letter she was holding in her hand.\n\n\"Well, someone will need to type it up,\" said Connie's grandmother, rising to her feet with a scrape of her chair and moving off into the gloam of the kitchen. A cave-like place of long-exhausted bulbs and unwashed dishes, empty jam jars cluttered the counters along with small heaps of unopened bills and hoarded egg boxes awaiting a new incarnation.\n\n\"I could do it,\" said Connie, turning to her mum and speaking very deliberately. \"I could type it up tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Excellent,\" said Deirdre, her huge voice welling up out of the corner. She was fussing around in a bottom cupboard, withdrawing ancient bottles of gin, and vermouth and cr\u00e8me de menthe. When she straightened up, she was breathless, a bottle of sherry in her hand, grasped by the neck.\n\n\"You might want to correct the spellings while you're at it. Your mother always was the most hopeless speller.\"\n\nShe deposited the bottle of sherry on the table with a thump and Connie stared at her, wondering were these little cruelties of hers deliberate, or were they unconscious? Did she even think about these things before she said them? If anything, it seemed to Connie recently that her grandmother was becoming more sweeping in her pronouncements, and more cavalier toward other people's feelings. She reminded her of a big old jellyfish, wafting her way through life, oblivious to the pain that was caused to others by the tentacles that came trailing in her wake.\n\n\"Macdara was the best speller of the lot of you,\" she was saying. \"Macdara won first prize in the spelling competition at school, did you know that? 'Trepidatious' was the word that sealed his victory, as I remember.\"\n\n\"How could we forget?\" said Alma, inclining her face toward her sister with a slow roll of the eyes.\n\nLining four crystal glasses up on the table, Deirdre began to pour a small measure of sherry into each. The glasses were so dusty they were almost opaque, the cuts in the crystal as black as soot. Connie took a corner of her scarf and gave the rim of her glass a discreet wipe before she lifted it to her lips. Her grandmother was struggling to untie a small plastic supermarket bag, her fingers wobbling at the knot. Eventually she got it loose to reveal an already opened pack of ginger nut biscuits. Connie stared at the pack suspiciously, thinking, Expiry date? She reached a hand out and took one, dunking it into the puddle-colored drink. The sherry tasted moldy, or was it the biscuit? She nibbled at it anyway.\n\n\"What about Dad?\" she asked, all of a sudden. \"Where's Dad in all of this?\"\n\nShe looked from one to the other of them. Saw the answer on their faces.\n\n\"So he doesn't know about the letter?\"\n\n\"This is women's business,\" said her grandmother. \"Your father gave up the right long ago to have a say in any of this.\"\n\nAnd if there was a militant edge to her voice, if there was a touch of bitterness, who could blame her? This was a woman whose husband had left her for a Moroccan man half her age. If Alma was a bit tough, maybe you'd have to be tough if you discovered that your husband was sleeping with every female reporter on the island. If Connie's mother was fragile, and prone to sorrow, well, it was very clear to Connie now why that might be. All of a sudden _everything_ seemed very clear to Connie.\n\n\" _Sl\u00e1inte_ ,\" said her grandmother, lifting her small glass and puckering her lips to sip from it. The rest of them lifted their glasses briefly in response, and as they did so, Connie experienced a shudder of vertigo. A sense of the future and the past cohabiting with the present, as if the scene in front of her was only the most minute and inadequate manifestation of a vast, non-linear reality, one that her brain could only catch the tiniest glimpse of. It was only then that it occurred to her\u2014amid the creeping spider plants and the dusty books, with her grandmother's distinct smell of never-washed lambswool and chemist-shop perfume hanging in the stale air\u2014it was then that it occurred to Connie that it was not a secret, this thing that her mother had told her. It was not a secret because at some level she had known it all along.\n\nShe remembers it.\n\nA smattering of sequential happenings, like numbered dots of ink on a page. It's only now that she realizes what it is that she remembers, now that she can join the dots.\n\nShe remembers her mother going to London. An unusual trip\u2014even at the time she would have known that it was out of the ordinary for her mother and her grandmother to go to London to see a show. Her father was busy with work so she was sent to stay with her aunt Alma, and her mother forgot to pack a toothbrush for her so Alma had to take her down to the chemist's to buy a new one. Later that day, or maybe it was another day, Alma took Connie and Nora on a carriage ride around Stephen's Green, and afterward she treated them to lunch in Captain America's. Connie ordered a banana split that came with a purple paper parasol stuck into it, and a long-handled spoon to eat it with. She still remembers the foamy taste of the canned whipped cream and the nibs of roasted hazelnuts that were sprinkled on top. She remembers the sense that Alma was spoiling her; she remembers not understanding why.\n\nIt was probably only a day or two that Connie stayed with Alma, but in her memory it seems like a week, a month, a year. When eventually Alma brought her home, it was to her grandmother's house rather than to her own, and her mother was upstairs, resting after the journey. Of course, in retrospect this made no sense. The flight from London was less than an hour, an anomaly that Connie would not have noticed at the time. She would have been distracted by the presents they brought back. She remembers her grandmother opening a suitcase out on the kitchen floor. In it was a Hamleys bag, and out of the Hamleys bag came two baby dolls, one for Connie and one for Nora. Connie remembers Alma's reaction, heard but not understood.\n\n\"Jesus, Mother! Isn't that just a little bit inappropriate?\"\n\n\"Don't be ridiculous,\" said Deirdre, handing out the dolls.\n\nNora's doll was dressed in a pink Babygro and Connie's doll was dressed in a blue one, which was fine by Connie because at the time blue was her favorite color. Connie laid her doll down on the floor and went about the work of undressing it. She had difficulty getting the poor doll's arms out of its sleeves\u2014the arm was fused into a rigid bend at the elbow, so you had to pull the fabric of the suit to breaking point to get it free\u2014but once that was done, all you had to do was pull the Babygro down over the doll's belly and yank it free of the legs. Under the Babygro, Connie discovered, the doll was wearing a cloth nappy, and under the nappy, to her horror, was a small plastic penis. She dropped the doll on to the tiles as if it had caught fire.\n\nAlma let out a squawk.\n\n\"Oh, sweet Jesus,\" she said, dry, rasping laughs coming out of her. Her hand was clasped to her chest and her eyes were streaming silent cartoon tears, tears that had been dyed bright blue by her mascara. (At that time Alma was a great woman for the blue mascara.)\n\nConnie remembers wailing.\n\n\"Would you stop that caterwauling!\" said her grandmother, moving across the kitchen with murderous intent. \"This can easily be resolved.\"\n\nShe came back with a bread knife.\n\n\"Pass me that doll.\"\n\nAlma was retching with laughter. Tears leaving wet blue runs on her white skin, like streaks of toilet cleaner on the enamel of a lavatory bowl.\n\n\"No,\" she was saying. \"Please, no. This is too much.\"\n\nConnie remembers picking the doll up by the arm and passing it up to her grandmother. Her wailing had stopped and in its place was a sticky, breathless curiosity.\n\nHer grandmother laid the doll down on the kitchen table and, using a rapid sawing motion, she removed the offending penis, slipping it into the pocket of her voluminous skirt. She handed the doll back to Connie.\n\n\"Now,\" she said. \"Problem solved.\"\n\nConnie shook her head.\n\n\"I don't want it.\"\n\n\"Don't be ridiculous. It's exactly the same now as the other doll.\"\n\nAgain, Connie shook her head.\n\n\"I don't want it.\"\n\nAnd so they stood facing each other in the kitchen, Connie aged seven, and her grandmother aged fifty-seven, and one of them more determined than the other. They would have been standing there all night if the standoff had not been resolved by Nora. Six years old and already a peacemaker, she came forward with her own doll and offered it to Connie.\n\nAnd so it came to pass that Connie got the girl doll, with her pale pink Babygro and her discreetly featureless plastic bum. Nora took the poor butchered boy doll, with his blue Babygro and underneath it a tiny rough-edged crater where his little plastic penis should have been. But life would have its revenge on Connie, by visiting on her two boy babies, one after the other, as living reincarnations of that poor rejected boy doll.\n\nConnie turned her key carefully in the front door, anxious not to make the slightest noise that might wake the boys. She slipped her feet out of her shoes and picked them up, using her fingers as a prong. With her huge fake fur muffling her movements, she swept through the living room and into the small kitchen at the back of the house. Moonlight was streaming in the back window, throwing a melancholy glow over the dinner dishes that were stacked in the sink where she had left them. A red light flashed on the washing machine where a load had finished but not been unpacked. A carton of milk stood on the counter with a spill leading away from it like a snail trail. The kettle was off its moorings and a bottle cap lay where it had fallen on the kitchen floor. Connie sighed, wondering for the hundredth time how it was possible for anyone to create such a mess heating up a single baby's bottle.\n\nShe crept up the stairs, stopping on the landing to peek into the boys' room, where, by the blue light of the nightlight, she saw Oscar asleep in his cot. With his knees pulled up under his chest and his bum in the air, he looked like a Muslim at prayer. Ernie was splayed out in his little bed with the covers thrown off him and his dinosaur pajamas all a-tangle. His hair was matted with sweat and in his right fist he was clutching a small plastic figurine he had found in the playground\u2014a miniature Woody from _Toy Story_. He had refused to let it out of his hand ever since. Connie stood for a moment in the doorway and watched her sons sleeping. She would have liked to kiss them, but she was afraid of waking them. Softly, she stepped back out on to the landing, leaving the door of their room ajar.\n\nThe light in her bedroom was on but Emmet was fast asleep, an open copy of a book about Lance Armstrong slumped facedown on his chest\u2014Connie had given it to him for Christmas but he never seemed to be able to get past the first page without passing out. She plucked the book off him, closing it and sliding it on to his bedside table. She shrugged her coat off and then her cardigan, climbing out of her leggings and tossing them on to the chair in the corner. Without even bothering to put on a nightdress, she climbed into the warm bed in her T-shirt and knickers, pulling the bobbin out of her hair and dropping it on the floor before reaching out to turn off the light.\n\nShe had only been out of the house for an hour or two, but she felt as if she had returned home from a long journey. The echoes of the evening's revelations lapping over her like waves, a sense of clouds and sky over her head, a feeling of water moving all about her, she could have been lying on a darkened beach, or in the bottom of a boat, instead of in her own bed.\n\nShe curled over on to her side for comfort, and Emmet fell in behind her, nuzzling his chin into the curve of her collarbone. Connie was reminded of those fortune-telling fish that you hold in the palm of your hand. The way they curl up is supposed to tell you something about yourself. She lay there trying to remember what it was those fish were supposed to tell you, but she was so tired that she fell asleep without ever remembering.\n\nAt some point during the night, Connie wakes to the sound of a small boy calling out in the dark. She cocks her ears and listens out for which of them it might be, identifying the cry as Ernie's. Glancing over briefly at her husband, who is fast asleep (or pretending to be), she leaps out of the bed, anxious to get to the child before he goes and wakes his brother.\n\nEver since the boys arrived\u2014one after the other in the space of less than two years\u2014sleep has become the dominating force in Connie's house. Sleep, and the lack of it, is what governs Connie and Emmet's relationship. It has become the currency of their marriage\u2014a small stack of casino chips that they barter with each other, exchanging an extra hour in bed for a sexual favor or a night on the town. Like water that has become dangerously scarce, what little sleep that is available is measured out between them with meticulous precision, each of them guarding their own share with a primitive ferocity.\n\nIn the four years since they became parents, there has been only a handful of occasions when they have both slept through the night. Between the colic and the teething, between the nightmares and the head colds and the barking dogs and the mating cats and the car alarms going off out on the street, there is seldom a night that one or the other of the boys doesn't wake up. And while at first Connie and Emmet took it in turns to get up\u2014in the beginning, Emmet even helped with the night feeds\u2014now that he is trying to finish his book, on top of teaching full-time, Connie feels in all conscience that he needs his night's sleep. So, tired as she is, when she hears Ernie calling out for her in the dark, Connie hauls herself out of bed and staggers into his room.\n\nThe room is sealed off from the world by blackout curtains, the night-light throwing outsize fish shapes across the walls. Ernie's eyes are wide open, his pupils pinned. \"There was a wolf,\" he says. In Ernie's dreams, there is always a wolf.\n\n\"There aren't any wolves in Ireland,\" whispers Connie, settling herself down on the bare floorboards beside his bed. Her back against the clammy wall, she slides her hand under the duvet to reassure her child.\n\n\"It's only a dream,\" she says, closing her eyes and using her own breathing to still his, her own hand to cool his; whether it works or not she doesn't know, because she falls asleep before him.\n\nSome time later\u2014Connie has no way of knowing how long, but it's still dark outside\u2014she wakes to find herself sprawled on the floor. A crick in her neck; her shoulder hurts where it's been resting on the wooden boards. Her nose and toes are frozen to snapping point. Terrified of waking the boys, she crawls out of the room on her hands and knees, aware even as she is doing so of the absurdity of the situation she finds herself in. Nothing matters so long as she makes it back to her own bed without waking them.\n\n\"Mum.\"\n\nShe keeps her eyes closed for a few seconds, maybe even for as long as a minute, as some hopeful part of her brain clings to the possibility that he might go away again if she doesn't open them.\n\n\"Mummy,\" he says. \"Mummy. Wake up.\"\n\nHe's pulling at her arm now, using all the weight of his stocky little body to haul on her, as if he were attempting to pull a large boat out of the water.\n\n\"Stop it,\" she says, opening her eyes to glare at him. \"Get off me.\" In her irritation, she sounds like a small child herself.\n\n\"Mum, I'm hungry.\"\n\n\"I'm coming.\" she says. \"You go on down and turn on the telly.\"\n\nAs she passes out of the room, she looks back and sees that her husband is curled up on his side. His face buried in a mound of pillows, he is sound asleep. In Connie's head, a stopwatch begins to count the seconds that he remains asleep while she herself is awake. She pads down the steep stairs to the living room, awarding herself a point for every creaking step. With every toy she stoops to pick up, with every movement of her exhausted limbs, her sense of martyrdom grows. When she steps on a small piece of Lego, the pain only serves as proof of her misery.\n\n\"Fuck, fuck, fuck,\" she says as she rubs the ball of her foot. The boys' eyes stare at her sideways from the couch. Another second and their eyes slide back to the TV.\n\nMoving across the room, Connie trips over a phone charger and curses again. She bends down and yanks the charger out of the wall. A temper raging in her, she wants to throw it across the room. Instead she slams it down on the desk, shocked to find herself up against the limits of her own personality. Forbearance, patience, calm\u2014Connie understands these things now. She understands why they are virtues.\n\nIn the kitchen, she heats some porridge and serves it up to the boys in front of the TV. She cleans off the kitchen counter and sweeps the kitchen floor. In her mind she's totting up all the jobs she's done in the house already today, measuring her tally of household chores against Emmet's. Every time she puts out a garbage bag, every time she bends over to pick up a pair of dirty underpants or wipe the pee stains off the toilet seat, the resentment sloshes around in her heart. Even as she's hating him, she hates this in herself. Never in her wildest dreams did Connie think she would ever turn into this kind of woman.\n\nConnie, who always _preferred_ the company of men to that of women. She couldn't wait to get out of school, smothered by that all-girl environment. It was only when she got to college that she found herself in her element. As a student of history and politics, she was one of the few women in a class full of earnest young men, and she reveled in being one of the lads while delighting at the same time in not being one of them. She made a point of sitting in the front row of the lecture hall, taking copious notes in green ink, before swinging her neat little bum back up the auditorium steps, pretending not to notice the effect she was having on the boys. Her shining hour came during a presentation on the causes of the American Civil War, when she set out a complicated analogy likening the countdown to the conflict to a game of strip poker between North and South. And if the mention of strip poker by a twenty-two-year-old Connie\u2014wearing her tight black polo neck and her tartan miniskirt\u2014if the mere mention of the word was enough to cause a rise in the temperature of the room, and a few coughs and splutters from the shyer boys, well that was something Connie would have taken no heed of. At that time she was of the view that there was nothing to separate the men and women of her generation.\n\n\"The only difference between the men and women of our generation is that the men pee standing up and the women pee sitting down,\" she argued at a college debate (even though she and a girlfriend had once managed to subvert this rule at an outdoor concert where the queue for the ladies' Portaloo was unmercifully long). Speaking in support of the motion that \"Society no longer has a need for feminism,\" Connie declared that the women of her generation only had themselves to blame if they failed to take up their rightful place in society. Afterward, in the college bar, between shots of tequila and the flagrant chain-smoking of Marlboro Lights (when Connie looks back on her college days she sees herself always in a cloud of smoke), she made the same case to her class tutor. While her tutor slid his hand up her skirt, Connie told him how future generations would have no need for special courses on women's history because women would be out there making history for themselves, an argument that seemed only to heighten the tutor's admiration for her, driving his hand farther up her thigh and his tongue into her ear.\n\nThe boy wonder of the history department, he was just back from Oxford with his newly earned PhD (a study of the Irish chaplains who served in the First World War). With his never-brushed hair and his murky green eyes\u2014eyes the color of an empty wine bottle with the light shining through\u2014Emmet brought a touch of rock-star glamour into the fossilized atmosphere of the history department. Heavily made-up girls lined the front rows of all his lectures; the same girls were to be found leaning against the wall outside his office, or sitting cross-legged on the floor waiting for him to come out, while back in his rooms Connie lay naked in his bed. That was where she spent most of her final year, smoking cigarettes and reading novels and listening to Emmet's music collection, when she should have been in the library. When her final results came through, she had earned herself not the first she had once hoped for, but a bare 2.1. But by then she and Emmet had moved in together, taking a one-year lease on a small flat above a Lebanese restaurant on Camden Street, and the loss of that elusive first seemed a small price to pay for love.\n\nOh, Connie, she says to herself now, as she stuffs another load of his dirty socks and knickers into the washing machine, slamming the door so hard that for a minute she's afraid she's broken the catch. Connie, Connie, Connie. How could you have let this happen to you?\n\n\"Hey,\" he says, when he comes down the stairs just after nine.\n\nFreshly showered and wearing blue jeans and a white shirt, with a pea-green lambswool sweater his mother gave him for his birthday, he smells of peppermint toothpaste and suds, his hair wet and dark. He comes into the kitchen and picks an apple out of the fruit bowl for his breakfast. He looks so handsome, and so clean, that Connie can't help but fancy him. In her oversized cardigan and her grubby T-shirt, she feels like a slob. Hair unbrushed, mascara down around her cheekbones, her hands are in the sudsy water, fondling last night's dishes.\n\n\"Well?\" he says, teasing her with his eyes.\n\n\"Well,\" she says, determined to match him monosyllable for monosyllable.\n\nHe comes up behind her and slips a hand under her cardigan, taking hold of her right bum cheek and squeezing it. He snakes the other hand round her waist, sliding it up the front of her chest and taking her right breast lightly in the palm of his hand, with his fingers splayed on either side of her nipple, and his lips worrying the back of her neck. Hands submerged in the warm, wet sink, she's shackled by him. She closes her eyes for a second, breathing in the smooth, clean feel of him.\n\n\"How about a ride?\" he whispers into her ear.\n\n\"How about an elbow in the goolies,\" she says, pushing him away from her with her hip as she takes another plate out of the sink and stows it on the drying rack. Drip, drip, drip. She hears him laughing as he moves out into the living room. He's gathering up his papers and stuffing them into his laptop bag, in preparation for the day at his mother's house. His mother has created a special workspace for him in her dining room. She stocks up on the coffee he drinks and the biscuits he likes, all in the service of the great book. A book he needs to write if he's ever going to get tenure\u2014if he's ever going to make professor, which is what Emmet fully intends to be.\n\n\"You could always take the day off,\" says Connie, leaning her head back and throwing her voice after him. \"It is a Sunday, after all.\"\n\nOf all the days that she spends alone, it's the Sundays that she finds the hardest.\n\n\"Come on, Connie. You know I can't.\"\n\nAnd of course, she does know. She knows that his deadline is only six months away. That the book has to be ready for next year's centenary of the start of the war. That it would have been written years ago if it wasn't for her and the boys...\n\n\"I know,\" she says. \"I know.\"\n\nHe hovers in the kitchen doorway.\n\n\"So, what was the drama?\" He has his laptop bag in one hand, his bicycle helmet in the other. \"Last night, what was the big drama?\"\n\n\"Oh,\" says Connie. \"It's a long story. I'll tell you later.\"\n\nAs he leaves, she hears him call out a goodbye to the boys. She hears the door close behind him and is overcome by despair. The day ahead of her seems impossibly long. The task of filling it impossibly arduous, a task made all the more difficult by the boys' racing reserves of energy. By her own epic exhaustion.\n\nAn exhaustion that lies in wait for her every morning when she wakes up; it follows her around all day, hanging like lead weights off the hem of her clothes, constantly trying to pull her down. She recharges herself with coffee, enjoying a brief burst of energy before she goes flat again. She eats, and experiences a short sugar burst, which dips again after half an hour, leaving her more tired than she was before. Like a woman in danger of being washed away by raging flood waters, she grabs on to any piece of driftwood she can find to steady herself. A mug of tea, a bar of chocolate, a sneaky cigarette. Anything that might give her the strength to muddle through another hour of another interminable day.\n\nKeep swimming, she tells herself, channeling Dory in _Finding Nemo_. Keep swimming, keep swimming. Sometimes it seems like all she has in her head these days are cartoons.\n\nShe was folding the washing when her phone rang. Her mother's number on the screen\u2014as soon as Connie saw it, she wondered had her mother changed her mind. Too late if so, the e-mail was already gone\u2014Connie had typed it up and sent it off ten minutes ago.\n\n\"So, they rang me.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" said Connie. \"We were expecting that. What did they say?\"\n\n\"It was a woman. She wanted to know if the letter was genuine.\"\n\n\"Well, that's fair enough. Did she ask you anything else?\"\n\n\"She asked me if your father knew about it.\" (Always \"your father,\" never Liam.)\n\n\"And what did you say?\"\n\n\"I said I would prefer if he wasn't told.\"\n\nConnie had a vision of the news conference, and the discussion that would inevitably take place.\n\n\"Was that it?\"\n\n\"No. Someone else rang me back afterward.\"\n\n\"Probably a reporter.\"\n\nAcushla's voice broke through with a question, as tentative as a puff of smoke.\n\n\"Do you think they'll print it?\"\n\nConnie paused, not quite sure how to answer. A confession from the wife of a former minister that she had traveled to England for an abortion, in contravention of the protection accorded to the unborn by the constitution? _Of course_ they would print it. Just try and stop them. She began to wonder did her mum have any idea what she was getting herself into?\n\n\"Oh, they'll print it all right,\" she said gently. \"There's no question, Mum, but they'll print it.\" (They would run a news story too, most likely on the front page, but Connie thought it better not to mention that yet.) \"You're not getting cold feet, are you?\"\n\n\"No,\" said her mum, with too much emphasis in her voice. She sounded like she was trying to convince herself. \"No, no. I want to do this.\"\n\nConnie wedged her mobile in between her shoulder and her ear so that she could get on with folding the dry clothes while she was talking.\n\n\"Okay,\" she said. \"Because it's not too late to pull out if you don't want to.\"\n\nShe was holding a pair of Ernie's trousers up against her belly, running the palm of her hand over them to flatten out the kinks. She folded them over once, twice, and set them down on the kitchen table, taking care to keep them well clear of the jam spill she had failed until now to notice.\n\n\"No, I do want to,\" said her mother. Her voice had a disjointed quality to it, which led Connie to think she'd taken a Valium. \"It's just... I don't know. It's just that I'm nervous, I suppose.\"\n\nConnie plucked a T-shirt of Emmet's off the clothes horse as she listened. She pinned it to her chest with her chin. Taking the sleeves, she doubled them toward the center. Folded the T-shirt over twice and set it down on the table.\n\n\"I don't know how people will react,\" her mother was saying. \"I'm a bit nervous, I suppose, about people's reactions.\"\n\nConnie reached deep inside herself, trying to find the energy to give her mother the encouragement she needed.\n\n\"I think you'll be surprised,\" she said, \"how sympathetic people will be. You'll get great support from people once they know.\"\n\nShe picked up a pair of Emmet's boxer shorts, fastening the single button on the crotch before folding them over.\n\n\"When are they going to publish it?\"\n\n\"They're talking about tomorrow. Tomorrow is the day.\"\n\n\"What about Dad? Are you worried about how he's going to react when it's published?\"\n\n\"No!\" said her mum defiantly, her voice skittering off the word. \"No, I know how he'll react. He'll hit the roof.\"\n\nAnd whereas before it had seemed to Connie that there was fear in her mother's voice, and trepidation, whereas a moment ago she had sensed a pitiful anxiety about how people would react, the mention of her father seemed to have invoked a spirit of brinksmanship in her. It occurred to Connie that perhaps her mother's newfound activism was not about women's rights, or women's freedoms and men's role in suppressing them. Perhaps it was just about one man and one woman, and the endlessly unhappy dance they were leading each other, a dance that would continue, most likely, long after this storm had passed. The thought of it made Connie feel sad and faintly sick.\n\nAfter her mother had gone off the line, she stood in the kitchen for a moment, with the phone cradled in the crook of her neck. She wondered what to do with the stray sock she was holding. Three times already this sock had gone through the wash, and still Connie couldn't find its partner. Holding it with the tips of two fingers as if it were a dead mouse, she dropped it into the bin.\n\nOne thing about living with three men is the amount of socks they have. Another thing is the amount of shoes. You'd swear you were living with a family of octopuses. Octopi? Whatever. Connie seems to spend her life putting away shoes.\n\nEverywhere she looks there are runners strewn about the floor. A pair of small red wellies abandoned inside the front door. A single sandal peeping out from between the cushions of the couch. There are slippers in the log basket and Crocs in the toy trunk; a pair of Emmet's leather brogues sitting neatly side by side on the floor at the foot of the armchair, as if the person who was wearing them had spontaneously combusted, leaving only their shoes behind them.\n\nIn a frenzy, Connie goes around the house piling shoes high in her arms like firewood. When she's gathered them all up, she finds there's nowhere to put them. She stands in the middle of her tiny house, trying to create by sheer force of desire some new storage space where none exists. Walking over to the playpen, she bends down, releases her arms and a cascade of shoes tumbles out.\n\nThe idea of the playpen was that the boys would play happily in it and Connie would sit at the table and do some work, but it has turned out the other way around. Often of a morning Connie will climb into the playpen with her laptop while the boys have the run of the house. Her latest innovation is to upend a box of cornflakes on to the kitchen tiles and let them turn the cornflakes into a quarry, running their diggers through them and shunting them around the floor, grinding the cereal into dust with the knees of their corduroy trousers. The cost of a box of cornflakes is less than two euro. The clean-up time, ten minutes of vigorous sweeping or five minutes with the hoover. The time bought, as much as an hour. If she's focused about it, she can get her blog written in the space of an hour.\n\nConnie writes a weekly blog, which she distributes to her modest Twitter following. She produces the occasional feature article for one of the national newspapers, where the editor is someone Alma knows. She conducts potted interviews by e-mail, quizzing minor celebrities about the silliest of things (What items are always to be found in your fridge? What's your favorite smell?). And while it's not exactly the career she once had in mind for herself\u2014a career with a regular paycheck, and colleagues, and lunch\u2014the cost of childcare makes it unfeasible for her to work outside the home. With a house in negative equity to the tune of two hundred thousand euro, and four people to feed on a junior lecturer's salary, Connie's career is a luxury that, for the moment at least, they cannot afford.\n\nOut in front of the house there's a stagnant river, and between the house and the river there's a green area, and it's there that Connie brings the boys to burn up some time. With a mug of tea in her hand and the sun on her face, she watches them at play, a warm weight settling over her like a mosquito net, creating a thin veil between her and the world.\n\nA dog emerges from one of the houses and the boys make a beeline for it.\n\n\"Wait, guys. Be careful,\" says Connie. But her voice sounds thin and unconvincing, like Willy Wonka. Stop. Don't. Come back.\n\nAlready the boys are throwing a stick for the dog. The dog fetches the stick and comes back with it and Ernie tries to wrestle it from his mouth while Oscar tries to mount the animal like a horse. Connie calls out to him.\n\n\"Oscar. Don't torment that poor creature.\"\n\nBut her words might as well be thoughts for all the impact they have. They might as well be speech bubbles, floating away in the air. Above the river wall the seagulls are wheeling, letting out heartbroken cries as they plummet. A woman on the bridge is throwing bread for them, and above the woman's head sits the stadium, like a big hair dryer hood. \"The bedpan\" the locals call it. But then the locals have a name for everything.\n\n\"Nice day for it,\" says Connie's neighbor, stepping out of her house and yanking her shopping cart over the threshold after her. A birdlike woman with twig-thin legs that end in big bird feet, she is well into her eighties but still as fit as a fiddle.\n\n\"Amazing,\" says Connie, smiling up at her.\n\n\"They're saying we're in for a good summer,\" says the neighbor.\n\n\"We don't get good summers.\"\n\n\"I'm telling you. The fella was on the radio this morning. He says the good weather's here till September.\"\n\n\"I'll believe it when I see it,\" says Connie. \"After everything we've suffered these last few years, a proper summer is exactly what we need, seeing as none of us can afford to leave the country.\"\n\nFive years since Connie has had a holiday, and she finds herself craving the heat.\n\n\"Well in anyway,\" says the neighbor, tucking her chin into her neck, \"it'll save on the gas bills.\"\n\nThe neighbor trundles off down the road, dragging her cart after her, and Connie closes her eyes to savor the sunshine. With her eyes shut, the light becomes liquid, pooling around her. From what seems like very far away, she hears wailing. Is it Ernie? she wonders. Or Oscar? It takes her a second to decide. She opens her eyes to see her youngest falling across the grass toward her.\n\nHe tumbles into her arms, his skull as hard as a nut under her chin, his tears big wet smears on the skin of her hand. Wrapping her arms around his squidgy belly, Connie feels so full of love for him that she could burst. She pulls him into her, burying her face in the hollow at the back of his neck and kissing him there over and over again. It's only when he's had a fall that she gets to kiss him like this.\n\n\"My baby,\" she says, breathing in the powdery smell behind his ear. The word sends a jolt through him. He stiffens and fights to get free of her.\n\nConnie wrinkles her nose.\n\n\"Ah, not again,\" she says, bending down to inspect the soles of his shoes.\n\n\"Shit,\" she says, without a trace of irony. \"Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.\"\n\nShe prizes his left shoe off him and carries it into the front garden. Picking up a toothbrush that she keeps on the windowsill for this very purpose, and holding the sole of the shoe under the outside tap, she begins to work the dog shit out of the grooves of the runners. Her movements are driven by rage. Rage against the faceless dog owners who don't pick up after their dogs; rage against Dublin City Council, who don't enforce the fines against the dog owners who don't pick up after their dogs; rage against her husband, who at this moment is sitting at his desk in his mother's house eating chocolate biscuits. Fucking asshole, she says to herself, as she scrubs the side of the shoe and holds it under the tap, turning her face away to avoid the fine spray of shitty water that bounces back off its surface. Asshole, she says again, addressing her husband in her mind. For some reason, it seems clear to her that this is all his fault.\n\nA beep sounded loud and close and Connie looked up to see her mum's car rolling up to the door.\n\n\"I thought we'd get some coffees and go to the playground,\" she said through the open car window. \"I need to find some way of putting in the day.\"\n\nNot for the first time, Connie was grateful for her company.\n\n\"Hang on,\" she said, dashing into the house to grab her handbag. Keys, spare nappies, baby wipes... She pulled the door behind her. Already the boys were scrambling into the back of their granny's car, clambering over the large overnight bag that was there. Opening the passenger door, Connie had to move a leather vanity case that occupied the front footwell along with several pairs of shoes.\n\n\"Why am I getting a _Thelma and Louise_ feeling about this?\" She looked sideways at her mum and saw her eyelashes wobbling away behind her sunglasses.\n\n\"I thought it might be best if I stayed with your grandmother for a few days.\"\n\nShe was looking up at the rearview mirror as she pulled out. Her nails were displayed like pale pink shells along the steering wheel; the large dress ring she was wearing on her right hand threw off shards of colored light.\n\n\"Is that Grandmother's ring?\" asked Connie, even though there was no doubt in her mind that it was.\n\n\"Oh,\" said her mum, still looking into the mirror as she answered. \"She gave it to me. She can't wear it anymore\u2014her fingers are too puffy.\"\n\n\"Right,\" said Connie, thinking uneasily of the picture her grandmother had given her the last time she visited\u2014a print by a well-known Irish artist. Connie knew it to be of some value so she had tried to refuse it, but her grandmother had insisted. \"I _want_ you to have it,\" she had said, in a high, airy voice. \"Who knows who might get their hands on it after I'm gone.\"\n\n\"You don't think she's losing her marbles, do you? It's very unlike her to be giving stuff away.\"\n\nConnie's grandmother had always guarded her few precious possessions so fiercely. Only once had Connie and Nora ever been allowed to play with her jewelry, and even then she had hovered over them making sure nothing went astray.\n\n\"I suppose she's just getting old,\" said Acushla, with a shrug in her voice.\n\nFrom the back of the car Connie could hear Ernie counting cars. Oscar was pretending to count too, repeating the numbers he'd heard coming out of his brother's mouth but in a random sequence. Connie closed her eyes to quell the sense she had of some nebulous dread.\n\nThe playground was swirling with children when they arrived. Connie opened the gate, and the boys disappeared in among them. She bolted the gate behind her and followed her mum over to a picnic table.\n\n\"So,\" she said. \"I suppose there's nothing for us to do now but wait.\"\n\nHer mother sat with her shoulders slumped forward, her hands hugging her coffee cup. An oyster-colored pashmina was draped elegantly over her shoulders. Her eyes were blinking shadows behind her sunglasses.\n\n\"I feel a bit bad,\" she said. \"Sneaking out on your father like that.\"\n\n\"Oh, come on, Mum. It's no more than he deserves.\"\n\nThe more Connie thought about it, the more it seemed to her it was the very least he deserved.\n\nHer mum sighed. \"I suppose.\"\n\n\"I feel like such an idiot,\" said Connie, \"for taking his side all those years.\"\n\nShe cringes with shame as she thinks of it, what a daddy's girl she was.\n\n\"You adored your dad,\" said her mum with a weak smile. \"It was never my desire to come between the two of you.\"\n\n\"I know,\" said Connie. When the truth was that her mother never could have come between them, even if she had wanted to. There was nobody could have come between Connie and her dad.\n\nIn her mother's presence Connie was a serious child, imperious and bossy, but as soon as her father came in the door, he brought a sea breeze with him, whipping Connie into peaks of giddy froth. The less time he spent at home, the more Connie delighted in his presence. On the many, many nights when he was out at some constituency event or other, Connie would insist on waiting downstairs for him, falling asleep on the couch in the breakfast room while her mother moved about the kitchen completing her chores. The next thing Connie knew, her father would be scooping her up in his arms and carrying her up the stairs. As he slid her into her own bed, she would curl up between the cold sheets like a little guard dog who was finally off duty now that her master was home.\n\nIn later years her dad used to take her on his rounds of the doorsteps on Saturday mornings. She would hand out election leaflets, and nod and smile as he promised to help someone skip a hospital waiting list, or dodge a prison sentence by grace of his intervention. The evident devotion of his daughter was a subtle vote-getter, and something that would not have been lost on him, not for one moment. When he was appointed to Cabinet for the third time, it was Connie who accompanied him to the start of the new D\u00e1il term. She got a new dress for the occasion and a new pair of patent pumps, and her picture was in all the papers the next day. (Her mother was at home in bed with a sore throat\u2014an excuse that in retrospect seemed a bit thin to Connie, but then in retrospect there were so many things that suddenly made sense.)\n\n\"Oh, God,\" she said. \"I was such a little misogynist!\"\n\nRemembering how she loved being with her father. How she preferred her grandfather's company to her grandmother's. It was Connie's grandfather who taught her to play drafts, challenging her to epic tournaments that swallowed up entire rainy afternoons, while Sam sat by the window painting. He always had a stash of chocolate in the top left-hand drawer of his desk, and it was he who taught her to dip the end of a Time Out into her mug and use it as a straw. (\"I don't normally subscribe to these new-fangled confections,\" he would say, \"but I have to make an exception for Time Out. It's a magnificent addition to the repertoire.\") Connie has such happy memories of those lovely, languorous afternoons at her grandfather's dining table, with a large Latin dictionary wedged in under her bum, and her shoes hanging like lead weights off her dangling legs, with her grandfather's old-time music swirling in the air and his smirking blue eyes watching her as she huffed him. A sense of comradeship between them, as if they were on the same side in the game of life.\n\nAnd they _were_ on the same side, that was the truth of it. Before she even knew there were sides, Connie had sided with her grandfather. Treacherous little girl that she was, she had sided with her father. She had sided with the entire male population over the female. Because women, it seemed to Connie, were always complaining about something. They were always bickering with each other, or bitching, and if they weren't crying about something they were mounting a silent protest, one that only they knew the logic of. And it seemed to Connie that there was some disposition to unhappiness in the women of her family, some determination to be unhappy that must be located somewhere on the second X chromosome. The men seemed so much happier than the women, and so much more fun to be around.\n\n\"Mum\u2014\" she started to say, but she was interrupted by the sound of a child calling out to her.\n\n\"Mum!\" It was Ernie, from the top of the slide. He was standing gripping the handrails with his little fists. His solemn face searching out hers for approbation. Connie gave him a circus smile and a thumbs-up.\n\n\"Ah, God,\" she said as she turned back to her mum. \"Wouldn't that melt your heart.\"\n\n\"He's a darling,\" said her mum, and it seemed to Connie that in their love for the boys they were in perfect tune with each other. All the little things that mattered to Connie\u2014the visceral fear of a fever, the momentousness of a newly glimpsed tooth, the joy in kissing the velvety sole of a baby's foot\u2014her mother understood all these things. Her mother supported her, slipping her small gifts of cash to pay for makeup or a haircut. She helped her with babysitting, taking up the slack wordlessly whenever Connie needed her, whereas her father seemed to be talking to her in another register, about all the things they used to talk about before she had babies, things that were so remote to Connie now that she could barely hear him...\n\n\"You know you've been a great mum to me,\" she said, leaning forward to search out her mother's eyes behind her sunglasses. \"You do know that, don't you? Nobody could have been a better mum.\"\n\nHer mother tilted her head to one side and sighed.\n\n\"I do my best,\" she said. \"Just like you do, darling. You try to be the best mother you can be...\"\n\nAnd Connie was about to answer her when something occurred to her.\n\n\"Hang on,\" she said. \"Where's Oscar gone?\"\n\nA moment of playground panic; a second went by, and then another second, before she located him, waiting for a little girl to vacate a swing. He had his hand down the front of his trousers to fondle himself. (\"Captain Elastic\" Emmet liked to call him, because he seemed never to tire of stretching his little penis out like bubble gum, to see how far it would go.)\n\n\"Oh, Jesus,\" said Connie, covering her mouth with her hand. \"Would you look at my son.\"\n\nHer mum took in the sight of Oscar, and bit her lip and smiled. As she turned back to Connie, the smile turned into a laugh, tears forming in her eyes as she shook her head helplessly from side to side. Connie began to laugh with her, the two of them shaking with speechless laughter so that at first neither of them noticed that Connie's phone was ringing. It was hopping up and down on the surface of the picnic table. The screen displayed a photograph of Connie's father's face. A red receiver icon and a green receiver icon, inviting her to accept or reject the call. Still breathless from laughing, Connie reached out to reject it.\n\nIt was early afternoon by the time they got back to the house.\n\n\"Can we bake?\" asked the boys as soon as they were in the door.\n\n\"Jesus, lads. We're only just back from the park. Would you not think of having a nap?\"\n\nTheir two little faces turned up to hers in expectation of disappointment. For weeks she'd been promising them they could bake. For weeks she'd been postponing the promise. Maybe later, she would say, maybe tomorrow. Hoping they would forget about it, but of course they didn't.\n\n\"You promised us we could bake.\"\n\n\"All right,\" she said wearily. \"Let's bake.\"\n\nSo here they were, standing precariously on a pair of kitchen chairs, with adult-sized aprons tied twice around their bellies and wooden spoons in their hands. Flour in their hair, and in their eyebrows and their eyelashes, flour in every crevice of their clothing. With their cheeks flaming and their eyes wide and serious from the task at hand, they were blithely unaware of the spectacle they presented.\n\nConnie was just about to put the tray of cookies into the oven when she saw a sudden movement in the corner of the room. She froze with the tray in her hand. She saw, but did not react. For a second, maybe two, she stood and stared at the rat. The rat sat and stared back. Connie dropped the cookie tray and screamed.\n\nIn one swooping movement she hooked a child under each arm and climbed up on to the couch. She managed to reach for her mobile, which was on the table. Stabbed at Emmet's number; the phone rang three times and went through to voice mail. She rang his number again, and again the phone went through to voice mail. Again and again she rang, picturing the tally of missed calls mounting on the face of his phone, a measure of her growing hysteria. Seven calls she made, and still the rat sat in the corner of the kitchen, picking away at a stray crumb of cookie dough.\n\nConnie decided to make a run for it. She hefted a child on to each hip and made for the door, her bare feet barely touching the floor, as if she was running through a pit of flames. She slammed the front door behind her and threw the boys into the back of her little car, climbing into the front seat herself and starting it up. The soles of her feet naked on the pedals.\n\nOn the way to Emmet's mother's house, she kept trying his number. With each unanswered call she chalked up another black mark against him. By the time she had pulled up outside the house, she had scored twenty-seven unanswered calls. She rang on the side door, but again she got no answer. She bent down and retrieved the spare key from under the mat, letting herself into the dark hall. Turning the boys loose on their granny's fridge, she made her way up the stairs to the first floor, driven now by fury. The interconnecting reception rooms were deserted, sunlight streaming in through the back window, throwing a lopsided rectangle of light across the pale carpet. The dining room table was piled high with Emmet's books, but there were no signs of recent industry. No coffee cups, no loose notes, no uncapped pens. With something approaching relish, Connie crept up the stairs to the second floor. Past the framed portrait of Emmet in his graduation robes, his parents standing proudly on either side of him. Past a mosaic of family wedding photographs. She took in her own with a single withering glance as she charged by.\n\nShe found him in his old room. The bedroom door was ajar, and through the opening Connie could see the bottom half of his body lying on top of the single bed in all his clothes. She could hear the television, with a sound coming out of it like a swarm of angry bees; she recognized it as the drone of racing cars looping a track. Gingerly, she stepped around the open door and saw that he was fast asleep, the remote control lying on his belly and his hand placed protectively over it.\n\n\"At least he was on his own,\" said her friend Orla, palm clamped to her chest with relief. \"I thought you were going to tell me there was another woman in the bed with him.\"\n\nA pale dream of a girl, Orla's skin was stretched so thinly over the fine bones of her face as to be almost transparent. Delicate colors moved beneath the surface. At one time a coral-pink flush would show, high up on her cheekbones; another time it was the blue veins you would notice, marbling her eyelids and her temples, and again, the purple shadows under her eyes.\n\n\"But that's the worst of it!\" said Connie, putting her daiquiri glass down on the low table for a moment and looking around at her friends. (It seemed clear to her that the only thing to do under the circumstances was to get drunk.) \"I think I'd have preferred to find him in bed with another woman. For all the action he gets these days, I'd have _understood_ if he was sleeping with another woman. I'd have understood if he was sleeping with another _man_. I swear to God, I'm so knackered, I wouldn't care. It's the fact that he was sleeping alone, that's what I can't forgive. The thought of all that delicious sleep. I don't see how I'm ever going to forgive him.\"\n\n\"Hard to see,\" said Rachel, shaking her head. The only one of them who was still single, Rachel could be relied upon to take a hard line against male transgressions.\n\n\"I'd kill him,\" said Trish. \"If Ross did that to me, I'd murder him.\" (Ross who can't keep his hands off other women when he's had a few drinks. Ross who once asked Connie did she like it up the arse. I'd want to kill him too, thought Connie. If I was married to Ross, I'd happily kill him.)\n\n\"The only problem with killing him,\" said Orla, in her reedy voice, \"is that you'd be left minding the boys on your own, which would be a bit of an own goal.\"\n\n\"Oh, I've no intention of killing him,\" said Connie, with all the command of a hanging judge. \"The punishment I have in mind is much slower and more painful. I intend to make him pay me back for all the sleep he's been stealing from me.\"\n\nBending down to pucker her lips over the tip of her straw, she drained the last of her frozen daiquiri in one long slurp, sending a glacier at breakneck speed through the cavities of her skull. Even as she was gasping with the pain, she was raising her hand to order another round.\n\n\"There should be some kind of warning,\" she said, after they'd moved on to the next bar. They were standing outside on the street, smoking Rachel's cigarettes, even though the rest of them were supposed to have given up. \"They should have a public health campaign,\" she went on as she lit up. \"People should be warned about the dangers of marriage.\"\n\n\"It's not possible for men and women to live together happily,\" she said to Rachel in the nightclub. The others seemed to have disappeared, leaving just the two of them slumped side-by-side on a velvet couch. \"I don't know a single couple who manage to cohabit happily.\"\n\nShe was stunned by the clarity of this thought.\n\n\"I swear to God, I can't think of anyone I know who has a happy marriage!\"(Her grandfather was the only person Connie could think of who was in a happy relationship, which said something in and of itself about relations between men and women.)\n\n\"What about your parents?\" asked Rachel, confused. \"I thought your parents were still married.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" said Connie, thinking of the reams of newsprint that must even now be reeling off the great printing presses in the west of the city. Corralling her slurred thoughts into line, she made a mental note to buy the newspaper on her way home. She imagined how she would wobble into the Spar while her taxi meter ticked away outside. She would squint at the small print in the dark backseat of the taxi, not sure if it was the darkness or the drink that was preventing her from reading it. Already she could imagine exactly what it would say.\n\n**FORMER  \nMINISTER'S  \nWIFE  \nBREAKS  \nSILENCE  \nON  \nABORTION**\n\n# Liam\n\nLiam endured a night riddled with dreams.\n\nNormally he tended to dream only when he was traveling, or when he was sick, but for some reason on this occasion he was assailed by dreams all night long. He dreamed first of his father. A strangely prosaic dream whereby he and his father were tending a bonfire in an oil barrel in the corner of the garden. (Back then you could still light a bonfire, something Liam's own government would later move to ban, relegating one of the great pleasures of his youth to the realm of nostalgia.) Often of a summer evening Liam's father used to make a bonfire for all the packaging waste from the kitchen, tossing it on to the flames with all the absorption of a child playing with matches. In the dream, Liam and his father stood admiring the curious colors thrown up by the melting plastic, and Liam could feel his face being roasted by the flames while at his back the chill crept in from the darkening woods around him. There was no smell in the dream, only swirls of thick smoke distorting the air and the sense of his father standing beside him, solid as a tree, with his boots planted firmly in the gravel.\n\nWithout warning, the dream morphed into a nightmare. Liam was turning the compost heap over with a pitchfork when he came across his father's body. A flesh-covered hand in the early stages of decomposition, like the body of the farmyard dog that Liam had encountered in the compost heap one spring morning, warm and steamy after a whole winter of being dead.\n\n\"Jesus!\"\n\nHe sat up in the bed, choking on his own breath. Eyes wide and staring, his brain tumbling through time. He turned toward his wife for ballast, only to find the bed empty beside him. He checked his watch and saw that it was almost three, which was late for Acushla to be home but not so late as to worry him. He rolled the duvet round himself and curled into the comfort of it, falling straight back into a tunnel of dreams that were all about Acushla. When he woke again, it was just before six and her side of the bed was still empty.\n\nHis first thought was that she must have had an accident and that he should ring the Guards. He reached for his phone and was about to dial 999, but first he found himself rehearsing what he would say to them. He would be forced to identify himself, and to explain that his wife had not come home last night, and there would follow all kinds of intrusive questions and innuendo as they tried to come up with sordid scenarios to explain her absence. Putting the phone down again, he leaned over and turned on the radio, hoping to catch the news. If there had been a fatal road accident in the city during the night, or some other catastrophe that might explain why she had not come home, it would surely be on the news. He sat up in bed as he listened to the six o'clock news.\n\nThe first headline was about a tornado in Oklahoma. The second concerned an ongoing scandal about penalty points, and the third referred to the wife of a former minister who had admitted to having had an abortion. It took Liam a moment to realize that the former minister they were referring to was him.\n\nLiam's phone started ringing as the newscaster was reading out the weather forecast (another day of sunshine, announced with a mixture of disbelief and delight). He eyed the phone, identifying without answering them calls from every political correspondent in the country. Calls from the news desks of all the major newspapers, and all the broadcasters. He sat on the edge of his bed, elbows on his bony knees and bare feet planted in the carpet, with his phone in his hand. The minutes slipped by, the phone rang and rang and still Liam sat in his pajamas on the edge of his bed. Like someone who finds themselves at the bottom of a deep well without a rope, or far out at sea without an oar, he allowed himself the luxury of a period of inaction to wallow in his despair. A despair that seemed so absolute that everything that went before it now paled in comparison. The loss of his seat, even that now seemed little more than a common or garden crisis, and one that could have been overcome. But this... it was hard to see how there was any way back from this.\n\nNot since he was a child, sitting cross-legged on the bare boards of their bedroom floor as his brother beat him at Snakes and Ladders\u2014not since then had he experienced such an abject feeling of defeat. It was all he could do not to cry.\n\nHis press officer phoned at thirteen minutes past seven. He must have delayed ringing until he'd listened to _It Says In The Papers._ With a sinking heart, Liam accepted the call.\n\n\"Jack,\" he said.\n\n\"All right,\" said Jack, without any preamble. \" _The Irish Times_ is leading with it and the _Indo_ have it shoehorned into their later edition. RT\u00c9, Newstalk, Today FM\u2014you name it, they're all over it. And I just got a call from the BBC, which means it's about to travel across the water.\"\n\nLiam could hear the bounce in Jack's voice. After two years in the wilderness, his phone was hopping again. He was back in business.\n\n\"I didn't have a clue,\" said Liam. \"I'm as surprised as you are.\"\n\n\"I figured as much.\"\n\nThat was Jack for you, he always had to be ahead of the curve. God forbid anyone would steal a march on him.\n\n\"It was an ambush,\" said Liam, resting his forehead on his hand. \"A fucking ambush is what it was.\"\n\nAnd the fact that Liam found himself using the F word, that was an indication of how rattled he was. In a world where profanity sometimes seemed to be a language in and of itself, Liam had always prided himself on keeping his vocabulary clean. Often in the privacy of his own head he would unleash a string of obscenities, but seldom if ever did he allow them to escape out of him.\n\n\"I hate to be the one to ask you this,\" said Jack, with most uncharacteristic hesitancy. \"Don't take any offense now, but do you think she's left you?\"\n\nLiam raked a hand through his hair.\n\n\"That would appear to be the case,\" he said, hearing the note of self-pity that he had tried but failed to keep out of his voice.\n\n\"Do you think she's likely to do any interviews?\" persisted Jack. \"I have a horrible vision of her turning up on _The Late Late Show_ on Friday night.\"\n\n\"How would I know?\" said Liam, and this time his voice came out more like a bark. A narky, yappy little bark. \"I don't know, Jack,\" he said, in a whine now. \"All these things you're asking me, I don't have the answers to any of them.\"\n\nHe clenched his head with his hands, squeezing the bones of his skull tightly between his fingers, as if it was a football he was trying to burst. His mind was empty of everything but the fact that his wife had left him, taking his career with her.\n\n\"Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,\" he muttered to himself. It was only when he heard Jack's breath on the other end of the phone that he realized he had spoken out loud.\n\nShe had no understanding of politics, that was the problem. She was ignorant not just of the nuts and bolts of political life, but of the impulses that drove it. The sense of a big picture, the call to public service, all of that was incomprehensible to Acushla. She was like a peasant living in a medieval village. Her life revolved around a small circle of relationships that were confined within her familial walls. The world outside might as well not have existed, so little did it concern her. She was a creature of the microcosm.\n\nWhen Liam first ran for public office, in a constituency that was hers by birth rather than his own, his wife was no help to him. She seemed to have no knowledge of the terrain, no insight into local issues, and no contacts worth speaking of. She resisted any suggestions that she take part in the canvass, on the basis that she wouldn't have a clue what to say. On the one occasion that she agreed to hand out election leaflets outside Sunday Mass, she found the experience humiliating and resisted ever doing it again. Absorbed at that time in the potty training of Connie, and in painting the kitchen cupboards a sunflower yellow\u2014a task she insisted on undertaking two weeks before the election, despite Liam's pleas for her to hold off\u2014Acushla made it clear from the start that his political career was nothing to do with her, and if at first she did nothing to hinder it, she did nothing to help either.\n\nAlma was a mighty help, enlisting at his kitchen table amid the paint fumes and the endless cups of instant coffee. Together they worked their way through the electoral register, the way you might work your way through an old orchard, trying to shake every last vote out of it. Alma had a masterful command of the facts and figures, spitting out strings of numbers representing first-preference votes from elections before she was even born, recalling the patterns of transfers and the vagaries of each electoral area; she remembered exactly how many ballots had been cast in each election, and how each of those ballots had played out for each candidate along the magnificent if somewhat eccentric path of the single transferable vote. Late into the night she would wax lyrical about the beauty of the PR system. The wonders of the tally. The drama of the five-day count. Many years later, when Liam became Minister for the Environment and was foisted with the unenviable task of introducing electronic voting to a country enamored of the paper ballot\u2014a task that would turn into a career-defining fiasco\u2014it was Alma who warned him against it.\n\n\"You're making a mistake,\" she said. \"You'll ruin all the fun\u2014surely you of all people would prefer a paper ballot to a bloody machine?\"\n\n\"You might as well ask the lobster whether he prefers a slow death or a fast one,\" he said dolefully.\n\nShe laughed that laugh of hers that was like a pigeon cooing, and often afterward she quoted it back to him. \"How's life in the lobster tank?\" she would ask whenever she ran into him around government buildings. When Liam lost his seat, Alma sent a courier round with a live lobster packaged in a Styrofoam box, thick elastic bands wound around its claws. At the time, Liam failed to see the funny side of it.\n\n\"Well,\" said Mick, with a chuckle in his voice. \"Never a dull moment.\"\n\nInstantly Liam was sorry he'd come. He was tempted to turn away again rather than suffer his brother laughing at him. It was infuriating to Liam how Mick managed to find the humor in everything.\n\nHis brother's text had caught him at a weak moment. He was standing in his kitchen in the aftermath of the crisis meeting Jack had pulled together. Empty mugs strewn about the table, and half a digestive biscuit languishing on a plate. His phone had for some reason stopped ringing, and while the endless noise had jangled his nerves, the absence of it was almost worse. The sense of something happening behind his back, that was something Liam had always hated. He was standing staring at the phone, waiting for it to ring\u2014he was almost willing it to ring\u2014when he saw a text message come in from Mick.\n\nI'm here if you need me. M.\n\nHe was so touched by his brother's gesture of support that he could have cried. Acting on impulse, he grabbed his car keys and drove straight over to Alma's. A house he'd only ever visited on the canvass\u2014standing on the doorstep shooting the breeze with Alma about the latest polls. He had never actually been inside.\n\n\"Come on in,\" said Mick, and reluctantly Liam stepped into the blood-red hall. Framed watercolors of roses on the walls, and on the floor a pale pink carpet. He had the uncomfortable feeling that he was venturing into a strictly female domain.\n\n\"Shhh,\" said Mick, finger to his lips. He led the way down a short flight of steps into the kitchen. \"Alma's asleep upstairs.\"\n\n\"Is she all right?\"\n\nMick closed the kitchen door behind them before he answered.\n\n\"She's a bit shook. Your man being let out on bail, it was the last thing she needed. She hasn't been sleeping well since.\"\n\nLiam nodded in reply, but he was having trouble concentrating on what Mick was saying, so preoccupied was he by his own troubles.\n\n\"What can I offer you?\" Mick was asking. \"Coffee? Tea?\"\n\nBarefoot and wearing nothing but a pair of jeans and an open-necked shirt, he looked mightily at home.\n\n\"I'm all right,\" said Liam, shaking his head. With his hands in his pockets, and his fingers stroking the inside seams, he walked to the glass-paned back door and peered out into the garden. He turned to see Mick watching him.\n\n\"You could at least say something,\" he said, angry all of a sudden with his brother, although he hardly knew why.\n\n\"What do you want me to say?\"\n\n\"I dunno. That you're surprised, maybe? That you're shocked? Say anything, but don't just stand there looking at me like that.\"\n\n\"I'm not going to pretend to you that I'm surprised,\" said Mick. \"I knew about it already. I've known for a long time.\"\n\n\"Of course. Alma would have told you.\"\n\nMick shook his head.\n\n\"Actually, it was Acushla told me. A very long time ago, Acushla told me about it.\"\n\nLiam couldn't believe what he was hearing. A landslide started in his mind, the ground under him falling away.\n\n\"When was this?\" he asked, grappling for some facts to steady himself.\n\n\"About a year after it happened. I bumped into her in town. The poor kid was upset. She needed someone to talk to.\"\n\nLiam narrowed his eyes as all kinds of images unfurled in his brain. He imagined Acushla in a flood of tears, with Mick bending to comfort her. The next thing he had an image of his wife in his brother's arms. He forced his eyes tight shut, his paranoia spinning out of control. He didn't know what to be thinking.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" he muttered under his breath. (That's what his counselor had told him to say to the negative thoughts. Ask them what they're doing there, said the counselor, and tell them to go away.) \"What are you doing here?\" he said again, spitting the words out through gritted teeth. His attention had turned backward into his own head, and he was only barely aware of his brother standing in front of him.\n\n\"Jesus,\" said Mick, throwing up his hands in a gesture of surrender. \"Don't blame the messenger.\"\n\nLiam stared at him, trying to remember what else the counselor had told him. Don't get yourself into negative spirals. Don't go over to the dark side.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he said, swallowing hard and drawing his hand down over his face, as if he was holding a hot cloth that he could use to wipe away his thoughts and start afresh. When he took his hand away, he saw that Mick was looking at him with alarm.\n\n\"Sorry, Mick. I'm a bit upset.\"\n\nMick nodded, and this time Liam was glad he didn't say anything.\n\n\"It's been a shitty time,\" he said, hearing the whine come through in his voice again. How he hated that whine; no matter what he did, he couldn't keep it out of his voice. \"It's been such a shitty, shitty time,\" he said. \"Do you know, Mick? There are times when I despair of things ever getting better.\"\n\n\"It's the anger,\" he said. \"I've never come across anything like it.\"\n\nThe two of them were sitting in his car outside Alma's house. Mick with his towel and togs rolled up on his lap. Liam with his car keys primed to start the engine. (\"Would you not come for a swim?\" Mick had asked, offering him the loan of a pair of togs. \"You're all right,\" said Liam. \"But I'll drive you out there if you like.\")\n\n\"Nice jammer,\" said Mick, as Liam started up the engine. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"A Skoda,\" said Liam ruefully. \"Not that that stopped them from having a go at me.\"\n\n**COLLINS SPLASHES OUT ON FLASH NEW CAR** was the headline in one of the tabloids. As if he had any choice but to go out and buy a car. What did they expect him to do, walk everywhere? Gone was the infamous \"car with a star\"; the Garda driver was also, obviously, gone. Liam was forced to dig out his old driving license, which had lapsed in the years since he had become a minister. He had to resit the test, a humiliation the tabloids devoured with glee, mocking up pictures of him wearing L plates plastered to his chest and a dunce's cap on his head, under the headline **COLLINS GOES BACK TO SCHOOL**.\n\n\"The anger that's out there,\" he said, as he reversed carefully out of the square. \"You've no idea, Mick, what it's been like. It's like they take pleasure in abusing us. The last time I went to a match in the Aviva, I had a pint thrown over me.\" (Liam was careful always to use the new name of the stadium, in deference to its corporate sponsor.)\n\n\"I suppose you can understand it,\" Mick was saying. \"There's a lot of people out there having a tough time.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well that's fair enough, but they act like they had no hand or part in it! The very people who were buying those houses they couldn't afford, the same people who were buying brand-new cars on the never-never, and apartments in Bulgaria, they're the ones who are shouting the loudest!\"\n\nLiam could hear his own voice, thin and high-pitched with indignation.\n\n\"Yeah, well,\" said Mick. \"It's always easier to blame someone else for your troubles, isn't it?\"\n\nHe was bent over in the seat, rummaging around in the glove compartment. Liam was about to tell him to take his nose out of his bloody glove compartment when Mick straightened up, brandishing a CD case.\n\n\"Dire Straits,\" he said, and his shoulders were wobbling with laughter as he opened up the case and took the disc out. He shook his head and let out a long sigh of pleasure as he slid the CD into the player. \"Oh, Liam. That could not be more fucking appropriate.\"\n\nLiam steered the car through a roundabout. Taking the two o'clock exit into an industrial wasteland, he peered out at a row of travelers' caravans parked on the verge. A fire burning on the ground. A child wearing nothing but a sagging disposable nappy. Further along the road they drove past a scrap heap, old cars piled high and ready for flattening. A repository for shipping containers; they were stacked one on top of the other like giant Lego bricks. Round the next corner they came upon the sewage plant and then the electricity generating station, and on the other side of the road, the flat blue sea.\n\n\"I have to hand it to you,\" said Liam. \"You sure know how to pick a scenic spot for your swim.\"\n\nMick laughed.\n\n\"I wouldn't mind, but it's your constituency. You're supposed to love every square inch of it.\"\n\nThe fucking cheek of him! This was the guy who had stolen their father's seat out from under Liam's nose. A seat that should by rights have been Liam's. After all, it was Liam who had taken a course in auctioneering with a view to taking over his father's practice in town. It was Liam who took the bus home from college every weekend to help out on the farm. Liam who took an interest in the local news, while Mick rarely bothered to make the trip down from Dublin. When their father died\u2014of a heart attack so sudden that he fell and cracked his head on the tap in the farmyard\u2014it was Liam who found him. There was so much blood on the ground that Liam's first thought was that he'd been stabbed; it was only when the doctor arrived that they discovered the truth. Throughout the three days of the funeral, Liam was so shocked that he hardly knew where he was. And by the time his father was buried and the grave covered over, Mick had it all sorted that he'd be the one to defend the seat in the by-election, on the basis that he was the firstborn, and that was the end of that.\n\nMick bought himself a house in town and pretended to be living there, not that anybody was fooled. Especially after he married Alma, there was hardly a weekend a month that they spent there. He retained the seat all the same, buoyed up by his youth and the rumored promise of a junior ministry, rumors that he and Alma had themselves started. During his first term, he managed to secure a brand-new public swimming pool for the constituency, and an investor to come in and put up a gleaming new shopping center on the outskirts of town, sinking its foundations right on top of an ancient burial site despite the objections of a handful of local poets and tree huggers. Once the tills started ringing in the shopping center, Mick's seat was safe for as long as he wanted it.\n\nBy that time Liam was living in Dublin and the farm was leased out to a neighbor. When eventually their mother died, they sold the house, and the farm along with it. And while Liam did nothing to save the farm\u2014he did think about it at the time but ruled it out as impracticable\u2014he mourns the loss of it still. He imagines himself walking out of a summer evening to count the cattle, with the darkness gathering in the trees and the river like a strip of tinfoil in the moonlight. He sees himself turning to walk back across the damp grass to the house, pausing at the stile to smoke the last cigarette of the day; the vision is so real to him that it's almost as if some shadowy version of himself is still there, living the life that he always assumed was his to live. The life his father and grandfather lived before him. In many ways it is more real to Liam than the life he has ended up with, a life that was never of his own choosing.\n\nAs the long, slow notes of an electric guitar sounded the start of \"Brothers in Arms\"\u2014a track Liam had always loved, never mind his brother's derision\u2014he found himself enveloped in a fog of homesickness. He was homesick for the land. Homesick for the fields, and the trees. For the one-word exchanges that said more than a thousand when you moved among people who spoke the same language as you. He was homesick for home, which was always and forever the place where he was born. No matter how long he lived in the city, Liam had never been able to call it his own.\n\nLiam parked the car up at the base of the South Wall and watched as his brother set off for his swim. He was heading for the Half Moon swimming club\u2014a whitewashed area halfway along the seawall, with iron steps leading down into the water. Normally it was only the regulars who swam there, but the sunshine had brought out the fair-weather swimmers. Young men taking running jumps off the seawall, legs pedaling for a moment in the air before they hit the water.\n\nMick negotiated the uneven surface of the wall in a gentle waddle, his shoulders tilting from side to side as he went, his head bobbing up and down like a nodding dog. Towel under one arm, he raised the other arm in greeting to everyone he passed. Not a care in the world; it was maddening to Liam to watch how he had reinvented himself.\n\nIf you'd been offering odds a few weeks ago on the chances of Mick turning himself around after the pepper grinder thing, you'd have been looking at 100\/1, maybe even 1,000\/1. And yet Liam had opened his paper the other day to see that Mick had signed himself up for the summer season of _Celebrity MasterChef_. He was pictured wearing a white apron and brandishing a wooden spoon at the launch of the RT\u00c9 summer schedule. Liam could just see it now, how his brother would charm his way back into public life, landing like a bruised plum into the soft heart of the nation's affections.\n\n\"Don't bother waiting for me,\" Mick had said. \"I'll find my own way back.\"\n\nBut instead of driving away, Liam sat on in his car. There were half a dozen others lined up on either side of him in the car park, all with their engines turned off. Some of the drivers had their doors open, with their legs stretched out to catch the sun. Summer sounds in the air. From one car he could hear a ribbon of jazz. From behind him, the hum of an ice-cream van, and the patter of children's voices. From out of the babble, one sound isolated itself so that all the others disappeared. Opening his eyes, Liam saw that what he was hearing was the radio, streaming through the open window of the car next to him. He leaned forward to turn the dial on his own radio, and there she was. The sound of her voice familiar but different, like the sound of your own voice played back to you. Liam could tell by listening to her that she was nervous.\n\n\"We're talking about twenty years ago,\" she was saying. \"There was no Internet back then. I had no way of finding out any information, no way of getting in touch with other women who'd had similar experiences.\"\n\nHer voice, as fragile as a tune played on a tin whistle.\n\n\"I was utterly alone,\" she was saying. \"As far as I knew, I was the only person this had ever happened to.\"\n\nThere were long, empty spaces between her words and Liam found himself listening to her as he had never listened before. Listening to her as a stranger would, with nothing to stand in the way of his sympathies.\n\n\"When I came back, I couldn't tell anyone about it, which made it all the harder.\"\n\nThe interviewer's voice broke in on tiptoe.\n\n\"Can I ask you where your husband was when all of this was happening?\"\n\nAnother pause, and it seemed to Liam that the world turned on her answer.\n\n\"Well,\" she said at last. \"I can't really speak for him. I can only speak for myself.\"\n\n\"But he knew about it,\" said the interviewer, pressing her ever so gently. \"Your husband knew at the time that you'd had an abortion?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" said Acushla. \"He knew. Of course he knew.\"\n\n\"And yet he subsequently opposed the legislation to introduce abortion information in this country, in line with the 1992 referendum.\"\n\n\"That's right.\"\n\n\"That must have been very difficult for you,\" said the interviewer.\n\n\"It was,\" said Acushla. \"It was absolutely devastating.\"\n\nThe presenter allowed a few seconds to go by before breathing in heavily, for effect.\n\n\"Acushla Collins. Thank you so much for joining us.\"\n\nLiam closed his eyes and let out the breath he was holding. His shoulders collapsed and his head fell down on to his chest. Like an inflatable doll with the air gone out of it, there was nothing inside of him to hold him up. Nothing whatsoever in his head for a minute, perhaps even two\u2014for the entire duration of an ad break, and then a piece of music, Liam thought of nothing at all. It was only when he heard the presenter preparing to read out the comments of the listeners that he came back to his senses.\n\nHe sat up in his seat, afraid for Acushla now. He of all people knew the bile that was out there. The unholy vitriol this interview was liable to bring down on her. He was bracing himself for it, but to his amazement the comments were overwhelmingly positive. There were one or two, of course, who condemned her for the action she had taken\u2014one listener in particular said that she would have God to answer to for her actions\u2014but by and large the response was sympathetic. Caller after caller praising her for her courage, and sharing similar stories. As Liam listened to them, he was aware of the tide of public opinion slipping out from under him. He felt stranded and alone.\n\nAnd what he wanted to say\u2014what he wanted people to understand\u2014was something he had tried to explain to Acushla a number of times over the years, something she never seemed to be able to grasp. What he wanted people to know was that it was his sorrow too, the fact that they lost that baby. It was his sorrow too.\n\nLiam always wanted a big family. As a young man, he always pictured himself surrounded by multiple offspring, an older version of himself stalking the fields with his sons and walking his daughters up the aisle of the small church where he himself had been married. In those visions he wears his age on the surface, like the lead actor in a family saga who has had talcum powder combed through his hair in the makeup department, and skin-colored putty applied to his face to denote the passage of time, even though the audience knows that he's still a young man underneath. His wife is in the garden gathering flowers for the table, and she too has talcum powder in her hair and a layer of putty on her face, but underneath everyone can see that she's still the same girl he fell in love with all those years ago.\n\nWhen Liam married Acushla, he was blinded by the beauty of her. Blindsided into believing that she fitted the part, he wrote her into the story of his life, ignoring his mother's running commentary in the background. (His mother made no secret of the fact that she would have preferred him to marry a local girl.) \"She's very pretty,\" his mother said, when Liam first brought her home. And Liam knew what she meant by that; she meant that Acushla was too pretty. \"She's a jittery little thing,\" said his mother, again implying that this quality was enough to make her unsuitable for the life Liam had in store for her. \"I can't see her getting the hang of it,\" by which she meant that Acushla would never master the uneven temperatures in the kitchen range, or learn how to set the fire at the back of the grate so as not to smoke out the front room, or how to drape her clothes over the upstairs banisters so as they wouldn't be damp when she went to get into them in the morning. It had taken Liam's mother years to get the hang of all these things, and it wasn't that she doubted Acushla's ability to do the same; she doubted her willingness. And she'd have been right.\n\n\"I can't seem to get warm,\" whispered Acushla, that first night she stayed in Liam's mother's house. Wearing the diamond he had bought her on the ring finger of her left hand (Mick had already given their grandmother's old ruby ring to Alma), Acushla was curled up in a shiver between the cave-damp sheets in the single bed in the guest room. Liam crept across the bare creaking boards and she scooted over in the bed to make room for him; he had to put his fingers in her mouth as he made love to her, to stop her from giggling. To Liam's surprise, Acushla was a very noisy lover.\n\nThat night was the making of Connie, a fact that was not lost for one moment on Liam's mother. \"She's fierce healthy-looking, for a premature baby,\" his mother remarked, when Connie landed in a Dublin maternity hospital barely six months into their marriage. Acushla had insisted on having her baby in Dublin, and when she left the hospital three days later, it was to her own mother's house she went, ostensibly for a few weeks; those weeks turned into months as Liam drove up and down every day to tend the farm. Eventually he found a fellow to take care of the day-to-day running of it and he rented a house in Dublin, leaving the drawings for the new bungalow he had planned to build gathering dust on the desk in his father's study.\n\nThere was no bungalow built. No more babies born, although there were two miscarriages within the space of as many years, by which time Liam had managed to capture the fourth seat in Dublin southeast on the basis of a bare four thousand first-preference votes\u2014it was the transfers that clinched it for him. And if Acushla's last, disastrous miscarriage was not his finest hour as a husband (always in his mind he thought of it as a miscarriage, unable to bring himself to use the word \"abortion\"), it wasn't fair to say that it was his fault either. There were rumblings of another election when it happened, and if there was one word you didn't want to encounter on the doorsteps it was the word \"abortion.\"\n\nAfterward, they went for marriage counseling, attending a number of tortuous hour-long sessions in a windowless room at the top of a Georgian building that housed an Indian restaurant in its basement\u2014forever afterward Liam would associate this phase of his marriage with the smell of tikka masala. The therapist Acushla had chosen was a middle-aged woman with undyed hair. She always wore the same smock top and the same fat-person jeans. The same pair of lace-up leather sneakers. As soon as Liam saw her, he knew he didn't stand a chance.\n\n\"Your wife,\" she said to him, using the word as a stick to beat him with. \"Your wife\u2014and I'm using her words, not mine\u2014feels that her needs are being sacrificed on the altar of your political career.\"\n\nLiam nearly choked with indignation when she said that. He crossed and uncrossed his legs in an attempt to disguise his impatience. The therapist was watching his every move with a knowing look in her eyes, as if she knew exactly what he was thinking. As if she knew exactly what he was going to say before he even opened his mouth.\n\n\"What my wife fails to understand,\" he said, looking unblinkingly at the therapist as he tried to ignore the sound of Acushla's sobbing, \"what she seems determined not to understand, is that I am not a free agent. I'm a member of a government that has been elected by the people to do a job.\" (He was Minister for Defense at the time, a fact he assumed the therapist was well aware of.) \"I have a most sacred job to do, and while I understand that Acushla and I have had our personal difficulties recently, I am nonetheless obliged to rise above them and look at the bigger picture.\"\n\nThe therapist dipped her head a little and rested her chin on her knuckles, without ever taking her eyes off Liam. Not since he was seven, and he and Mick had been called into the local priest's office to answer for the theft of some candles from the shrine in the church (which of course Mick was guilty of), not since then had Liam had the sense that someone could see right through him, right through to the wrinkled little walnut of guilt at the center of him, a guilt he had no sense of ever having warranted. How to explain to this woman the injustices that had assailed him his whole life?\n\n\"I'm just doing my best here,\" he said, appealing to her for some sympathy. But he should have known better.\n\n\"Has it ever occurred to you that you might be abdicating responsibility for the personal, and using your political duties as an excuse? It sounds to me like your public persona provides you with a pretext to distance yourself from what's happening at home.\"\n\n\"Ah, now,\" he said, taking ahold of the armrests of his chair and raising himself up tall. \"I'm not going to sit here and listen to you filling my wife's head with those kinds of ideas. I won't have you handing her ammunition to use against me. I won't stand for it.\"\n\nThe therapist looked up at him with a vicious glint in her eyes.\n\n\"Oh, really?\" she said. \"You and whose army?\"\n\nThey were all against him.\n\nThat's how it seemed to Liam now. Starting with his own mother, who had always sided with Mick. His twin brother, who had always delighted in putting one over on him. Even his wife never once took his side in anything. It seemed to Liam that the whole world was against him, and through no fault of his own.\n\nHe was always a good son. A good brother. A good husband. A good public representative, but still and all the voters had deserted him. After twenty-five years treading the footpaths of their bloody constituency, trampling in their dog shit and picking up their discarded chips bags, they had cast him out. A quarter of a century, during which time there wasn't a single night of the week but he was attending the removal of some constituent who had died, or a residents' association meeting. Not a Saturday morning but he was at a school fair, his arms full of cling-filmed banana bread and freezer-bagged fairy cakes, and the ear chewed off him about the need for a new classroom, or an extra resource teacher. After twenty-five years of this slavish community service they had dumped him, and for what?\n\nAs Liam drove back past the power station, past the sewage works and the scrap metal yard and the abandoned shipping containers, he began to talk to the radio, mounting a calmly reasoned defense of his record in government; it was a defense he had rolled out a hundred times in the past few years in interviews with print and broadcast media, but he continued to pursue it, because in his mind every word of it was true.\n\n\"We brought about the greatest period of prosperity this country has ever known,\" he said, cocking his head to one side as he spoke in his most patient and reasonable voice. \"We tripled child benefit. We banned smoking in public places. We brought peace to the island.\"\n\n\"Well that's all very well,\" the interviewer would say. \"But you also brought the country to ruin. You beggared the banks. You sold our sovereignty down the river. Generations to come will end up having to pay for the mess you made of things.\"\n\n\"No, S\u00e9an,\" said Liam, furrowing his brow as he spoke to the windshield. \"You see, that's where you're wrong. Yes, we suffered an economic crisis, yes, the effects of it have been the cause of much hardship for a great number of households, but the Irish people are nothing if not fair, and it's simply not fair to place the blame at the door of one party. What happened was not the fault of any one government. What happened here was the result of a global economic crisis...\"\n\nSo engrossed was Liam in the argument he was making, so determined was he to finally convince his imaginary audience of the reasonableness of what he was saying, that he failed to observe the yield sign at the approach to the roundabout. He failed to check the traffic coming from the right, and sailed straight into the path of a Louth-registered BMW. The BMW swerved to avoid him, letting out an angry beep. Heel of the hand on the wheel, Liam beeped back at him, three long defensive wails. As he drove on, eyeing the BMW driver warily in his rearview mirror while at the same time checking ahead of him in case a Garda had witnessed the incident, it seemed to him that he didn't have a friend in the world.\n\nIt was only when he stopped at the traffic lights on the Beach Road and indicated to turn left for home that he thought of one last port of call. Indicating right, he pulled on the wheel in preparation for a last-minute change of lane.\n\n\"Dad,\" said Connie, when she answered the door.\n\nShe was wearing dark glasses and her face was pinched and pale, her lips set in a grim straight line. Liam's hopes of a fair hearing plummeted at the sight of her.\n\nShe took a step back, pulling the door in on herself. The hallway was so small that she had to press back against the coatrack to let him through. A huge flower arrangement was balanced precariously on a side table at the bottom of the stairs; the vase wobbled precariously as Liam brushed by it and Connie went to steady it.\n\n\"Nice flowers,\" he said. And as a joke, \"What did he do?\"\n\n\"Don't go there,\" she said, in an ominous voice.\n\nLiam ducked his head to pass into the living area, plastic toys crunching under his shoes as he went.\n\n\"Boys,\" said Connie. \"Are you not going to say hello to your grandfather?\"\n\nThe boys were playing on the floor behind the couch, blankets and quilts draped over the dining chairs to form a den. One by one they emerged on their hands and knees.\n\n\"Hiya, lads,\" said Liam. He bent down from the waist to greet them, shaking hands with them as if he was on the campaign trail. They stared up at him, not quite sure what to make of him. He had his hands in the pockets of his sports jacket, and nervously he jangled the coins that were in there. The boys waited to see if this was a prelude to a gift. A conjuror's trick that would end in him producing a coin from his pocket, or better still a chocolate bar. Once they realized it wasn't going to happen, they ducked back into their den.\n\n\"Will you have tea?\" asked Connie, going to put the kettle on without waiting for an answer.\n\n\"Sure,\" he said, and he followed her into the kitchen, his hands still in his pockets. With the chairs all in use for the den, there was nowhere for him to sit. He paced down as far as the back wall and turned round.\n\n\"It's a bit cramped for you all here, isn't it?\"\n\nConnie stared at him with a puzzled look on her face.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nShe had pushed her sunglasses back on her head and Liam could see that her eyes were washed-out-looking. He found himself wondering had she been crying, and if so why.\n\n\"You must be very tight for space. The four of you.\"\n\nConnie shrugged.\n\n\"People raised ten kids in these houses. I think we can manage with two.\"\n\nHe turned to peer out into the backyard, where a pair of garden chairs occupied the small patio area, leaving barely enough room for the boys' trikes and scooters.\n\n\"It would be nice for the lads to have a garden,\" he said, craning his head up to search out the sky.\n\n\"We do have a garden.\" She was lining a pair of mugs up on the kitchen counter, and dropping tea bags into them. \"It's small, but it's still a garden.\"\n\nLooking out the window, Liam saw where Connie had installed creepers along the side fences. She'd planted shrubs and a maple tree, with a bird feeder hanging from its branches.\n\n\"I reckon the market might be bottoming out,\" he said, turning away from the window. \"It mightn't be the worst time for you to think about trading up.\"\n\n\"Hang on,\" said Connie, standing in the middle of the kitchen with a milk carton in her hand and an expression of disbelief on her face. \"Is that what you came here to talk to me about?\"\n\nHe paused, not sure what to say.\n\n\"You're unbelievable.\"\n\nThe way she looked at him, they might as well have been strangers.\n\n\"Mum's left you. She's camped out in Grandmother's house, doing back-to-back interviews about the abortion you somehow neglected to tell anyone about. The nation's up in arms at the thought of your blatant hypocrisy, and you're standing here talking to me about property prices. Are you completely mad?\"\n\nListening to her, it did seem to Liam that he wasn't handling this particularly well.\n\n\"I think I'm in shock. I wasn't expecting any of this, Connie. I had no idea it was coming. Your mother didn't think to warn me about it.\"\n\n\"You still don't get it, do you?\"\n\nShe put the milk carton down on the kitchen counter and took a step toward him. Her face was all screwed up as she spoke, as if she'd been sucking a lemon.\n\n\"It's always someone else's fault, isn't it? That's the thing with you. Everything that happens is someone else's fault.\"\n\n\"Ah, now\u2014\" he started to say, but Connie wouldn't allow him to speak.\n\n\"I don't want to hear it,\" she said, throwing her hands up in the air. \"I've no interest in hearing it. Don't you see? There's nothing you can say that will make it okay.\"\n\nLiam stared at her, struggling to understand what she was saying, this daughter of his who had once been such a great little friend to him. When did Connie stop being his friend? he wondered. It seemed to him that everything had changed between them once she started having babies.\n\n\"Come on, Connie. Don't you go turning against me now. You and me were always such great pals.\"\n\nConnie shuddered, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again he could see that she was full of tears, her mouth open like a bird so she could breathe.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said sadly, nodding her head and wiping her nose with the back of her hand. \"We were great pals. But I'm not taking sides with you against my mother anymore. I can't do it.\"\n\n\"So everyone's against me.\"\n\n\"It's not that everyone's against you,\" said Connie, and there was a whistle of urgency in her voice now, like the sound the old kettle used to make on the Aga in Liam's mother's kitchen when it was gone past the boil. \"It's just that you're in the wrong and you won't admit it. If you could only acknowledge it, then maybe there might be some hope for you.\"\n\nShe turned away from him and placed her hands on the kitchen counter, letting her head hang down on to her chest, like an athlete resting after a long run. Their two mugs of tea sat untouched on the counter beside her. Liam stood for a long time and watched her, his head slowly churning all the things she'd said.\n\n\"So what should I do?\" he asked her at last.\n\n\"What should you do?\" she repeated, turning her face to look at him.\n\nHe nodded, and she stared at him.\n\n\"I don't think I've ever heard you ask anyone for advice before.\"\n\nAnd come to think of it, Liam hadn't either\u2014he couldn't remember ever seeking anything other than professional advice, in the sanctity of a consulting room.\n\n\"Would you believe me when I tell you I'm asking for it now?\"\n\nConnie paused, and it seemed to him that she was weighing up whether to help him or not.\n\n\"One word. That's all I have for you.\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\n\"You might want to try saying you're sorry. Say it like you mean it. If you say it often enough, people might even start to believe you.\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" she repeated as she pushed him out the front door. With the flat of her hand on his back, she pounded him a few times with what could almost have passed for affection.\n\nSo, here he is again outside Acushla's mother's house.\n\nHe's standing underneath the acacia tree in the front garden, where he spent many a night when he was courting her, and the only thing that's missing is the cigarette. He finds himself wishing he never gave them up.\n\nHe bends to pick a stone up from the gravel, tossing it against the windowpane, but the noise it makes is hardly audible and there's no response. He takes another stone, tossing it harder this time, but this one bounces off the wooden window frame. The third stone he throws strikes the center of the bottom pane, shattering it instantly.\n\n\"Oh, shit!\" Liam doubles up, chest to his knees with his hands clutching his head as two startled faces appear in the top half of the window.\n\n\"Oh, shit,\" he says with a lurch of despair, as he comes to terms with the fact that things are still getting worse instead of better.\n\n\"Sorry,\" he calls out as the front door opens and Acushla and her mother appear in the doorway. Wearing long nightdresses and backlit by the bright hall, they have the appearance of two welcoming saints with the light of heaven shining behind them. Liam experiences a strange sensation of weightlessness, as if he has died and is about to enter the afterlife.\n\n\"I'm really, really sorry,\" he says, taking the steps two at a time so that before he knows it he is standing before them. Acushla's expression is stony but Liam has the impression that Deirdre is trying to suppress a smile.\n\n\"Can I come in?\" he asks, appealing to his mother-in-law rather than his wife.\n\n\"I suppose you had better,\" says Deirdre with great gravitas, pulling on the heavy old door to admit him. Acushla turns without so much as a glance at him and leads the way down the back stairs to the kitchen. Deirdre rolls her eyes and follows her daughter down, leaving Liam to bring up the rear. Past the empty spaces on the walls, spaces Deirdre has preserved for thirty years so that everyone can see where her husband removed those paintings that were his on the day he left her. \"Excuse the cold,\" she likes to tell her visitors, \"but it's not worth the cost of heating the whole house for me _alone_.\" (Whereas Acushla's father's flat is always as warm as the toast he likes to burn and scrape before he eats it.)\n\n\"Tell her I'm sorry,\" says Liam, addressing himself to Deirdre rather than Acushla.\n\nAcushla won't even look at him, so Deirdre has agreed to act as a conduit between them. With the three of them sitting round the large table, the low-hanging light casting shadows on their faces from above, the scene has all the appearance of a seance, except that the communion is between the living rather than the dead.\n\n\"Tell her I'll do anything to get her back. Anything she wants, I'll do it.\"\n\nDeirdre repeats this to her daughter and Acushla listens, her eyes resting with great composure on her mother's face. Liam can see that she's thinking about it.\n\n\"You heard him,\" says Deirdre. \"He says he'll do anything.\"\n\n\"Tell him I only have one condition,\" says Acushla, after a pause.\n\n\"No problem,\" he says straight away, addressing his wife's impassive profile.\n\nHe turns to Deirdre. \"Whatever it is, tell her I'll do it.\"\n\nDeirdre waits, alert as a croupier, for Acushla to show her hand.\n\n\"I want him to give up his place at the head of the table.\"\n\nWith the crown of her head high and proud, and her hands still in her lap, she enunciates every word with gentle precision. \"Every day for the rest of his life, I want him to sit across from me at the table.\"\n\nDeirdre blinks at her as if to say, _What?_ Is that all you're going to ask for?\n\n\"That's all I want,\" says Acushla, and she turns her head slowly to face Liam. Liam looks her in the eyes, and in them he sees something that he never knew was there. All these years, and never did he have the faintest inkling that Acushla had in her the stuff of political genius.\n\n\"You're on,\" he says, nodding slowly and looking at her with a new respect.\n\nThere were dozens of screaming teens gathered outside TV reception when they arrived.\n\n\"One Direction are on after you,\" explained the young woman with the clipboard who emerged to greet them. She led them up the stairs and ushered them into the green room, offering them tea or coffee, which they both declined. She guided them toward a sofa, waiting for them to sit down before she spun away again. Never had Liam been so aware of them as a couple as he was now, sitting nervously upright on the unyielding sofa like a pair of immigrants; all they had with them was their story.\n\n\"Liam,\" said the producer in greeting, \"Acushla, thanks very much for coming in to us.\"\n\n\"Thanks for having us,\" said Acushla, her face tilted upward in a practiced smile.\n\n\"Now,\" said the producer, his head spinning round as he looked for the young woman with the clipboard. \"We need to get Liam and Acushla down to makeup.\"\n\nThe way he said it, Liam had the feeling that he was talking in code. The young woman came and led them away down breeze-block corridors, up bare concrete stairwells and down more concrete stairwells until they arrived in the makeup department. They were put sitting side by side facing a huge mirror, the two of them draped in hairdresser's capes.\n\n\"You've gorgeous skin,\" said the woman who was doing Acushla's makeup. \"If only everyone had your skin, my job would be a lot easier.\"\n\nLiam could see that Acushla was pleased. She was shining with all the attention she was receiving. A divine grace settling over her like a bridal veil, he was reminded of the day he married her. He remembered how she had appeared in the doorway of the church on her father's arm. With her head bare and her golden hair adorned only by a single white camellia, she made her way down the aisle with glorious ease, her head bowed with pleasure under the weight of all the admiring attention. Suddenly Liam felt very sad at his failure down the years to give Acushla the attention she needed. It seemed to him now that it would have cost him nothing to give her a bit of attention.\n\n\"Nervous?\" he asked her, talking through the mirror.\n\n\"No,\" she said, with a smile. And considering this was her first time on TV, her level of calm was incomprehensible to him. He still developed a pit of fear in his stomach every time he prepared to go on air. Just as bad now, if not worse than the first time, despite all the media training he'd had over the years.\n\n\"If you're going to apologize, the trick is to do it properly,\" said the communications strategist he had hired to prepare him for this interview. \"No excuses, no whining. Just say that you were wrong, that you regret the way you handled it, and that you wish you'd done it differently.\"\n\nLiam was still repeating those instructions to himself when the host popped his head in to makeup to greet them.\n\n\"Liam,\" he said, pumping Liam's hand up and down. \"Good to see you.\"\n\n\"So brave of you,\" he said to Acushla, leaning down to bump his freshly made-up cheek against hers. \"Don't worry, I'll be gentle with you.\" And with a slow wink he was gone.\n\nAs Liam and Acushla waited hand in hand in the wings (make sure you walk onstage holding hands, the communications strategist had said), their host was straightening his tie and firing a quip into the waiting studio audience to warm them up. The newsreader on the nine o'clock news was wrapping up the bulletin with one late-breaking headline. Liam could see her face on the backstage monitor, he could see her lips moving and the measured movements of her head, but the volume on the monitor was turned off so he couldn't hear what it was that she was saying.\n\n\"Two minutes to air,\" said someone as the ads started rolling. Liam took a deep breath and squeezed Acushla's hand tighter while they waited for their cue.\n\n**Breaking news...** Three Irish human-rights activists are to be deported from Israel. Tarquin Kilpedder (73), Emer Barry (37) and Nora MacEntee Collins (28) were arrested in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday morning and taken to Givon Prison in the Israeli city of Ramla, where they've been held ever since. The three activists were in the area as volunteers with an international organization that provides solidarity to fishermen and farmers in Gaza.\n\n# Nora\n\nThe first thing Nora saw when the electric doors slid back was her parents, standing side by side at the welcome rail, like something that happens to you in a dream, when people from different parts of your life converge on you without explanation\u2014you might find your dentist and your first boyfriend together in your mother's kitchen, or your grandmother and your yoga teacher sitting in the front seat of a car while you sit in the back. Her brain gave a lurch as she tried to construct a narrative that would explain their presence here together. Her mother stepped out from behind the railing, bizarrely colorless with her undyed hair. She looked like an unpainted plaster model of herself.\n\n\"Nora,\" she said, looking down at Nora's feet. \"What in God's name happened to your shoes?\"\n\nThree days in an Israeli jail and the only thing her mother was worried about was her shoes. Nora looked down and saw the unpainted toenails, the smear of toe jam in the curve between each toe. The patches of raw skin where her feet had repeatedly burned and peeled while she was working in the fields.\n\n\"They never gave them back to me,\" she said, watching for her mother's reaction. \"They knew we'd look like nutters without our shoes.\"\n\n\"Well,\" said her mum, coming forward to hug her. Nora expected to be released from the hug immediately, but instead her mother hung on to her. For what seemed a very long time she did not let her go, and Nora was forced to settle into the hug. With her cheek lying against her mother's soft cashmere shoulder, and her eyes open on to the bright colors of the juice bar at the arrivals gate, she had a sense of what it must have been like to be a baby.\n\n\"It's good to have you home,\" said her mum, and Nora could have sworn that she had tears in her eyes.\n\n\"Nora,\" said her dad, coming forward to lift the backpack off her shoulder. He gave her an awkward squeeze, the backpack bumping against the both of them. \"Is that all the luggage you've got?\"\n\nA white light assaulted her, and a fraction of a second later there was the sound of a camera shutter. Her dad whirled round with the deep swing of a shot-putter, to confront the photographers.\n\n\"Now, lads,\" he said, putting up a stop hand.\n\nNora's mum put an arm around her and went to bundle her past the cameras.\n\n\"Wait a minute,\" said Nora, slipping out from under her arm. \"I haven't done anything wrong.\"\n\nShe turned toward the snappers, peeling off her sweater as she did so, and veterans of the media though they were, neither of her parents had the presence of mind to step out of the shot. The next day the papers would all publish different variations of the same photograph. A picture of Nora standing proud in the arrivals hall at Dublin airport, wearing a Free Gaza T-shirt, with her parents lurking behind her like common criminals.\n\nThe house was smaller than she remembered it, and more cluttered. The smell inside impossible to conjure up until you stepped back into it, but once you did, it was hard to imagine how you could ever have forgotten it. A smell of lingering peat dust and her mother's old-rose bath oil, with a base note of cheese that's been left for too long in the fridge.\n\nNora stood in the hall. Hemmed in between the bulging coatrack and the Mrs. Delany prints on the wall, she felt as if she was caught between two worlds. The world she was about to enter seemed unreal to her, or maybe she was unreal to it. A distance between them, like an encounter with a friend you haven't seen for a long time. She was reluctant to move any deeper into the house.\n\nShe was aware of a terrible sense of loss, but what it was that had been lost she could not have said. She felt as if she had left her body behind her in that hot little cell in Givon Prison. The memory of the dead air was still on her skin, the struggle to breathe in enough oxygen. \"Breathe shallow,\" Emer had said to her. \"Try to breathe shallow.\" For three days she and Emer had lain bunk over bunk, silent sometimes and sometimes talking, banging on the steel door of the cell for water, shouting out for Tarquin and waiting to hear Tarquin shout back. She could still hear the sound of his jaunty old voice, heard through the walls like a snatch of dialogue from an opera, in all its exaggerated bravado. Nora missed Tarquin already. She missed Emer too, and the simple meals they had been served, on blue plastic trays, of rice and cucumber and tomato. (Nora was a vegetarian and could not eat the chicken her captors offered her.) She missed her prison cell, she realized with surprise. While she was there, she had thought of nothing but the desire to get out. Now, given the choice, she would almost have gone back.\n\nThere were five plump silver fish lined up on a chopping board on the kitchen counter. Five dead eyes staring up at the kitchen ceiling. The presence of five raw fish in her mother's kitchen was only slightly more bizarre than the presence of Nora's father, a presence that had still only partially been explained.\n\n\" _Celebrity MasterChef_ ,\" said Nora again, not sure she had understood him correctly.\n\nShe was looking suspiciously at the fish.\n\n\"What are they?\"\n\n\"Sea bass. According to the fella in the fish shop, they're a bugger to bone.\"\n\nWith a tea towel slung over his shoulder and a grubby apron strung under the overhang of his belly, he was brandishing a long, thin filleting knife.\n\n\"The skills test,\" he said, eyeing the fish dolefully. \"That's the thing I'm most scared of. You wouldn't know what they'd throw at you.\"\n\n\"Will you've tea, Mick?\" asked her mum. She was taking china cups out of a cupboard underneath the counter and setting them on the table.\n\n\"Pour it out for me,\" he said, \"and I'll drink it while I'm doing this.\"\n\nNora was struck by the normality of their conversation. The way they spoke to each other was entirely normal; that was what was so weird about it.\n\nShe looked around the kitchen and saw all the familiar things on the walls\u2014the Edward Hopper print her mother had bought in MoMA, the Clinton\/Gore election poster she'd brought back from Washington, with a Hillary flyer wedged in between the glass and the frame. The china cups they were drinking from were part of the set Alma had been given as a bride\u2014as a child, Nora had broken one of them and hidden it in the bin rather than confess; as far as she knew, her mother had never noticed.\n\nNora sipped at her tea. Jet lag swirling around her, she still had the noise of the plane's engines in her ears. The chill of its air-conditioning system was still in her, and the smell of airline meals heating in the galley. A yearning for home that had not been satisfied by her return.\n\n\"Tell me about Acushla,\" she said, in an effort to anchor herself. Her voice sounded a false note, and she hardly recognized it.\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" said her mother. \"You missed all that.\"\n\nThere was something different about her mother but Nora couldn't put her finger on it. Something strangely rigid in her demeanor. Even the way she was sitting, perched like a schoolgirl with her hands tucked under her thighs, it was not like her.\n\n\"I've just been reading about it on the plane.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said her father, lifting a fish spine by the tail and flicking it into the bin. \"I'm afraid she's usurped my place as the country's media darling.\"\n\n\"She's shown great courage,\" said Nora's mum solemnly, and Nora looked at her closely, not sure if she was being sarcastic or not.\n\n\"Unbelievable,\" said Nora, shaking her head.\n\nFor years Nora had despaired of her family's cynicism. For years she had tried to stir them to action, urging them to join her campaign against the use of Shannon airport by the U.S. military. (\"And watch all the American multinationals pull out of Ireland?\" said her father.) She had tried to sign them up to petitions in support of Falun Gong. (\"I would,\" said her grandfather, \"but I'd be afraid it might prevent me getting a visa for China.\") To join a vigil for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi. (\"How does she always manage to look so _elegant_?\" said Acushla.) That her meek and pampered aunt should become the figurehead of a protest movement, this seemed to Nora a most unlikely turn of events.\n\n\"How's Liam?\" she asked.\n\n\"Oh, he's trotting around after her like a wee lamb,\" said her father, with no attempt to disguise his pleasure. \"She has him by the bollocks, and she knows it. Now,\" he said, straightening up and looking at the clock. \"When would you ladies like to eat?\"\n\n\"Why don't you have a bath?\" said Nora's mum. \"I'll run you a nice hot bath and then we'll all sit down to dinner.\"\n\nUnder cover of the sound of gushing water, Nora slipped up to her old bedroom and closed the door quietly behind her. Like a guest in a stranger's house, she was desperate for a moment on her own. She sat down on her bed, pulling her knees up to her chest and resting her chin on them. Taking stock of her belongings, she searched for a pattern that would allow her to stitch herself back together again. The dream catcher in the window. The patchwork quilt on the bed. The snow globes she had collected as a child as mementoes of her parents' travels. The inspirational verses she had copied out and pinned on to her bulletin board. _Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path, and leave a trail_ (Ralph Waldo Emerson). _We must not fight injustice, we must make it invisible_ (Gandhi). Above her desk there was a framed portrait she had painted of herself in junior school, with oversized round eyes in a big round head. As she looked at it now, it seemed to her that she had captured something of herself in that self-portrait, an aloneness that she had not been aware of at the time.\n\nNora was fourteen when her parents split up, and at first she didn't notice that anything was wrong, because she was so used to her dad being away. It was the height of the peace process and her dad was Junior Minister at the Department of Foreign Affairs, so he spent more time in Belfast than he did at home. (\"Up there riding anything in a skirt,\" her mother told her later, and all Nora could think was, What kind of a person tells her daughter that?) Nora used to see her dad every night on TV. Walking into Stormont buildings, walking out of Stormont buildings. Standing outside Stormont buildings with a ragbag of other politicians and officials. To Nora they had the look of a band of puppets about them. Some muppetry quality in the strange assortment of shapes and sizes, all clumped together. Nora's dad was easy to pick out because he stood head and shoulders above everyone else.\n\nThe peace talks regularly went through the night, and often they went through the weekend, so it was no surprise to anyone if Nora's dad wasn't home much. But even after the peace process had ended, after the historic conclusion, for which the nuns led tentative prayers of thanks at Nora's school assembly\u2014after George Mitchell had flown home to New York and Tony Blair had gone triumphantly back to London, and the hotel rooms of Belfast had emptied themselves of reporters and camera crews, and the news bulletins had gone back to reporting other things that were happening in other places\u2014even then there was no sign of Nora's dad. It was only when she went through his wardrobe and discovered that his clothes were gone, only then did Nora figure out that he wasn't coming back. The final confirmation came not from either of her parents, but from a tabloid newspaper that Nora caught sight of one day in the Spar. She was on her way home from school and she had stopped to treat herself to a bag of popcorn with some coins she had found in her pocket when her parents' wedding photo caught her eye, looking out at her from the front page of one of the papers. \"The Good Friday Disagreement\" the paper had dubbed the split.\n\nNobody thought to tell Nora. There was never a day when her parents sat her down and explained to her what was happening (\"We both still love you... It's not your fault\"). At no point did either of them outline a plan to her (\"You'll spend weekdays with your mother and weekends with your father\"), let alone ask her how she felt about it. She was just another thing to be divided between them, at their convenience.\n\nAs Nora lingered in the slowly cooling bath her mother had run for her, with the slither of rose oil on her limbs and a scented steam misting up the windows and mirrors, she felt as if nothing had changed. Her parents had not asked her permission before they broke up her family; it seemed equally unfair to her now that they had not asked her permission before putting it back together again.\n\nHer mother's voice trilled up the stairs calling her down to dinner and Nora closed her eyes. She slid her bum along the oily base of the bath, pushing her knees into a deep bend. She arched her spine and craned her neck backward, allowing her head to sink down below the surface, where no further sounds could reach her. Just the sound of her own breath, amplified by the water and eerily alien.\n\n\"Habeas corpus,\" said her father, continuing a conversation that had begun in the car. \"I think we definitely have them on habeas corpus.\"\n\nHe was hunched over the kitchen counter, putting the finishing touches to his potato dauphinoise. Blowtorch in hand, he was carefully scorching the scales of scalloped potato that formed the surface.\n\n\"I still haven't worked out if you're pulling my leg,\" said Nora, turning to her mother for help.\n\n\"Oh, it's no joke,\" said her mum, looking up for a moment from setting the table.\n\n\"Were you even informed as to what they were charging you with?\" asked Nora's father. Poised on his toes like a jewel thief, he settled a perfect square of creamy caramelized potato into the center of each plate.\n\n\"You're missing the point,\" said Nora as she watched him.\n\nWith great care he leaned a naked white fillet of fish up against each potato square. Armed with a squidgy plastic bottle, he began to pipe small blisters of red sauce around the edges of the plates, dropping a sprinkling of crispy bacon crumbs on top of each blister.\n\n\"No bacon for me,\" said Nora, holding up her hand to stop him, but she was too late. She had not eaten meat since she was fourteen, but her dad seemed incapable of retaining this simple fact about her. The last time she visited him in Brussels, he suggested they go out for a steak.\n\n\"Okay,\" he said, throwing his hands up to beat an imaginary clock. \"That's it.\"\n\nBefore serving up the plates, he insisted on photographing them from every angle, muttering to himself as he went.\n\n\"They're going to get me on the presentation. I still haven't nailed it on the presentation.\"\n\nNora carried the first two plates over to the table and he followed with the last one.\n\n\"Well,\" he said, raising his glass of wine as he fell into his chair. His forehead shining with sweat, his face flushed from his efforts. \"To the two most important women in my life; it's good to have us all round the same table again.\"\n\nNora looked across nervously at her mother, expecting a snide remark, but instead her mum smiled, her eyes moving from Nora's dad to Nora before settling back on him. And again Nora saw something curiously unsure in her demeanor, something she had never seen in her before.\n\n\"They refused to allow you to make a phone call,\" her dad was saying. \"That's another grounds for complaint.\"\n\n\"You're missing the point,\" said Nora again, turning to face him. \"This isn't about me. This is about the people of Gaza. They're the ones who are being denied their rights, on a daily basis. They're the ones who are living in an open prison. That's the thing that matters here, not what happened to me.\"\n\nHow many times had they had this conversation? Or another one just like it. It was a well-worn path they liked to tramp along together.\n\n\"It's _wrong_ , what's happening in Gaza.\" She put her fork down and fixed her eyes on her father.\n\nHe looked at her as if he could barely contain his amusement.\n\n\"You agree with me,\" she said. \"I know you do! When it comes down to it, you believe in all the same things I do. But you keep coming up with excuses not to do anything about it.\"\n\n\"You're right,\" he said, with a maddening smirk, and she was reminded of the way he used to tickle her when she was a child. On weekend mornings, when she came into their bed in her pajamas, he used to catch her by the legs and tickle the soles of her feet. The more she wriggled and squealed, the harder he tickled her; he wouldn't give up until she begged for mercy.\n\n\"I'll tell you what,\" he said, serious all of a sudden. \"Once I've been crowned _Celebrity MasterChef Ireland_ , I might consider lending my support to one of your crusades. I could go back to Gaza with you, we could do a Gaza version of _I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here_.\"\n\nNora stared at him, not sure whether to laugh or cry.\n\n\"Ah, Nora,\" he said, choking on his own suppressed laughter. \"I'm sorry, I just get such a kick out of winding you up...\"\n\n\"I can't deal with him,\" said Nora, turning to her mother for support. \"How can you deal with a person who refuses to take anything seriously?\"\n\nHer mother seemed not to have been following the conversation. She was holding her fork with her left hand and her right hand was lying limp on the table, curled into a loose fist.\n\n\"Mum,\" said Nora. \"What happened to your _fingers_?\"\n\n\"I can't believe you didn't tell me.\"\n\nThey had moved into the living room after dinner, taking their wineglasses with them. The evening was too warm for a fire, warm enough even for Nora and her mother to remain bare-shouldered and barefooted. The sash window was open as far as it would go, a deepening blue sky outside. The stadium had absorbed all the glory of the summer night into its fish-scale skin.\n\nNora and her mother were curled up in opposite corners of the huge three-seater couch. Nora's dad was in the kitchen, practicing how to debone a chicken. (\"Is there no cleaver in this house?\" he had asked, before realizing his mistake.) Nora closed her eyes, unable to shake off the image of a huge square blade. She hugged one of the couch cushions to her chest so as to still her shuddering.\n\n\"I can't believe I didn't _notice_.\"\n\nNow that she had noticed, it was impossible to take her eyes off them. Those poor maimed fingers.\n\n\"Why didn't you tell me?\" she asked quietly, even though she knew the answer. Maybe if she had been in the habit of getting in touch more often, maybe then she would have been told.\n\nHer mother's eyelids fluttered momentarily, untold clouds passing behind them as she let the question go unanswered.\n\nNora sighed from deep down in her chest as it dawned on her that everything that had passed between them over the years had been leading to this moment. Every instance of neglect on the part of the mother (deliberate or accidental, it didn't make a difference, not at the time). Every act of revenge on the part of the daughter (noticed or unnoticed by her mother). Every step they took away from each other had in fact been bringing them closer to this. A moment that was always going to come. Perhaps not necessarily in this room, on this couch\u2014it could just as easily have been in a hospital ward with one or the other of them coming round to consciousness again after a road accident. It could have been at a funeral, the two of them standing over someone's grave. It could have played out in a hospital mortuary, with one of them laid out on the slab\u2014but it was always going to come. Nora experienced a great wave of relief that it had not come too late, this moment of reckoning.\n\n\"I would have come back. If I'd known, I would have come back.\"\n\n\"I know. That's why I couldn't tell you.\"\n\nHer mother's stockinged feet were knuckled up under Nora's bum, her mother's toes wriggling endlessly. Nora would have liked to change her position, to get away from the toes, but she did not want to appear to shy away from this awkward intimacy.\n\n\"It must have been terrifying,\" she said, treading oh-so-gently. She was trying to feel her way into the story, like someone venturing into a dark room, afraid of knocking something over.\n\nHer mother frowned the question away.\n\n\"I didn't think they were going to hurt me. I thought they'd just take whatever they could find and go. It never occurred to me that they would be prepared to hurt me.\"\n\nNora squeezed her eyes half shut and covered her mouth with her hand, unable to contain the images she was seeing in her mind.\n\n\"I can't bear to think about it. It's horrific.\"\n\nHer mother answered her in a matter-of-fact voice.\n\n\"These things happen to people,\" she said. \"And we are people.\"\n\n\"Oh, Mum,\" said Nora, and the way she said it, it sounded like she was pleading with her. Tears in her eyes, she didn't trust her voice to speak, so instead she reached out for her mother's hand. Cradling it between her own, she began to stroke it very gently, taking care not to avoid touching the poor wounded fingers.\n\nThere was a question Nora wanted to ask, but she didn't know whether to voice it or not.\n\n\"Mum,\" she said carefully. \"The people who did this to you. Did they catch them?\"\n\nHer mum reached out for her glass of wine.\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" she said, and her voice had changed. The tone of it was more brittle now, and more brusque. \"Yes, they've charged one of them. But the trial won't be until next year. He's been released on bail in the meantime. He's probably out there right now, breaking into someone else's house.\"\n\n\"Will you have to give evidence?\" asked Nora, as her father appeared in the doorway, his apron still on and smeared now with chicken guts. He placed the palm of his hand on the crown of her mother's head. Resting it there with great solemnity, as a priest might when giving a blessing.\n\n\"I thought we said we'd cross that bridge when we came to it?\"\n\nNora's mother stretched her neck back so that she was gazing up at him, and the look she gave him was one of such trust and dependence that Nora couldn't help but be touched.\n\n\"It's good to have you home,\" he said to Nora, using the word without a hint of self-consciousness. She thought of what she would have given over the years for the three of them to be together here like this, in quiet harmony. Now that it was happening, it was hard to know what to make of it.\n\nOn her way up to bed, Nora stopped to peek into her mother's bedroom and saw, with one slow sweep, her father's shoes under an armchair, one of his shirts hanging off the curtain rail, and a copy of _The Economist_ on what used to be the unoccupied side of the bed.\n\nAs a teenager, Nora was a spy. A dedicated listener at doors. A rifler of drawers. She always made it her business to know what man her mother was seeing. What woman her father was sleeping with. In her travels between her parents' separate residences, she was ever alert to the appearance of a new toothbrush beside the sink in her mother's house, or a man's sock behind the bedroom door. She took note of any face creams she found in her father's bathroom, or herb teas in his cupboards, using every detail to construct a picture a criminal profiler would have been proud of. And while she never stopped to consider the ethics of what she was doing while her parents were philandering with other people, now that it was the two of them together, she had an acute awareness of their privacy, and a desire not to violate it.\n\nWaking up on her first morning home, she lay in bed and listened as her father pottered about downstairs. She heard the stairs creaking as he carried a tray upstairs for her mother. She heard the springs groan as he climbed back into bed beside her. The sound of their voices through the wall; she couldn't make out what it was they were saying, just the sweet trickle of their conversation, like a nearby stream. Listening to it made her feel lonely all over again.\n\n\"Well,\" her father said, when finally she came downstairs. \"The dead have arisen.\"\n\nHe was standing at the cooker stirring a pot of custard for his ice cream. Barefoot and unshaven, he was wearing the peony-print kimono Nora had given her mum for her fiftieth birthday. When he turned toward her, Nora saw that the kimono was unbelted and hanging open on to a T-shirt and a flabby pair of boxer shorts. She was assailed by a mental image of her father's penis under there, sticky with sex.\n\n\"Here,\" he said, holding out a spoon to her. \"Taste this and tell me what you think. I've infused it with rosemary.\"\n\nNora turned her face away in disgust.\n\n\"There's no doubt about it,\" she told Connie. \"They're definitely sleeping together.\"\n\nShe had arrived at her cousin's door without warning. Walking across the bridge in the cool of the morning, she had skipped down the short flight of steps to the green area in front of Connie's house. A terrace of tiny red-brick houses, like something you might see in an English soap opera; every evening on the dot of half seven the _Coronation Street_ signature tune rang out down the row, followed by the _EastEnders_ sig at eight.\n\nNora peered through the front window, expecting to see the boys tumbling toward the door, but all she saw was Connie coming down the stairs. Long legs first, then a sage-green baby-doll nightie trimmed with black lace, until finally Connie's startled face appeared. She lit up when she saw her cousin.\n\n\"Nora!\" she squealed, throwing open the door.\n\n\"Did I wake you?\"\n\nConnie flung her arms around her. \"When did you get back?\"\n\n\"Only last night. You're the first person I've visited.\"\n\nNora stepped inside the door.\n\n\"Where's Emmet?\" she asked, looking around the empty room. \"Where are the boys?\"\n\n\"They've gone to the playground,\" said Connie. \"It's all part of a new regime. Every Sunday morning, come hell or high water, he has to take them to the playground.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"This is what I do while they're gone,\" said Connie, holding up a copy of the IKEA catalogue with a TV smile. \"I lie in bed reading the IKEA catalogue. That's how sad my life is...\"\n\nShe stopped herself and stood staring at Nora as if she'd only just noticed her standing there.\n\n\"I can't believe you're here! Come on into the kitchen. I'll make you coffee. I'm so happy to see you!\"\n\nThey settled on low stools in Connie's kitchen, surrounded by the smell of washing powder and soggy cereal. The sound of the tumble dryer stopping and then starting up again in the opposite direction. Connie had tucked the hem of her negligible nightie between her thighs and crossed them, to hide her knickers. Her hair was falling in loose spirals from the crown of her tiny head, and the shadows round her eyes were darkened by her day-old eye makeup. It seemed to Nora that Connie was getting more beautiful, if anything. She could never but be aware of Connie's beauty, with a tribal brew of jealousy and pride in equal measure.\n\n\"So,\" said Nora. \"It seems that my parents are sleeping together again.\"\n\nConnie wrinkled her nose.\n\n\"Can we be sure about this?\"\n\n\"There's no doubt about it. They're definitely sleeping together. Last night I heard sounds coming from their bedroom. At one stage I heard her give a kind of a squeal.\"\n\n\"Oh, Jesus,\" said Connie, baring her teeth.\n\n\"I can't get my head around it. They're getting on so _well_. It's like the divorce never happened. It's really weird.\"\n\n\"I don't find that weird at all. Your parents always got along well together. Way better than mine did. You got the feeling that they actually _liked_ each other.\"\n\nNora nodded as she acknowledged the truth of this.\n\n\"Your house was such a happy house,\" said Connie. \"Before your parents split up, it was a really happy house. Whereas the atmosphere in _my_ house\u2014do you remember? It was like Berlin before the wall came down.\"\n\n\"Well, now we know why.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Connie with a sigh. \"Now we know why.\"\n\nThey stared into each other's eyes, and it was as if the music had stopped and the parcel of family history they had been passing back and forth between them was being opened. One layer at a time, they were moving closer and closer to the nugget of truth that lay at the center of their lives.\n\n\"He used to bully her,\" said Connie, in a voice that was little more than a whisper. \"Do you remember? He used to bully her in front of us.\"\n\n\"I know,\" said Nora. \"I remember.\"\n\n\"He was a pig to her, and I did nothing to stop it. I feel so bad about that now. Especially now that we know what she was going through. I feel so bad for taking his side.\"\n\n\"Ah, Connie, you were just a kid.\"\n\n\"Still.\"\n\n\"She seems to be getting her revenge on him now.\"\n\nConnie smiled.\n\n\"I _almost_ feel sorry for him. He had to beg her to take him back.\"\n\n\"Do you think they still love each other?\"\n\n\"I don't know. I don't think love has much to do with it. I've reached the conclusion that relationships between men and women are all about power. It's all about the balance of power, and if you can't get that right, then it's a fight to the death.\"\n\nAnd it seemed to Nora that Connie wasn't talking about her parents anymore\u2014it seemed to Nora that she was talking about herself.\n\n\"Is everything okay between you and Emmet?\"\n\nConnie bent her head and looked down into her lap. She sighed, and for what seemed like a long time, she didn't speak.\n\n\"You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to.\"\n\n\"It's not that. Part of me does want to talk about it. I'm just afraid that if I start, I won't know where to stop.\"\n\nShe looked up at Nora and smiled an apologetic little smile, and Nora didn't know what to say to her. What could Nora say to Connie about husbands, and babies? Nora, who had never even had a proper boyfriend.\n\n\"Is it that bad?\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't know. I'm so tired I can't tell. We're still talking to each other, which is something, I suppose. We're still sleeping together, whenever we have the energy. But basically it's more like a war than a marriage.\"\n\n\"For all I know, that's normal.\"\n\nConnie burst out laughing.\n\n\"Oh, Nora. I missed you!\"\n\n\"I missed you too,\" said Nora, even though strictly speaking that wasn't true. When Nora was away, she missed her creature comforts all right. She missed her Barry's Tea and her Walnut Whips and she missed the salmon avocado rolls she and Connie craved from the sushi place on Capel Street, but curiously enough, she did not find herself missing people. She didn't miss her grandparents, even though she adored them both. She didn't miss Connie's boys, or Connie herself, even though Connie was the closest thing she had to a sister. Of all the people in the world, it was Connie who Nora loved best, and yet she did not miss her, not even for a moment, when she was away. Like a hot air balloon, the stays that tethered her to her family had to be severed every time she went away. And it was only when she returned that she felt herself being reattached.\n\n\"I wish you wouldn't keep disappearing off like that,\" said Connie, sticking her bottom lip out in a show of petulance. \"I don't like you being away so much.\"\n\n\"I always come back.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but not for long. I bet you're planning your next escape already.\"\n\nNora decided not to mention the e-mail she'd received from Amnesty last night\u2014an e-mail about the human-rights situation in Syria, it had her thinking of her next move already.\n\n\"My boys hardly recognize you, Nora. Every time you come back, I have to explain to them who you are.\"\n\nHow to say this without hurting Connie's feelings?\n\n\"Don't take this the wrong way, Connie, but sometimes I feel like there isn't much for me here.\"\n\n\"But this is your _home._ \"\n\nThat word again. Nora kept hearing it, and every time she heard it, she wondered what it meant.\n\n\"This is where your family is.\"\n\nAnd of course Nora couldn't say it, but that was the very thing that kept her away. The fact that they all lived within a square mile of each other, it was claustrophobic to Nora. She wondered how they could bear it.\n\n\"I know, Connie. I know, but...\"\n\nHow to explain it? The feeling she had when she was away of being free. Whereas here she felt so _un_ free. Unfree of her parents and her past, unfree of her feelings, feelings she had been trying for so long to get away from.\n\n\"Nora,\" said Connie, looking at her with the kindest of expressions in her beautiful eyes. \"Whether you like it or not, this is always going to be your home.\"\n\nNora's mother was not doing well.\n\nAt first she had seemed to everyone to be coping magnificently with what had happened to her. Like a building that has withstood the force of an earthquake, or a tree left standing after a storm, everyone was so relieved that she had survived it, they just assumed she would go on surviving it, day after day, into the future. But the cracks began to show over time, and the more time went by, the more she seemed to be struggling.\n\nNora would wake in the night to hear her padding about the house. The next thing, she would hear the sound of Eckhart Tolle's voice filtering through the walls; it reminded her of a Speak & Spell, with the cadences in all the wrong places. (It was Acushla who had suggested that Alma listen to _The Power of Now_ \u2014in a bizarre role reversal, Acushla was now giving Alma lessons in survival.) In the mornings Alma was groggy with the effects of what Nora suspected were sleeping pills, and in the evenings she was wakeful and anxious. She was getting headaches too, with increasing regularity. Incapacitating migraines that left her incapable of working for days at a time. Nora never remembered her mother suffering from migraines before.\n\n\"How are you doing?\" Nora asked, as she leaned into the darkened bedroom. The curtains were scrunched tight against the bright evening, the daylight outside rendering them luminously transparent. Her mum was lying fully clothed on top of the covers, a silk scarf draped over her eyes as a blindfold.\n\n\"I'm okay,\" she said, speaking in a tremulous whisper, as if there was a sleeping baby in the room and she was terrified of waking it.\n\nCarefully Nora perched on the edge of the bed, laying her hand on her mother's thigh.\n\n\"Can I get you anything?\" she whispered.\n\nHer mum shook her head, moving with the utmost care. The sense of some explosive substance that would detonate if disturbed.\n\n\"I brought you some water,\" whispered Nora. She held the glass up to her mother's lips for her to take a sip.\n\n\"Delicious,\" came the whisper. She mimed a thank-you that was audible only as a series of little puffs of breath. Nora took the glass away and set it down on the bedside table, careful not to make a sound as she was doing it. She let her eyes wander over the room, falling on shapes that were strangely unfamiliar in the shadows. A large mirror that gave the illusion of a door opening on to another room. A white sequined evening dress hanging from a cupboard door in a plastic dry-cleaner's sheath; it looked to Nora like a ghost about to rise up for a haunting. A black satin nightdress coiled on the floor; in the darkness it could have been a crouching cat.\n\nShe listened to her mum's breathing, shallow and deliberate, and she tried to follow it with her own breath. From outside the room came the sound of an ice-cream van. The jingle stopped abruptly and then started again just as suddenly. Nora listened as the sound of it receded into the distance, and when it was gone, she sat on in the silence. There was something restful about sitting in the stillness of her mother's illness. It was like being in the presence of a big drugged bear.\n\nThree days Nora had been home, and in all of that time nobody had asked her a single question about the month she had spent in Gaza. Oh, her father had asked her about the conditions inside the jail, and Connie wanted to know whether she'd met a man while she was away (which she hadn't), but nobody had expressed the remotest interest in the work she'd been doing, not until she visited Macdara.\n\n\"Now,\" he said. \"I want to hear all about it.\"\n\nHe was smiling at her with his eyes, letting his gaze rest on her the way very, very old people do, even though Macdara was only in his late forties. Macdara's ways were at odds with his appearance, which was curiously youthful. (\"What do you expect from someone who has nothing to do all day but take long baths?\" Nora had once heard Acushla say. \"No wonder he has no lines. He has nothing in the world to be worrying about.\")\n\nNora and Macdara sat at a wonky wrought-iron table that had been set into a small sunny patch in the corner of Nora's grandmother's garden. A garden that her grandmother kept untended as a testament to her husband's abandonment of her. From the ravening creepers to the perennially unpruned trees, everything pointed to the absence of a man in the house.\n\nWhen Nora and Connie were children, they used to spend hours acting out elaborate games in this garden. They played Sleeping Beauty here, with Connie the sleeping princess and Nora the valiant prince cutting his way through the brambles to reach her. They played Snow White, using Macdara's studio as the cottage of the Seven Dwarfs. They played Hansel and Gretel, with their grandmother cast (unbeknownst to her) in the role of the witch. For Nora, the garden still held the echoes of all those childhood games.\n\nShe had come to visit her grandmother, but found only Macdara at home.\n\n\"She's gone to the charity shop,\" he told her. \"For some reason she's taken it upon herself to bring all her old clothes to the charity shop.\"\n\n\"Really?\" said Nora, struggling to take in this information. Never once in her whole life did she ever remember her grandmother throwing anything out. (She's a Womble, Nora's grandfather used to say, forgetting that Nora was too young to remember the Wombles.)\n\n\"She's taken to decluttering all of a sudden,\" said Macdara. \"I've no idea what prompted it, but it's most out of character.\"\n\nHe led Nora outside, offering her a glass of lemon barley water, which he fetched from the gloom of the studio. They sat side by side, with their chairs turned to face the sun, sipping at the cloudy drink. Nora closed her eyes and allowed the silence to swarm round her as she waited for Macdara to say something. You wouldn't know what Macdara might say. He might just as easily say nothing.\n\nShe set her glass down on the slanting surface of the table and stretched her legs out in front of her to catch the sun. She slipped her feet out of her flip-flops, enjoying the wormy squelch of soil between the blades of uncut grass. She was aware of the sound of a train scuttling along the track behind the garden, aware of the cloying scent of the honeysuckle that had been allowed to run wild along the walls. She was aware of Macdara's presence, as tenuous as the company of a wild hedgehog, or a hare that had ventured into the garden. You were afraid to move in case you might scare him off.\n\n\"Lemon barley water is a good thing,\" he said eventually. \"I'm not sure whether people appreciate what a good thing lemon barley water is.\"\n\n\"It's delicious,\" said Nora. \"It reminds me of being a child.\"\n\nMacdara looked at her curiously.\n\n\"I keep forgetting,\" he said, \"that our little Nora's all grown up.\"\n\nAnd it might have sounded creepy coming from anyone else. If you didn't know Macdara, you might think this was a creepy thing to say. If you listened to Nora's mother talking about him, you might assume that he was handicapped perhaps, or an invalid of some sort. If you saw him in the midst of his family, silent and watchful where everyone else was so noisy, you would know there was something not quite right about him. But Nora had grown up with a child's view of her uncle, and that view of him had never left her. She saw the slight figure bulked out by cardigan on top of cardigan, turning from his desk as she and Connie pushed open the door of the studio. She saw the childlike man who would gracefully receive the tea they'd made for him from weeds they'd found in the garden. She saw the solitary audience member, sitting on a chair in the studio while she and Connie acted out their shambolic plays for him.\n\n\"What was it like?\" he asked her. \"What was it like, this place you've just been to?\"\n\nNora paused before she answered. There was something about Macdara that made you want to choose your words very carefully when you spoke to him. You had the sense that you were holding an instrument in your hands and that Macdara was listening out for the sound you would make with it; you had the feeling that he would know if you sounded an untrue note.\n\n\"It's a sad place,\" she said. \"I think it's the saddest place I've ever been.\"\n\n\"I'd like to hear about it,\" he said.\n\nAnd there was something wistful in his voice, this middle-aged man who had only once in his life been out of Ireland. He had been to France, many years ago, on a scholarship that was supposed to last a year but ended after just a week. A trip that was the butt forever afterward of many a family joke. It was Alma who suggested he write an account of it entitled \"A Week in Provence.\" Macdara smiled with good grace every time that joke was rolled out, but he never ventured off the island again. Talking to him about her travels, Nora felt like an ancient adventurer who brings back tales of distant lands, along with a trunk full of strange trophies, with which to mesmerize the people at home.\n\n\"It should be a beautiful place,\" she said. \"That's what's so sad about it. At one time it must have been the most beautiful place, this ancient city beside the sea. But there's almost nothing left of it now, only rubble and sand.\"\n\nMacdara had his head inclined toward her, his pale eyes endlessly patient.\n\n\"I can just picture it. You describe it well.\"\n\n\"The people have no way of making a living. They try to fish, but their fishing boats are taken away from them. They try to farm, but the snipers shoot at them while they're working in the fields. Even the olive trees,\" she said, and in her own voice she could hear a shrill note of indignation. \"The settlers break the branches off the olive trees to spoil the harvest.\"\n\n\"But that's terrible!\" said Macdara. \"That's just terrible.\" He was shaking his head as if he found it hard to believe what she was telling him.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said. \"It is terrible.\"\n\nAnd she wondered, if Macdara could see this so clearly, why did everyone else find it so hard to see how terrible it was?\n\nWhen the Garda came to the door, Nora's first thought was that it must be something to do with her deportation from Gaza.\n\nA Friday morning, her dad had left at the crack of dawn for another day of filming. Acushla had just arrived for coffee, along with Connie and the boys, bringing with them a box of small cakes. Instead of leading them straight into the kitchen, Nora's mum took the boys out into the back garden to show them the nest of newly hatched robins in the crook of the wall. The boys were more interested in the cakes than they were in the robins, but they were too polite to say so.\n\n\"Do you know a funny thing?\" said Alma, as she stepped back into the kitchen, closing the glass door carefully behind her. \"I've spent my entire adult life talking about politics and the economy and the state of the nation\u2014but I find that none of that's of any interest to me anymore.\"\n\nConnie was setting out the cups, but she paused and looked up at Alma, waiting to hear what her aunt was going to say.\n\nAlma was still standing at the kitchen door. She was gazing into midair as she spoke, while the rest of them stopped what they were doing to listen. Nora had a queer sense that they were all of them actors on a stage, waiting for Alma to deliver a key soliloquy before the action could resume.\n\n\"The thing is, I find I've no interest whatsoever in what's happening in Iraq, or Afghanistan,\" Alma was saying, as she walked over to the fridge and took out a carton of milk. \"I couldn't tell you who's in power in Israel. Or what's happening in Libya. It's like I've no space in my mind for any of those things anymore.\"\n\n\"Welcome to my world,\" said Connie with a snort. \"What you're describing is the state of my brain ever since I had children.\"\n\nAlma filled the milk jug and paused with the carton still in her hand.\n\n\"The only thing that interests me now is when those little robins are going to take flight. It's the only thing that seems real to me.\"\n\nShe had her head tilted to one side. A wistful note in her voice, as if she regretted the insight.\n\n\"I know it sounds mad, but I could quite happily sit here all day waiting for those little birds to fly away.\"\n\nAcushla stared at her, and Nora could see that she was still adjusting to this new incarnation of her sister.\n\n\"When can we have the cake?\" asked Ernie.\n\nHis brother was beside him, springing up and down on the spot.\n\n\"When can we have the cake? When can we have the cake? When can we have the cake?\"\n\n\"Now,\" said Acushla, coming to attention. \"Now is the time for the cake. Come and help me put them out on the plate.\"\n\nThe kettle boiled and switched itself off and Nora poured some water into the coffeepot to warm it. She was just emptying the water out into the sink when the doorbell rang.\n\n\"It's probably Grandmother,\" she told Connie. \"Would you mind getting it?\"\n\nBut instead of her grandmother, it was a female Garda who stepped into the kitchen (Nora's dad would have called her a ban-Garda). She had her hat in her hand, and her hair rolled into a neat little bun at the nape of her neck.\n\n\"Sorry to disturb you,\" she said, stepping forward tentatively with one navy-trousered leg. \"I can see that you're in the middle of something.\"\n\n\"Not at all,\" said Acushla. Best girl in the class, she was already extending an arm to usher the Garda forward. \"Will you have some coffee?\"\n\nThe little boys stood staring at the Garda, the cake for the moment forgotten.\n\n\"Honestly, I'm grand,\" said the Garda, looking at Acushla only briefly before turning her attention to Alma. \"I just wanted to have a quick word with Alma. There's something we need to bring to your attention.\"\n\nThe movement of air in the room was suspended as they all waited for the Garda to explain.\n\n\"A woman was killed in a house in Blessington last night. The state pathologist is only arriving at the scene now, so we've no official comment as of yet. But we believe she was killed by an intruder.\"\n\nNora became aware of her own breathing, hard and slow. Connie's breathing, and Acushla's breathing, and the little boys' and her mother's\u2014it seemed to Nora that they were all of them doing nothing but breathing. Breathing the Garda's words in.\n\n\"We've arrested a man and we're holding him in Blessington Garda station. But we thought you should know, it's the same man who's been charged with the attack on you.\"\n\nIn the pause that followed, the sound of the doorbell rang out, much louder than it had been before. Connie slid sideways out of the room, and a moment later she returned with her grandmother following behind her. Hair falling loose over her shoulders, Deirdre was wearing a magenta beret and holding a bunch of lavender that had clearly been stolen from someone's garden along the way.\n\n\"Did I miss something?\" she asked, in her huge billowing voice.\n\nBriefly the Garda explained the sequence of events again, while Nora watched her mother's face.\n\n\"Well,\" said Deirdre, addressing herself to Alma with her startled eyes wide and bright. \"It would appear that you had a rather lucky escape.\"\n\nAnd really, it did seem to them all that this was the case.\n\nThe crisis came the next morning.\n\nNora slipped downstairs to get herself a glass of water and found her mother sitting in the chair by the back door. Her mouth was turned upside down in a carnival mask of a sad face. Her eyes, dripping heartbroken tears.\n\n\"Mum!\" said Nora. \"What's wrong?\" She sank to her knees on the cold tiles, one careful hand on her mother's arm. Through the glass door, the sky was a cocktail of oranges and reds, but the garden was still steeped in darkness.\n\n\"What is it?\" asked Nora, but instead of replying, her mother just stared at her. In her eyes Nora saw a dull glint of catastrophe, as if she had caught sight of something so terrible that she could not put it into words.\n\n\"Oh, Mum. There's no need to be afraid. He's locked up now. He won't be allowed out again for a very long time.\"\n\nHer mother shook her head as the tears slid out of her.\n\n\"It's over, Mum. I know it doesn't feel like it, but it's over now.\" (They had been through all this last night. Time and time again they had talked it through. How the murder charge would take precedence. How Alma's case would be adjourned. It might never even come to court.)\n\n\"It's not that,\" said Alma, shaking her head vehemently. But what it was, she could not bring herself to say.\n\nNora sat with her and waited, looking at the lurid sky while her mother cried herself out.\n\nIt was the baby robins, she explained eventually. A cat perhaps, or a fox\u2014who knows what it might have been, but they were all gone. All that was left of them was some blood and feathers, and she couldn't bear it. Of all the things that had happened, this was the one thing she could not bear. The poor little baby robins.\n\n\"Right,\" said Nora's father, his hair sticking up in a tuft at the back of his head, his eyes wild with incomprehension. He had come down to find Nora and Alma wrapped up together, one seated in a chair and one on the floor, the mother's head resting on the daughter's.\n\n\"I don't understand,\" he whispered to Nora when she came back down after putting her mother to bed. He was assembling a breakfast tray for her, but he was so addled that he couldn't get the sequencing right and the toast popped before he had even turned on the kettle. \"Did something else happen?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Nora. \"Something else happened.\"\n\nHer father stared at her in genuine confusion and not for the first time, Nora found herself wondering how her parents had managed to live for so long in the world, while learning so very little.\n\nNora runs.\n\nWaking before everyone else, she slips out of the house. She runs to the lighthouse and back, a route that takes her on a path along the edge of the strand, and past the electricity plant, and out on to the seawall. She runs the surface of the wall, aware even as she's doing so that she's taking a risk with her ankles on the uneven surface. At the end of the wall a handful of Poles and Lithuanians are to be found fishing from the rocks behind the lighthouse\u2014before they came, nobody ever fished there. Nora turns and runs back without stopping, past the morning strollers and the dog walkers; on her right, the car ferry keeps pace with her as it plows its way into the heart of the city.\n\nShe is halfway back down the wall one morning when she sees her dad sauntering toward her, a pair of Ray-Bans on him and his towel under his arm. It's his walk that she recognizes first\u2014the ungainly waddle of him.\n\n\"Good morning!\" he calls out, once they're within earshot of each other. Nora raises her hand to greet him, but it's a few long seconds before they draw level.\n\n\"Well,\" she says. \"No filming today?\"\n\n\"Not today,\" he says cheerfully. Not a word has he said to them about the outcome of the contest, but there is no concealing the fact that he's at liberty again after only two days. Nora and Alma have drawn their own conclusions.\n\n\"If you'll wait for me, I'll treat you to a cup of coffee afterward,\" he says with a nod toward the coffee van at the base of the wall.\n\nNora sits and waits for him while he swims; once he's dressed again, they walk the last section of the wall together.\n\n\"What'll you have?\" he asks her, and Nora can't help but notice that he doesn't know how she takes her coffee.\n\n\"A latte,\" she says. \"Full-fat milk.\"\n\nAs he queues for the coffees, Nora takes a seat on a low wall in the sunshine. She closes her eyes and hears, but does not see, two women sitting down beside her. They start up a conversation, and it takes a moment for Nora to realize that they're talking about her dad.\n\n\"Is that your man?\" says one woman. \"What's his name, Collins.\"\n\n\"The fella who had the wife had the abortion?\"\n\n\"No, no. That's the brother you're talking about. This one's the fella who was out in Brussels. The one with the pepper grinder.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's right,\" says the other lady with a chuckle.\n\nNora opened one eye and saw her dad standing patiently in the coffee queue, his coins clutched in his hand like a child about to spend his pocket money. She felt a rush of affection for him, and a desire to protect him.\n\n\"He'd be on a good pension,\" said one of the women.\n\n\"Ah, he would be, yeah. He'd be on a grand pension.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't be worrying about him.\"\n\n\"No, he won't starve, that's for sure.\"\n\nNora smiled and closed her eyes again, surprised by the comfort it gave her to find herself among people who know who you are.\n\n\"What about this weather?\" said one of the women.\n\n\"It's miraculous,\" said the other. \"It's nothing short of bloody miraculous.\"\n\nThe weather was all anyone was talking about. Weather the country had not seen the like of in a generation, day after day broke to clear blue skies, and no end to it in sight. All round the coast, people took to the beaches, while in the midlands they headed for the lakes and rivers. In the cities, children in discount wet suits leapt joyously from buildings and cranes into any patch of water they could find. On farms and building sites, workingmen stripped off their shirts as telephones rang out in empty offices. The city parks turned yellow and dry as savannah, the citizens lazing on the parched grass so tanned and happy as to be barely recognizable even to themselves. A smell of barbecued meat hung on the air; hose bans were put in place and reservoirs ran dry. A summer with the power to change everything: after year upon year of austerity, it was just what the country needed.\n\nTo celebrate this miraculous summer, it was decided that a party should be held in the square. The party was scheduled to coincide with the screening of the first episode of _Celebrity MasterChef._ Nothing would do the neighbors but to have a ritual screening. Colored bunting was strung from the lampposts. Barbecues were borrowed and kegs of beer bought. They'd even erected a gazebo, out of old habit, in case of rain. Maurice the neighbor rigged some electrical cable out through the open door of his house to where a large screen had been set up in the center of the square. (\"Say nothing,\" he said. \"Me son nicked it from his office.\")\n\nBy the time the program went on air, they were all of them stuffed with charred sausages and shop-bought coleslaw. Half drunk on draft lager and warm white wine. While the kids played hide-and-seek among the bushes (Connie's boys included), the adults drew their chairs in close to the bonfire someone had lit in an empty-bellied barbecue. There was a huge cheer as the title sequence appeared on-screen, showing Mick standing in line with the other contestants. \"I'm just hoping not to make a complete eejit of myself,\" he said in the soundbite, and again everyone cheered.\n\nConnie gripped Nora's arm and whispered something into her ear, but what it was Nora couldn't hear. \"Have some more wine,\" whispered Maurice, leaning across to top up their glasses. His hair had started to grow back, giving him the appearance of a fledgling chick. Nora looked over and saw her parents sitting huddled side by side on foldout chairs in the grass, both of them swathed in picnic rugs. Her dad had one arm around her mum's shoulders and with the other he was smoking a fat cigar. Nora couldn't help but think how content they both looked.\n\nShe turned to say this to Connie, but Connie had turned toward Emmet, who was sitting on the far side of her. Her face nestled in the crook of his neck, she had her fingers tucked inside the waistband of his jeans. Nora looked about her and saw children sitting in parents' laps. She saw teenagers flirting awkwardly with each other as they rolled a sneaky joint. Even the old lady from across the square had a small dog on her knee. It seemed to Nora that she was the only one who was alone.\n\nShe leaned her head back to search out the sky, but what she saw instead was the stadium. Lit up from within, its great steel girders looked as fragile as balsa wood, its glass panels as thin as rice paper. In the sky above it, birds were flying. Dozens of seabirds, picked out by the stadium lights; they glowed like paper lanterns. As she watched the magical flight of those beautiful birds of light, it seemed to Nora that everything was possible, even for her.\n\n\"Come for tea,\" her grandfather had said. But it wasn't her grandfather who answered the door. It was a man Nora had never seen before. Slender as a girl, he had tight brown curls and brown eyes like conkers. He was wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt and a pair of crumpled linen trousers, and Nora noticed that he was in his bare feet. For a moment she wondered had she rung on the wrong door.\n\nFrom somewhere inside the apartment came the sound of her grandfather's voice.\n\n\"Nora! You haven't met Nando.\"\n\nHer grandfather stepped into the corridor. Backlit by the flood of daylight from the living room, he looked like he was standing onstage at the start of _The X Factor_.\n\n\"Nando's from Argentina,\" he said, as if that explained everything.\n\n\"Oh!\" said Nora in surprise. The only Nando she'd ever come across before was the Nando from _Alive_. Nando, the hero who walked across the mountains for help.\n\n\"Nando's a reiki healer,\" Manus went on to say. \"We're hoping that reiki might help to ease some of Sam's symptoms.\"\n\nNora stepped forward to plant a kiss on her grandfather's scratchy old cheek.\n\n\"Forgive my apparel, but I have a bit of a cold.\" He was dressed in an Aran sweater and Thai fisherman's pants, a pair of knitted slipper socks on his feet. He had a blue Tuareg scarf wrapped around his neck and head, leaving only his endlessly startling blue eyes uncovered.\n\n\"You look like Lawrence of Arabia,\" said Nora.\n\n\"You wouldn't be the first person to remark on the resemblance,\" he said, with some delight. \"Have I ever told you the story about the lady who came up to me in a supermarket in Los Angeles?\"\n\n\"The lady who thought you were Peter O'Toole?\" Nora glanced behind her to see if Nando was still there, but he had disappeared.\n\n\"Oh, I did tell you.\" He sounded a little disappointed that he wasn't going to get to tell the story again.\n\nHe stepped into the kitchen and Nora followed him.\n\n\"We'll have tea,\" he announced, and moved across to the sink to fill the kettle from the tap. He set it into its cradle and switched it on. As the kettle began to creak, Nora was listening out for other sounds, in other rooms. A feeling like being in a field at night, she was aware of the presence of other living creatures around her, heard but not seen.\n\n\"I want to hear all about your trip,\" announced her grandfather, turning his magnificent eyes on her. \"But let's wait until we're sitting down. I want Sam to hear it too.\"\n\nHe pulled at the coils of his scarf to loosen it a little about the chin. Small beads of perspiration were gathering along his forehead.\n\n\"Is that not a bit hot?\" asked Nora.\n\n\"On the contrary. It's actually very comforting. Plus I'm anxious not to pass my cold on to anyone. In particular I don't want Sam to get it. Although I must say, his immune system is in better shape than my own. He's as healthy as the proverbial butcher's dog.\"\n\nAs her grandfather equipped a tray with mugs and milk and sugar and fig rolls, Nora studied the various newspaper clippings he had pinned to the doors of his kitchen cupboards with thumbtacks. A letter someone had written to the paper calling for a nationwide campaign against stickers being placed on apples. A list of all the foods you should eat to counter memory loss. A review of a biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor.\n\n\"I was never in Israel myself,\" he said, \"or Palestine for that matter. But I was in Beirut, you know, in 1964. Beirut was quite something.\"\n\nThe kettle had boiled while he was talking.\n\n\"Wait, now,\" he said, as if she had been the one speaking. \"I have to concentrate on the task at hand. I'm like my car\u2014I can only do one thing at a time.\" (Driving anywhere with Nora's grandfather was a hair-raising experience\u2014if it was raining, you had to choose between using the indicators or the windshield wipers.)\n\nMoving with painstaking concentration, he poured water into the teapot, swirling it around before tipping it out again into the sink. With all the care of a scientist stooped over a laboratory bench, he transferred a heaped teaspoonful of Earl Grey tea leaves from a tin on the kitchen counter into the heated pot. Then another spoonful, and a final one before pouring in the boiling water. The smell of orange peel filled the kitchen.\n\n\"Now,\" he said, closing the lid. \"I'll carry the tea if you follow with the tray.\"\n\n\"Sam!\" said her grandfather. \"Nando! Tea is served.\"\n\nWith the great glass windows magnifying the heat of the afternoon sun, it was as hot as a boiler room, but Manus didn't seem to notice. Nora set the tray down on the table and slipped her cardigan off. Her arms were pale where she had kept them covered all the time she was in Gaza. Only her hands and face were tanned.\n\n\"Sam,\" said her grandfather, looking up at the door. \"Come and say hello to Nora.\"\n\n\"Nora,\" said Sam, delight dawning on him with the memory of her name. He walked toward her with his hands down by his sides. Behind him, Nora could see Nando hanging back. She was acutely aware of him watching her as she greeted Sam.\n\n\"Oh, Sam,\" she said as she hugged him to her. \"I'm so happy to see you.\"\n\n\"Nora,\" he said again as they pulled apart to face each other. He was working his lips over her name.\n\nNora smiled into his dark-lashed eyes, lashes that were so black they always looked wet. Eyes the color of coffee beans; at one time there had always been a sheen on them, a glinting hint of his buoyant good humor. Now there was only a worried stillness. As he chewed at his bottom lip, Nora saw that his teeth were nicotine-stained. His face was unshaven, but he was wearing a freshly ironed shirt and a pair of clean jeans, evidence of her grandfather's devoted but imperfect care.\n\n\"Come on,\" said Manus. \"Let's have the tea.\"\n\nNora and Sam sat down side by side and Nando took a seat opposite them. Nora tried not to look at him too much. She tried not to look for too long, but a jigsaw was forming in her head all the same. A series of fragments that came together to form a composite. The sugary brown eyes, the hair that curled behind his ears. He wore a signet ring on his right hand. A frayed leather bracelet around his slim wrist.\n\n\"How's your father taking his disappointment?\" Manus asked. He was holding the teapot protectively in his hands but he had paused in the pouring of it while he asked the question.\n\n\"Oh,\" said Nora. \"He's blaming the sea urchin. Apparently it's all the sea urchin's fault.\"\n\nHer grandfather resumed his tea-pouring with a smile.\n\n\"Have a fig roll,\" he said. \"You haven't lived until you've tried a fig roll.\" The way he said it, in his huge old voice, he made it sound like a voice-over on an ad. (How _do_ they get the figs into the fig rolls?)\n\n\"Whereabouts in Argentina are you from?\" Nora asked Nando. She was thinking, Buenos Aires. She was picturing darkly lit caf\u00e9s with white tablecloths, and people dancing the tango.\n\n\"I'm from Baroliche,\" he said. \"It's in the south.\" And she had the feeling that he wanted her to ask him another question. She had the feeling that she could ask him anything and he would answer her. There was something wide open about him, something that made you think of deep oceans, big skies.\n\n\"Nando is a ski instructor,\" said Manus. \"In another life.\"\n\nSo that was it. Altitude. Snow.\n\n\"Is that what brings you here? The summer?\"\n\n\"Well actually, it's winter now in Argentina.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" said Nora, feeling like an idiot. She flipped the world over in her head. Tried to imagine skiers traversing upside-down mountains, inverted penguins strutting around on upended icebergs and ships sailing along an upside-down sea. She thought of snow, and found herself wishing she could scoop up a handful of it and bury her face in it. She was so hot! Her cheeks felt flushed, her armpits sticky, her dress was clinging to her thighs. She would have liked to slip out to the bathroom and wash her face. Put on some deodorant, slap some powder on her nose. Instead of which she picked a magazine up off the table and began to fan herself with it in the hope that she could regain her cool.\n\n\"Now,\" said her grandfather. \"You promised you'd tell us all about your travels.\"\n\n# RELATIVE VALUES\n\nIn today's _Sunday Times_ , the writer Manus MacEntee and his granddaughter, the human-rights activist Nora MacEntee Collins, talk about passion and pride and the joys of an unconventional family.\n\n## _Manus_\n\nNora is the quintessential Scorpio. She's brave and calm but under the surface there's plenty of passion bubbling away. Ever since she was a little girl, she always had a built-in radar for injustice of any kind.\n\nNora was born during the era of glasnost and perestroika. It was the time of the famine in Ethiopia. A time for brave souls, and Nora is without a doubt one of them. It was a good day for the world the day Nora was born. Sometimes the world manages to deliver of itself precisely the kind of people it most needs.\n\nI tried to teach Nora to play drafts when she was a little girl but she was absolutely hopeless at it. No matter what I said to her, I could not induce her to huff me. But that's Nora for you, she's not capable of taking anything if it's at a cost to someone else.\n\nNora's an only child and I think her parents' divorce hit her very hard. For years she lived this nomadic existence, moving back and forth between two different homes in two different countries. What impressed me most was how she managed to remain loyal to both her parents throughout that time. She never once took sides, which says a lot for her strength of character.\n\nI'm so proud of the work that Nora does. She's a warrior for justice and I can't think of a better way to use the life you've been given. If everyone was like Nora, we would have something close to heaven on earth.\n\nMy dearest wish for her is that she will meet someone who deserves her. Nora is such a very fine person, it will be hard for her to find someone to match her, but when she does find such a person (and I do believe she will), he or she will be a very, very lucky sod.\n\n## _Nora_\n\nI love the look on people's faces when I introduce my grandfather to them. I tend to forget that other people have grandfathers who spend their days on the golf course, or doing the crossword. My grandfather is more likely to spend the day on a sunbed and the night out partying. I have friends who live in the flat below Grandad's, and whenever they have a party, he appears in his dressing gown in the small hours and joins in the dancing.\n\nI remember one time when I was a kid, Grandad picked me up from school in his Jag, and all the other kids in my class thought he was a rock star. It was like having one of the Rolling Stones as your grandfather.\n\nWhen I was born, Grandad and Sam had already been living together for years. It never occurred to me that there was anything strange about your grandfather living with another man. A boy in school told me once that my grandad was queer, but I didn't know what that meant so I took it as a compliment.\n\nThe most important thing Grandad taught me was the importance of kindness. He always says that the only thing that matters, in the end of the day, is how we've treated one another. I try to remember that.\n\nI'm convinced that Grandad is going to live forever. He seems to get younger and younger as time goes on. If you asked me his true age, I'd say he's about seventeen. Forever seventeen.\n\nWhen I was a little girl, Grandad used to read the death notices out of the paper to me\u2014he said there was a story in every one. When his death notice eventually comes to be written, it will make some story.\n\n# Manus\n\nIt's true that Manus is a great fan of the death notices. They're the first thing he turns to every morning when he sits down with his newspaper, a pot of tea in front of him and a single slice of toast (burned and then scraped, just the way he likes it) with a spoonful of his famous homemade marmalade. Manus makes marmalade every year from tins of canned oranges that he orders on the Internet. His marmalade is rough-cut and heavily spiced, in deliberate defiance of the wimpish excuse for a thing that you find in the shops these days; it was the disappointment of factory-made marmalade that forced him to start making his own. A joyous ritual that he carries out once a year to a soundtrack of the Andrews Sisters, or Bing Crosby, singing along in his tuneless voice as he stews the fruit in a huge catering pan that he keeps for this express purpose. Using the empty Hellmann's mayonnaise jars that he hoards all year-round, and the jam jars his ex-wife stockpiles for him, he makes gifts of his marmalade to everyone he knows for Christmas, holding back half a dozen for himself to see him through the year.\n\nHe and Sam are in the habit of having two breakfasts. The first, which they consume in bed with the radio on, consists of small earthenware cups of black coffee and little bowls of granola heaped high with Greek-style yogurt and pebbled with blueberries. It's Sam's job to make this breakfast, a task he carries out with great seriousness but increasingly erratic timing. Some days it could be eight in the morning by the time he wakes Manus with the tray. Other days it might be five or six.\n\nOn this particular morning, Manus was woken at three by noises in the kitchen and the smell of coffee brewing. By the time Sam appeared, heartbreakingly boyish-looking in nothing but his pajama bottoms, Manus was sitting up valiantly in the bed with his pillows stacked behind him and the clock radio turned to face the wall so that Sam would not see his mistake. There was chamber music playing instead of the morning news program, but Sam didn't seem to notice. There was so much now, that Sam didn't notice. Invisible shutters falling down around his mind, blocking out bits of the world without him even knowing it.\n\nSide by side and with hardly a word spoken between them, they ate their breakfast in the dead of night. Through the gap in the curtains Manus could see the sky outside, an unfathomable black. He was aware of a longing in him for the cold discomfort of early-morning flights, overnight train journeys, late nights that turn into early mornings. Somewhere on their travels they had come across a bakery that served coffee and hot buns to the revelers coming out of the nightclubs.\n\n\"Where was that bakery?\" he asked Sam. \"The bakery with the hot buns.\"\n\nAnd Sam seemed to know just what he was thinking, as if the thoughts flowed freely between their two minds.\n\n\"Barcelona,\" he said. \"They were cinnamon buns.\"\n\nSometimes Sam remembers things that Manus doesn't. Things from long ago, they are as real to Sam as things from yesterday. More so, perhaps.\n\nManus had the smell of cinnamon in his nostrils now, and the taste of treacly coffee in his throat. A memory of those black-tobacco cigarettes with no filter, their butts littering the ground. From the radio, the announcer's voice sidled in among his memories like smoke.\n\n\"Well, that was Schubert's famous string quintet for two violins, viola and two cellos. That piece of music, written just before the composer's death at the age of thirty-two...\"\n\nOnce they had finished their pre-dawn breakfast, Manus shifted his empty bowl and cup on to Sam's tray and stacked it over his, allowing Sam space to get out of the bed. Sam picked up the trays and carried them out to the kitchen while Manus slipped down under the covers again. He closed his eyes in the hope of going back to sleep, but the coffee had done its work and his mind was too alert. He lay in bed and listened to the strange, sucked-up silence of the night. He heard the soft, padding sound of Sam, rummaging around in the living room like a fox, then the sound of a lighter sparking up a cigarette. Now Manus knew for certain that he would not be able to go back to sleep, for fear that Sam would leave the lighted cigarette on the arm of the couch, for fear that it would fall down into the couch cushions and smolder. Your sense of smell fails to function when you're asleep\u2014Manus had read that in the paper recently, and ever since he has feared a fire in the night, imagining himself slipping into a smoke-induced coma as the flames lick at the foot of his bed.\n\n\"Burned alive,\" his death notice would read, which would at least be some consolation. For years he and Sam had made a play of coming up with ever more sensational story lines for their death notices, in keeping with the colorful ends they delighted in envisaging for themselves. \"Eaten by a crocodile,\" Sam might say as he and Manus made their way along a rickety rope bridge above a flooded river in Cambodia. And Manus would add cheerfully, \"As he would have wanted.\"\n\nIt was what each of them wanted, to go out with a bang. A plane crash would fit the bill, they were agreed upon that. And there was a time when they traveled so much that it seemed almost a likelihood. Another distinct possibility was a bus crash\u2014those ravines in Peru, they were almost begging you to take the plunge. Malaria would be glamorous, or even dengue fever. (\"Succumbed to a fever,\" the death notice would read, with deliberate poetic flourish.) Kidnapping was always in the running, especially when you insisted on taking a road trip through Colombia in the 1990s. \"Under no circumstances is anyone to pay a ransom for us,\" Manus had told his family before they left. \"If you do, I'll haunt you.\" Of course there was always an outside possibility that they would be taken by cannibals and made a human sacrifice of\u2014why else would anyone undertake to go on a walking tour of Papua New Guinea but out of a desire to be eaten? (\"Slowly, in Papua New Guinea,\" the death notice would read.)\n\nSlowly. That was what they had feared the most. Your faculties taking leave of you one by one, leaving only layers of indignity in their place. A humbling that you had no choice but to succumb to. And of course they had always assumed that it would be Manus who would suffer this humiliating decline, with Sam as the witness. Never once did it occur to them that it would be the other way round. Manus smiled at the thought that life was playing this little joke on them. For all the times they had tempted fate with their talk of crocodiles and ravines, for all their bravado in the face of death, life was determined to have the last laugh.\n\nManus fears death now, not for and of itself, but because he fears what will become of Sam when he's gone. A quarter of a century between them\u2014it is too much to hope for that Sam will go before him. Sam is only fifty-eight. Manus is eighty-two. When first they met, those numbers seemed like mere diversions\u2014they were nothing but fireworks lighting up the sky, talking points for other people to ooh and aah over, but now... now the numbers have taken on a deadly menace. No matter how he goes at them, Manus cannot make of them anything but what they are. A formula for disaster. An equation that cannot be resolved. He retreats into binaries, taking the days as they come, one by one.\n\nNever does Manus let a day go by without reading the death notices. As soon as he has their second breakfast laid out on the table, as soon as he has his toast buttered and his tea primed with milk, he opens the paper to the inside back page and, with an almost sensual pleasure, begins to read.\n\nWorking from top to bottom, he scans the columns, searching out certain key words, like \"tragically,\" or \"suddenly,\" for closer reading. He makes a point of skimming over any notices that allude to grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, as being too dull to bother with. Similarly the deaths of religious do not merit his attention, unless there's a mention of time spent on the missions. He has a particular distaste for the self-satisfied death notice, with its reference to a career spent in the higher echelons of the civil service perhaps, or an association with a particular golf or sailing club. Snippets of verse he finds vulgar in the extreme, likewise epitaphs in the Irish language (the deceased probably didn't speak a word of Irish). Manus respects brevity in a death notice, with a particular eye to the intriguing detail, like the mention this morning of a solicitor's firm in Mallow, with a telephone number supplied for \"any inquiries.\"\n\n\"What on earth could that mean?\" he asks aloud, looking up at Sam, without really expecting him to answer.\n\nSam is lost in the task of assembling his breakfast. Like all Moroccans, Sam is a hopeless sugar addict. Even now he is dumping spoonful upon spoonful of sugar into his tea; if Manus didn't stop him, he would empty the whole bowl into his cup. He pours a long lick of honey on to his bread, concentrating so intently that he is not aware of Manus watching him. He picks up the bread and eats it, humming to himself as he chews. What it is that he's humming Manus cannot make out.\n\n\"What are you humming, Sam?\" he asks, speaking with great gentleness so as to mask his irritation. The humming has a bad effect on him, so he tries to divert Sam. Even humming along with him is better than listening to Sam humming to himself. Anything is better than listening to the humming.\n\nSam looks up, confused.\n\n\"You were humming something. I was trying to make out what it was.\"\n\nSam looks back at him with desperately serious eyes.\n\n\"It sounded to me like it might have been the Ink Spots. Am I right?\"\n\nManus begins to hum, and after a bar or two, Sam joins in. The words singing themselves in their heads. Would you look at us, thinks Manus. Two old queens sitting here over our breakfast, humming away like half-wits. If anyone could see us! There's an absurdity to it, he thinks; it's like something out of Beckett. But there's a certain beauty to it too, with the smell of burned toast hanging in the air, and the sunlight tumbling in on them through the giant window. What there is, despite everything, is love.\n\nSam was the most beautiful creature he ever saw.\n\nThe first time Manus set eyes on him, he was walking down Grafton Street as Manus was walking up. A bitterly cold day at the hard end of winter; there was a frost on the ground even though it was past midday, but Sam was wearing no coat. His head was bare and he had no scarf or gloves on him, just an Aran sweater and a pair of threadbare tweed trousers. He had a pair of huge black dogs with him and they were straining on their leashes, pulling him along as if he were a chariot. His chin was raised and his head leaning back on his neck, and the way he walked, it seemed to Manus that his feet hardly touched the ground. Manus was just approaching the corner at Weirs when Sam swept past him. He turned to watch in his wake, arrested by love as by a thunderclap; he had no idea if he would ever see him again. All he knew was that he would never forget him.\n\nAt that time Manus was forty-eight. He had been married for nearly thirty years to a woman he liked very much and with whom he had three wonderful children. He had achieved literary superstardom with a novel that was generally considered to be the finest work of Irish fiction since _Ulysses_ (although nobody suggested it was in quite the same league), and this astounding and unexpected critical success had been crowned with a most gratifying commercial triumph when his book was made into a movie, starring Peter Finch and James Mason. On the day the check for the movie rights arrived, Manus went out and bought himself a brand-new Jaguar saloon. The car he chose had pale blue paintwork, with leather seats and a walnut dashboard, and Manus had been driving it ever since, with a fierce, undying loyalty that only increased with age. The older the car got, the more alarming the smells and sounds that it emitted, the more loyal Manus became to it. They were growing old together, Manus and his car. Both of them creaking and groaning and farting and belching (although the burning smell of oil that the car emitted was a thing of fragrant beauty compared to the smells that escaped from Manus these days). No matter how much trouble it gave him, Manus would not give up on that car, no more than it would give up on him. What passed between them was nothing more or less than love.\n\nIn the years that followed the release of his book, and the film of the book, Manus rested on his laurels, eking out a comfortable living from the largesse that had so unexpectedly dropped into his life\u2014a largesse that grew miraculously over the years as the result of a series of canny investments. And while he did on occasion make further attempts at writing, mapping out an idea for a novel or scribbling down a single passage of prose, he always returned to the conclusion that with that one novel, he had reached the limit of his abilities. For the most part, he was content with what he had achieved.\n\nDublin at that time was a place of empty spaces. The great Georgian squares that had once been the light and life of the city lay dark and derelict, their roofs stoved in so as to escape paying rates. Anyone who could get out of the city did get out, moving their families to the newly built housing estates in the suburbs, where shopping centers began to spring up, and schools and playgrounds, and if they weren't beautiful they were at least warm and clean, and nobody who made the move regretted it. Those few people who chose to stay behind had the city to themselves, and it took on the atmosphere of a small town, or a village, so intimate was the sense of community among those who remained. Manus couldn't walk down Grafton Street without bumping into a dozen people he knew, and at night he and his friends huddled in the snugs of a handful of pubs in the dark backstreets, pubs that felt more like the front parlors of people's homes than they did public houses.\n\nIt was only when they had children that Manus and Deirdre began to entertain at home. This was the mid-sixties, and people in Dublin had begun to drink wine. Often of a Friday Deirdre would make a big stew, and Manus would buy in a case of cheap Italian red, and people they knew and people they didn't know would come to eat and drink and, mainly, talk.\n\nIt was at one of these Friday gatherings that Sam appeared, several weeks after Manus had first sighted him. He arrived in the company of an obscure scion of the Guinness family whose dogs he had been employed to walk. The moment Manus saw him standing there by the fire\u2014wearing the same Aran sweater and the same paint-splattered tweed trousers he had been wearing that day on Grafton Street\u2014as soon as Manus saw him he realized that he had known all along that he would come, and that now he had come, they were both of them on a trajectory that could not be altered, or avoided, any more than it could be regretted.\n\nNow in his late fifties, Sam still has the jet-black hair he had as a young man, but it's coursed with white, as if he had dipped his fingers in wet paint before running his hand through it. He still has the bockety teeth he had then, teeth that stand apart from each other like tilting dominoes. Stained with age and tobacco, they lend him a perverse attraction, hinting at something dangerous and disreputable in his past. The hazelnut eyes are streaked now with confusion in place of the seductive humor that once danced across them like the flames and silhouettes of a James Bond title sequence.\n\nWhen the doorbell rang, Sam was sitting at the window. With the iPad on his knee, he was working at the screen with a stylus, looking up every so often at the vast view. He was looking not at the clusters of red-brick houses down below him, nor at the strip of sea in the distance, with the sails of the yachts out of Dun Laoghaire splintering the blurry horizon line; he did not see the church steeples peeping up like weeds above the trees, nor the office blocks with the workers moving about within their windows. He didn't even glance at the stadium, slouched in the landscape in the form of a huge sleeping S\u2014all he had eyes for was the old Victorian gasometer with its red wrought-iron pillars and its pointed peaks. When Sam paints the gasometer, what appears on his screen is a series of minarets, set against the clear blue sky of another place, at another time. For it is the minarets of Tangier that always appear in Sam's paintings, against ever-changing skies. The skyline of home, always present in his memory.\n\nHe never went back after he met Manus. There was an arranged marriage waiting for him at home, and a place in the family business, and he was afraid that if he did go home they would not allow him to leave again, afraid that something might have reached them of the life he was living. If that was the case, it would not have been beyond them to force him to stay. He caught sight of the city of his childhood only once in all the years, from a promontory beyond Tarifa as he and Manus were driving across the south of Spain. They got out of the car and stood and stared over the straits to where the sunlight flashed off the tips of the minarets, and they sat there until nightfall so that Sam could see the lights of Tangier in the dark. Ever since that night, Sam has been painting the same sight over and over again, in every light. Manus suspects it will be the one thing that remains when everything else is gone.\n\nThe doorbell rang while Manus was preparing the lunch, mashing smoked mackerel with mayonnaise and lemon juice to form a p\u00e2t\u00e9, which he planned to serve with slivers of brown soda bread and unsalted butter. (Manus minds his own health as well as Sam's, because he knows that he must stay alive as long as is humanly possible in order to care for Sam. It is the centerpiece of his existence, this need to stay alive.) He dropped the fork he'd been using into the sink and wiped his hands on a tea towel to rid them of lemon juice before making his way down the corridor to the intercom.\n\n\"I've a parcel for you,\" said the voice at the other end.\n\n\"Can't you leave it downstairs?\"\n\n\"It's registered, you'll have to sign for it.\"\n\n\"All right. I'll be down in a minute.\"\n\nIt was probably a book to be reviewed. _The Irish Times_ was in the habit of sending him books, and occasionally he obliged, just to keep his hand in. There again, it could be a gift. Acushla was in the habit of ordering gifts for him on the Internet. Thoughtful things for the winter, like flannel pajamas, or cashmere socks. Yes, it was probably a present from Acushla. By the time the lift reached the ground floor, Manus was as excited as a child at Christmas at the thought of what the parcel might hold.\n\nWhen he saw the size of it, when he took it from the postman and felt the weight of it, it was clear to him that this was not a pair of cashmere socks, or a book for that matter. Unless it was an encyclopedia, and encyclopedias didn't exist anymore, did they? Not since Wikipedia. This bloody thing weighed a ton and it was as hard and unyielding as a slab of stone. Manus signed the postman's console and lugged the parcel back to the lift, holding it down by his knees with two hands, like a builder shifting a paving block.\n\n\"What the devil?\" he asked himself as he heaved it down the corridor and in through the door of the apartment.\n\n\"A parcel,\" he told Sam, hoisting it on to the table. He was in the habit of speaking to Sam as you might speak to a dog or to a baby, without ever expecting an answer.\n\nHe examined the parcel, looking for any indication of who might have sent it, but there was none. Just Manus's own name and address, handwritten in bold capitals with a black Magic Marker. He turned the parcel upside down, looking for a return address, but all there was, in the top left-hand corner, was the number of a PO box in Dublin.\n\n\"Let's see now,\" he said as he tugged at the plastic wrapping the parcel was encased in, trying to rip a hole in it. The plastic stretched and thinned where he tugged at it but it would not rupture. He was forced to go into the kitchen to fetch a knife, making a stab in the parcel as if it were flesh and pulling the skin away in one long strip. What this revealed was a stack of loose-leaf low-grade printer paper, as thick as an old Dublin phone book; it was held together in the old-fashioned way with a Bridget's cross of twine. On the title page were two sparse lines of printed script, in 12-point Times New Roman: _Untitled, A Novel_.\n\nAfter he and Sam had finished their lunch, Manus cleared the table, leaving the dishes in the sink water to soak, a slovenly habit he had adopted recently in order to lessen the monotony of the task (all he had to do later was take them out of the water and prop them on the dish rack to dry). Afterward, he set Sam up in front of the TV and put on a DVD for him, selecting at random an episode of _The Waltons_ from the box set that Acushla had ordered for him over the Internet. Sam found _The Waltons_ soothing. Something about the pace of it, and the tranquil setting, seemed to instill a peace in him. When the end of each episode came, he would join in the voices bidding good night to each other as the lights went out around the old wooden house.\n\n\"Good night, Elizabeth. Good night, Mary Ellen.\"\n\nManus would join in too, although it was not clear to him whether Sam knew they were just playing along with a TV program or whether he was under the illusion that they too were tucked up under the eaves of that darkening house as the crickets cheeped and the wind chimes sounded and the signature tune swung up out of the darkness with its cheery trumpet and its rolling guitar, sounding its way into yet another episode. Sam was capable of watching three or four of them, back to back, of an afternoon. And Manus would take the opportunity to retreat to the far corner of the living room with a book, with the soft tones of John Boy's reminiscences adding a nostalgic undertow to whatever it was that he happened to be reading.\n\nWith Sam absorbed in the soft glow from the television, Manus slipped the twine binding off the manuscript and eased the great hunk of paper out of it. Picking the title page off with a licked finger and laying it to one side, he leaned down over the opening paragraph, with only the faintest stirring of curiosity. He was fully expecting to be disappointed. He had been sent so many books over the years, embarking on each one with great hope only to be let down. But he only had to read the first line to know that this one was different. By the end of the first page, he knew that this was the book he had been waiting for, the book that had existed in his imagination ever since the day he had packed his own novel into an envelope and sent it off. Always he had known that there was a book like this out there, and it was this knowledge that had stopped him from ever attempting to write again himself. Because unless you could write something as good as this, there was no point in even bothering.\n\nWhat this writer had achieved was something Manus had lusted after and longed for all his life. Not as a writer but as a reader; he had begun to wonder did it even exist, other than in his own longings. A book that rips a seam through the earth, throwing up out of the torn ground the beating wings of the human soul. What this writer had achieved was nothing other than the sublime.\n\nWhen Nora came by the next morning, she found him sitting at the dining table. Upside down in front of him, in a higgledy-piggledy pile, lay the seven hundred and eighty-seven pages he had spent the night reading. Seven hundred and eighty-seven pages and not a page too long! Not a single word wasted! Manus had spent the morning trying to compose his response. He had started draft after draft that he discarded in disgust, wasting page upon page of expensive headed paper before finally happening upon a formula of words that did some justice to the masterpiece he had just read. Posterity clanging in his ears, he was as certain as he could be that whatever he chose to say about this book would live on long after he was dead.\n\nHe was just signing his name to the letter when the doorbell rang. He looked round at the scrunched balls of paper that littered the surface of the table, at the empty coffee cups and the biscuit crumbs, at the Anglepoise lamp, still burning although it was nearly eleven. He folded his letter in three and slipped it into an envelope. Hastily, he inscribed the address of the post office box on the front of the envelope before rushing to open the door.\n\n\"Hi, Grandad.\"\n\nNora appeared to be dressed for a jog, in a T-shirt and leggings and a pair of battered old runners. Her hair was freshly washed and smelling of lemongrass. Her lips glistened with a slick of pink gloss. She had a pair of rolled-up yoga mats under her arm, and the sight of the yoga mats reminded Manus that she had promised to take him through a meditation practice. Nora was convinced that meditation would help him cope with the stresses of caring for Sam, even though Manus had tried to assure her that he didn't find it stressful caring for Sam.\n\n\"Hi, Sam,\" she said, raising her hand toward the window, where Sam was sitting in a chair in his pajamas, gazing out at the view. For once there was no cigarette in his hand.\n\n\"He hasn't had a cigarette all morning,\" whispered Manus. \"Normally by this hour he would have smoked half a dozen. Say nothing, but I think he may have forgotten that he's a smoker.\"\n\nNora was looking at him strangely.\n\n\"You look like you've been up all night!\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" he said vaguely, looking into her rather than at her. \"You see, I've happened upon something quite extraordinary.\"\n\nShe looked about her, as if the thing he spoke of might be an object, or an animal that was lurking under the table.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\nHe paused before he answered.\n\n\"A book,\" he said at last. The word came out all consonants, like a single note sounded with a guitar pick. \"A most extraordinary book.\"\n\nNora looked back at him with her big owl eyes.\n\n\"Did _you_ write this book?\"\n\n\"Lord, no! That's the whole point. Someone else did.\"\n\nNora was still staring at him.\n\n\"I don't understand.\"\n\n\"This,\" he said, patting the pile of pages on the table. \"This is the proof I've been waiting for.\"\n\nNora's eyes were wider now, if that were possible.\n\n\"Proof of what?\"\n\n\"Proof of everything!\" he said. \"Proof that I was right not to write a dozen mediocre novels. Proof that we are human, and that someone else has witnessed the lives we have lived. This book,\" he said, pausing for effect. \"This book is proof that we existed!\" (A phrase Manus had seen carved into the wooden wall of a reading nook in Shakespeare and Company in Paris; it had come back to him repeatedly as he was reading this book.)\n\nNora was smiling.\n\n\"That's perfect!\" she said, as if he had just pronounced the magic word. \"That's what meditation's all about. It's all about cultivating a deeper awareness of our own existence.\"\n\nHer smile was gently indulgent, like the smile of a good fairy. Not for the first time, Manus had the sense that Nora was actually much, much older than him, that she had lived for centuries and centuries and had a clear sight of things that he could only catch the most fleeting glimpses of.\n\n\"Now, are you ready?\" she asked.\n\nAlready she was rolling the mats out on the floor.\n\n\"I thought we'd start with some breathing exercises,\" she said, sitting down on the edge of a chair and propping her ankle on her knee as she removed one sneaker and the sock underneath it to reveal a broad, flat foot with blue-painted toenails. Swapping sides, she removed the other sneaker and the other sock and set both feet on the floor, her hands on her knees; the hands too had stubby blue nails.\n\n\"You might want to start by lying down.\"\n\n\"Easier said than done,\" he said as he looked at the ground. It seemed like a long way down.\n\nWith considerable creaking, he managed to lower himself slowly until he was crouched with his knees on the floor, the knuckles of his hands out in front of him to steady him, like a sprinter about to take off. Snatching his hands up off the ground, he allowed himself to fall to one side, landing heavily on one hip. From there it was an easy rollout to a horizontal position. The feeling of the hard floor under his back was surprisingly pleasant; it reminded him of his youth.\n\n\"I'm going to give you an eye pillow,\" said Nora. He had a sense of her hovering above him, and next thing he felt a soft weight on his eyelids, and a smell of dusty lavender.\n\n\"Now, I want you to start by taking a few really deep breaths. In through the nose and out through the mouth. In through the nose, out through the mouth...\"\n\nHe heard her voice moving away from him, and for the first time in a very long time, he forced himself to empty his mind of everything but the most basic mechanics of life. In through the nose, out through the mouth. In through the nose, out through the mouth...\n\nHe was aware of thoughts darting out like little fish from behind the rocks in his brain. Something Sam had said in the middle of the night, coming back to him now. The drip from the kitchen tap\u2014he must find someone to fix it. The book he had just read was a noise in his head, like the roar of a nearby waterfall.\n\n\"If your mind wanders, just bring it back to your breathing.\"\n\nBut he had lost the rhythm of it. The breath was stuck in his chest and he had to release it in a clumsy stumble out through his mouth. This breathing thing, it was trickier than it seemed. He made a fresh attempt, harnessing all his powers of concentration to control it.\n\nIn through the nose, out through the mouth, he chanted silently to himself, thinking ruefully of old dogs and new tricks as his thoughts marched off in a new direction. He made a halfhearted attempt to catch them, like a man chasing along a city pavement after a scrap of paper or a sweet wrapper that has been picked up by the wind and is dancing away from him, always just out of his reach.\n\nHe left Nora and Nando minding Sam while he went out to post his letter.\n\nNando had arrived early for his session. Nora seemed in no hurry to leave. When Manus left, they were sitting over a pot of tea while Nando told her all about his plans to convert an old shipping container into a home. Any other girl would have run a mile at the thought of such a plan, but much to Manus's amusement, Nora seemed charmed by it.\n\nThe meditation had rendered Manus curiously elated. He floated his car to a stop in a loading bay outside the post office and clambered out. He wasn't in the habit of parking his car so much as abandoning it anywhere it would fit. Generally a bus stop or a taxi rank, as the average parking space would not suffice.\n\nHe was inside the post office for five minutes perhaps, increasingly aware of an uncomfortably full bladder as a woman at the top of the queue arranged for a number of enormous parcels to be weighed and franked for posting to Latvia. The man ahead of him was buying savings stamps with the contents of his coin jar, and Manus waited with growing exasperation as the single post office worker counted out the coins. At last it was his turn. He approached the hatch and purchased a book of ten local stamps, fixing one carefully on to the front of the envelope before he moved away from the counter to hover in front of the postbox. With all the gravitas of a man voting in a historic election, he deposited the letter into the mouth of the box, listening out for the small thump from inside as it ended its fall.\n\nBuoyed up by the safe execution of his errand, he stepped out of the post office into the startling sunshine, only to find that his car had been clamped. The clampers were still on-site, a black man and a white man wearing matching uniforms. The white man was already climbing back into the truck, while the black man was straightening up after applying the clamp to the Jaguar's wheel. Poor sod, thought Manus, imagine the abuse he gets. He determined to be especially courteous to him.\n\n\"Gentlemen,\" said Manus, stepping forward with his hands up, to indicate that he intended them no harm. \"If you would be so good as to wait a moment until I've paid my fine, then you'll be free to take that contraption away with you again.\"\n\nIt was his full bladder he was thinking of, and the need to conclude this matter expeditiously. Taking his credit card out of his wallet, he handed it to the black man. The man had shiny ebony skin and a large, wide forehead. His bloodshot eyes were dull with the expectation of abuse.\n\n\"I wonder would you be so good as to do the honors for me?\"\n\nThe man furrowed his forehead, not sure what to make of what he was hearing.\n\n\"I don't carry a mobile phone,\" explained Manus apologetically. \"Generally your colleagues are kind enough to make the call for me.\"\n\nManus was on first-name terms with most of the city's clampers, and by and large they allowed him free range of the parking spots in town. This pair he had not encountered before. This pair must be new.\n\n\"It's all right,\" he said, nodding encouragingly. \"Just dial it in.\"\n\nShoulder up to his ear to hold the phone, the clamper put the call through. As he was reading off the credit card numbers, he kept glancing up at Manus, afraid that he was falling victim to some scam.\n\n\"Marvelous,\" said Manus, when the clamper came off the phone and returned the credit card. Once he had removed the clamp from the wheel, Manus handed him a ten-euro note, folded over lengthways so that it formed a taper.\n\n\"You're crazy,\" said the clamper, staring at the banknote he was being offered as if it were a lit fuse. \"You're completely crazy.\"\n\nHe was still shaking his head from side to side as he walked back to the truck. Manus pulled away from the curb, giving the clampers a long, low honk of his horn. The clampers beeped back, two jaunty beeps. That was another team that would never bother him again. For eighty euro, plus the ten-euro tip, he would enjoy free parking for the foreseeable future. For all of his eccentricities, Manus could be surprisingly sane when it came to money.\n\nOn the way home, he stopped to drop his already read newspaper in to his ex-wife and to use her lavatory. Deirdre claimed she couldn't afford a newspaper of her own, so Manus was in the habit of dropping his around to her once he'd finished with it. Even though the alimony he paid her was more than sufficient to finance the purchase of her own paper, it would have been less fun that way. It gave Deirdre such satisfaction to live off his hand-me-downs.\n\n\"Do you have time for a cup of tea?\" she asked him, without waiting for an answer. \"Here,\" she said, fanning a pile of what appeared to be takeaway brochures out on the table in front of him as he sat down. \"Have a look at those.\"\n\n\"What is it I'm looking at?\"\n\nHe opened one brochure to find lists of canap\u00e9s. According to the lists, you could have ham-hock terrine and tuna sushi rolls and smoked salmon blinis with horseradish cr\u00e8me fraiche. You could have mini-beefburgers and wild mushroom arancini and miniature onion and gruy\u00e8re tarts, all at what seemed to Manus an eye-watering price. And the most surprising part of the whole thing was that of all the people in all the world, his ex-wife seemed to him the very least likely to splash out on a raft of wildly expensive canap\u00e9s. There was something about this that didn't add up.\n\n\"They're from the caterers,\" she said, with a girlish lilt to her voice. \"For my party.\"\n\nLike a bell ringing in a far-off room, Manus had a faint recollection of this topic being raised before.\n\n\"Ah,\" he said, \"your party.\" Hoping this would prompt her to offer up some more clues. But she was busy ferrying china cups and saucers to the table. Then a matching milk jug and sugar bowl, and a shop-bought Swiss roll. There was something faintly comical about the way she went about assembling her quaint little tea party. She reminded him of a character out of Beatrix Potter\u2014an upright cat, or a hedgehog dressed in human clothes. With her great white eyebrows spilling down over her eternally surprised eyes and her two loops of white hair hanging like long ears on either side of her face (there were a few white hairs visible on her upper lip that he couldn't help but notice), she could even have been a very large old rabbit.\n\nShe set the teapot down on the table and sat down heavily in front of it. Lifting the lid, she gave the tea a stir with the handle of a knife.\n\nManus turned his cup right side up to reveal layers of tannin build-up on the tender white china inside. The tea set had belonged to his mother, but he had left it behind when he went, thinking it petty to claim it. Clearly, it hadn't been washed since. Deirdre did not believe in washing teacups, or teapots (or salad bowls, for that matter, or omelet pans). She believed it destroyed the flavor to wash them. She was adamant on wiping only.\n\n\"Remind me,\" asked Manus. \"When is your party?\"\n\n\"Well, my birthday's on the Friday,\" she said. \"So I thought we'd have the party on the Saturday.\"\n\nShe had never been a birthday person before. All the time he'd been married to her, she had refused to celebrate her birthday. In an attempt to overcome this prohibition, Manus had once made the mistake of throwing a surprise party for her. She had turned on her heel and walked back out of the room, furious that her friends had seen her without her makeup.\n\n\"You never cease to surprise me,\" he said. (She never ceased to _amuse_ him, with her childlike passions.) \"Why now?\"\n\nShe looked at him for a long time before she answered, her hands cupping the hot teapot as if it were a crystal ball.\n\n\"I'm going to be eighty. And the closer I get to it, the lighter I feel in my heart. For the first time in my life, I have a great desire to celebrate.\"\n\nNever had it occurred to Manus to envy his wife, but it occurred to him now. It occurred to him that she had nothing in the world to be worrying about. Her work on this earth was done.\n\n\"I've spent so many years worrying about Macdara. I've worried myself sick about Acushla, because she's so soft. I've even worried about Alma\u2014her hardness was such a worry to me. But a funny thing happened to me recently. I realized they're not my responsibility anymore. Their lives are their own to live and their troubles are their own, and there's nothing more I can do.\"\n\nManus didn't like to tell her this, but he had had the same thought many, many years ago.\n\n\"Their lives will go on,\" he said, \"long after you and I are gone.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, \"I can see that now. Funny how I could never see that before.\"\n\n\"Let me offer you another comforting thought,\" he said. \"In a hundred years' time, nobody will even remember who any of us were.\"\n\nHe knew this would amuse her, and it did. This was the secret of their friendship, it seemed to him. The fact that they were amused by the same things.\n\n\"They'll remember you,\" she said, \"because of your book. Whereas my art was, by its very nature, transient.\"\n\nHe shrugged. He had never placed the same value on his book as other people had. He couldn't really see what all the fuss was about, couldn't see what made it stand out from anything else. The book he had read last night, now that was a different matter. The shadow of it stretched across his day like the shadow of a mighty mountain. He kept going back to it in his mind...\n\nDeirdre lifted the teapot and Manus held his cup out to her to receive the tea. He poured himself some milk and gave it a stir, leaning down to slurp the first mouthful, even though he knew this would annoy her. The annoyances were a part of it, this imperfect intimacy that existed between them. Like fond siblings, they were familiar with each other's every foible.\n\n\"After everything that's happened,\" she said, \"I feel it's an opportune time for a gathering of the tribe.\"\n\n\"What exactly do you have in mind?\" he asked, with some suspicion.\n\n\"Just a little family get-together. I thought it would be nice to gather the four generations together under the one roof. A meeting of the clan.\"\n\nThey lined up in front of Manus's eyes, two by two, as if they were boarding the Ark. He pictured himself and Sam coming up the front steps, then Alma and Mick, arm in arm and laughing, followed by Nora, who he saw walking alongside Nando. Now Connie and Emmet and the two boys, and after them, Acushla and Liam, side by side but not touching. At the back of the line was Macdara, all on his own. Why did the thought of it give him a shivery sense of foreboding? He felt as if someone was walking on his grave.\n\n\"We'll open up the double rooms,\" Deirdre was saying, her eyes sparkling with an intent that was almost sinister. \"We'll have champagne first, and canap\u00e9s, and then everybody will have to perform a party piece, even the little boys.\"\n\nManus found his suspicions growing, a feeling of unease that he could not explain. For a moment he wondered if perhaps Deirdre was planning some kind of ritual massacre? He had a vision of his entire family lying in lifeless puddles on the floor of her drawing room, while a toxic gas hovered in the air and she stood by the fireplace and sang \"The Last Rose of Summer.\" That had always been her party piece. Even now he could hear her singing it in her huge voice, a voice that could fill every inch of any room, no matter how large.\n\n\"Why am I getting a bad feeling about this?\" he asked her.\n\nShe stared at him with pantomime innocence, her spiky eyelashes blinking away at him.\n\n\"Why would you say that?\"\n\n\"Because I know you,\" he growled. \"And I know when you're up to something.\"\n\n\"I am not!\"\n\n\"Oh, yes you are.\"\n\n\"Oh, no I'm not.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes you are,\" he said, determined to have the last word. He knew her well enough to know that she was up to something. But what it might be he could not for the life of him have guessed.\n\nThey were always great friends.\n\nThey were friends before ever they were married and they remained friends afterward, strange as that might seem to some. \"Isn't it funny the way we've ended up being such good friends?\" she said to him once. It was the day of Connie's wedding and he had insisted on walking her out of the church behind the bride and groom, leaving Sam to trail behind with Macdara. \"Well, lass,\" he had said, holding out his arm for her to take. \"We should present a united front as grandparents.\" When the truth was that he wanted to save her the indignity of walking down the aisle alone. \"You're a good friend to me,\" she said to him later that evening, when he sat down beside her to take a rest from the dancing. \"You might even be my best friend,\" she added with mild disgust. \"God help us all.\"\n\nHe was twenty when he met her. A medical school dropout, he had managed to find a job with an advertising agency to tide him over until he fulfilled his dream of becoming a writer, a dream he never doubted would come to pass. Deirdre was seventeen and fresh out of Ennis. With her elocution-lesson accent and her thick black hair worn loose down her back, she was on the run from her mother's small-town ambitions for her, ambitions she was hell-bent on frustrating. They met in McDaids on a wet summer Saturday and Manus offered to buy her a drink. \"I'll have a brandy,\" she said boldly. He used to tease her about that afterward. Who drinks brandy on a summer's afternoon? Only a girl just up from the country!\n\n\"Your mother and I always had great affection for one another,\" Manus told Acushla when she came to him once looking for answers. She was wondering, not for the first time, whether to leave her husband. \"The secret to my relationship with your mother is that we never took each other too seriously,\" he told her. \"No matter what happened, we were always able to laugh about it.\" Looking at Acushla, he could see that laughter was the last thing on her mind. You would think, by looking at her, that she had forgotten how to laugh.\n\n\"Macushla,\" he had said, resting his hand on her thin arm. \"Macushla, my blue-eyed Macushla.\" (It was Manus who had the naming of her, and he had named her with that song in mind, a song he sang to her often when she was a child.) \"Macushla,\" he said. \"Macushla,\" and with his words he was deliberately evoking that beautiful old melody in both of their heads. \"Do you think you might try, for a change, not to take everything so very seriously?\"\n\nShe had smiled at him then, through her tears, and she had promised him that she would try. But Manus didn't hold out much hope for her. He had seen too much of life to think that there was any hope of a person changing their colors once they were cast. Acushla had been born with a deadly appetite for battle, a battle that she had waged first on her sister and then on her husband. Now at least it seemed to Manus that she had found a fight that was worthy of her. It was highly amusing to Manus, if not to Acushla, to think of her as a feminist icon. He was very much cheered not just by his younger daughter's belated blossoming, but by the notion that life still had it within its power to spring him the odd surprise.\n\nIt was one of the more unwelcome things about getting older, the sense of certainty that had begun to plague him. The stories of people's lives seemed at times so obvious to him, it was as if the whole world was a book that he had reached the end of, while everybody else was still reading. A sad and lonely feeling; there was nothing that gave him more pleasure than encountering a last-minute plot twist.\n\nIn Alma and Mick's wounded reunion Manus saw a beautiful logic, and it seemed to him that in his failure to foresee it, he had neglected to factor in the virulent strain of monogamy that affected all the women of his ex-wife's lineage. In Acushla's reconciliation with Liam, he recognized the same fatal strain of loyalty, one that he suspected Connie had inherited as well.\n\n\"I'm afraid we're one-man women,\" Deirdre said to him once, stating it as a sad fact, when he had asked her whether she ever saw herself marrying again. He was reminded of a story she used to tell the children when they were small. A story from her own childhood, about a swan whose mate was shot by a poacher; the widowed swan spent the rest of her days going up and down the river alone. \"Swans mate for life, you see,\" Deirdre would say. \"If a swan loses its mate, it will live out its days alone rather than ever mate again.\" Only now does Manus see that in leaving Deirdre, he doomed her to spending the rest of her life alone. A fate she bore with silent dignity, just like the swan in her story. It seems to Manus very sad that he never saw that until now.\n\nOf all the surprises that lie in wait around the corner, Manus prays that one of them is reserved for Macdara, but he fears that this is not the case. He sees Macdara living out his life alone, and he understands that Macdara's self-imposed celibacy is the result of his own highly publicized sexuality. If Manus has one regret, it is the hurt that he caused to Macdara. That's the one thing he would like to be able to go back and change.\n\n\"It wasn't you that put Macdara off sex,\" Deirdre said to him recently. \"It was all that rugby.\"\n\nThey were walking along a country lane, the hedgerows spilling over with life and color. Ahead of them the coffin of an old friend was being borne along the road from the church to the graveyard by a slow-moving hearse. The friend had been a contemporary of Deirdre's at the Abbey. He had stood best man to Manus at their wedding. Now he was dead and they were walking after his coffin.\n\n\"Poor Macdara,\" said Deirdre. \"He never recovered from being forced to play all that rugby.\"\n\nManus smiled at the comfort his ex-wife never ceased to find in these tangents of hers, tangents that for all their whimsy still contained somewhere within them the seeds of some grain of truth. It was true that Macdara had been traumatized by the smelly, sweaty-fleshed contact of the school scrum; it had produced in him a distaste for physical intimacy of any kind.\n\n\"Do you think he's lonely?\" asked Manus, looking down at his shoes as he walked, one foot appearing in his line of vision, then the other. He was trying to keep step with Deirdre, walking deliberately slowly in order to do so.\n\n\"Oh, no more than any of us,\" she said. \"Perhaps even less. Don't forget, Macdara chooses to be alone.\"\n\nAs they took their places round the open grave, a very old priest recited an inaudible prayer.\n\n\"Hypocrisy of the highest order,\" hissed Deirdre into Manus's ear. \"Sure, he always held that the notion of God was a nonsense.\"\n\nManus turned his face in order to whisper back.\n\n\"Hypocrisy, my dear, is the medium in which we move.\"\n\nA non-believer himself, Manus was nonetheless a great fan of Christian pageantry. In particular he was a sucker for a rousing Christian hymn. There was nothing quite so comforting to Manus as a good Protestant hymn.\n\n\"Well, lass,\" he said, as they began to move away from the grave. He held his arm out for her to fall in step with him, noticing with surprise that she had tears in her eyes. For a moment he thought that perhaps it was the sun that had made her eyes water, but when she spoke, her voice was affected too.\n\n\"Do you know what just occurred to me,\" she said, reaching out to grab his arm as she stumbled on the uneven ground.\n\n\"What?\"\n\nShe gazed up at him with a fierce look on her face. \"Now that Donal is gone, you're the only one left who remembers me for the girl I once was. And I'm the only one who remembers what you were like when you were young.\"\n\nThe funerals were coming hard and fast. Hardly a day went by but Manus spotted someone he knew in the death notices. Today it was Freddy Noble whose death was being announced. Beloved husband of Margaret, said the death notice. Deeply regretted by his devoted daughters Michaela and Ursula, his sons-in-law Arthur and Alan, granddaughters Isobel, Amy and Emily, and his many nieces and nephews. _Ar dheis D\u00e9 go raibh a anam d\u00edlis_.\n\nManus laughed.\n\n\"No mention of poor Patricia,\" he said to Sam.\n\n\"Patricia,\" said Sam. He appeared to be giving the name great thought. \"Patricia and her cassoulet.\"\n\n\"Forty years,\" said Manus. \"Freddy's been living with Patricia for forty years, and not a mention of her in the death notice.\"\n\nAs he spread a thin layer of marmalade on his toast, he was smiling to himself at the endlessly bizarre turns of human behavior. He was wondering to himself, fleetingly, whether Deirdre might expect a mention in his own death notice. Surely not, he thought, although technically she was still his wife. Manus had no doubt that Deirdre would outlive him. He was always telling her she would live to be a hundred, and for some reason this seemed to irritate her. She took it as an insult, which was why he persisted in mentioning it.\n\nManus would have liked to go to Freddy's funeral. He and Freddy had been in boarding school together, and when Manus sold his book, it was Freddy who had looked the contracts over for him. Often over the years he and Sam had been invited to eat with Freddy and Patricia in their little house down by the Dodder. (Manus and Sam could of course be counted upon not to be judgmental about Freddy's domestic arrangements.) Patricia was a terrific cook and a priceless mimic, and Manus had many a happy memory of nights around their table, replete with Patricia's famous cassoulet. Yes, Manus would have liked to be at Freddy's funeral, if only to see how the wife and daughters would handle the presence of Patricia. That would certainly be worth seeing, only Manus had to bring Sam to a doctor's appointment.\n\n\"Sam,\" he said. \"We should start getting ready. We have to be at Dr. Boylan's by eleven.\" Manus had been careful not to mention the appointment until now, aware that it would only rattle Sam to know of it too far in advance.\n\n\"Dr. Boylan,\" said Sam, flustered already. \"What time do we have to be there?\"\n\nHe rose from the table, unaware that his shirt was still open, the buttons unbuttoned and his white vest visible underneath.\n\n\"Eleven,\" said Manus. \"Don't worry, we have plenty of time.\"\n\nHe came around the table and drew Sam's shirt closed. Fastening the buttons, he took care to keep his hand movements as brusque and businesslike as possible. Sam had developed a tendency to mistake some of Manus's more innocent ministrations for sexual advances, with the result that Manus was wary of touching him. He was afraid to put his hand on Sam's arm, lest Sam take this as a come-on, afraid to stroke Sam's hair lest this should lead Sam to stroke him back. Sam's illness seemed to have had the effect of stoking his sexual appetite and freeing him of his inhibitions, whereas on Manus it had the opposite effect. Manus didn't like making love to Sam anymore, or being made love to by him. It didn't feel right, not when he couldn't be sure that Sam knew what he was doing. This wasn't something Manus felt he could talk to anyone about. Just another of the many little lonelinesses he had acquired since Sam first started to get sick.\n\n\"It's hot out there,\" said Manus. \"You'll hardly need a jacket.\"\n\nSelecting for himself a battered panama hat from the shelf in the cupboard, he set it on his head and checked for his keys and his wallet before ushering Sam out into the hall and closing the door behind them.\n\nAs they waited for the lift, Sam was anxious, impatiently watching the numbers on the display above the door.\n\n\"What time do we have to be there?\" he asked.\n\n\"Eleven,\" said Manus. \"We've loads of time.\"\n\n\"We've loads of time,\" said Sam, as if Manus was the one who needed convincing.\n\nWhen the lift arrived, there was someone already inside. A very obese young man, Sam and Manus only just about managed to squash in beside him. The lift doors closed and Manus noticed that Sam was humming the Oompa Loompa tune from _Charlie and the Chocolate Factory_ ; he prayed the young man would not recognize it. Painstakingly slowly they moved down through the six floors, arriving at last on the ground floor. The lift doors opened and Manus and Sam were forced to step out into the lobby to allow the young man to emerge. They got back in for the last leg of their journey, down to the basement garage. Sam was still humming as they stepped out of the lift and walked toward the car.\n\n\"Now,\" said Manus, opening the passenger door for Sam. He waited until Sam was safely in, then went round and climbed into the driver's seat. He started the engine, checking the petrol gauge to see if they would need to stop. The needle showed the tank a quarter full. That would get them to the doctor's surgery and back, if not much farther. Turning the radio on to a classical music station, Manus swung out of his parking place (the spaces on either side of him were empty, because no one could fit their car in beside his for fear of scraping it). He put his foot to the floor so as to make it up the ramp, and an unholy noise erupted from the back of the car, as if tin cans had been attached to the bumper.\n\n\"Damn it,\" said Manus, and he stopped the car at the top of the ramp, wrenching the handbrake up and hauling himself out. He went round the back of the car, stooping to look underneath it.\n\nThe fender was hanging off. It was clinging by one dull and neglected chrome arm on to the round rump of the car. When Manus touched it, it clattered to the ground, skittering away down the ramp. He inched down the slope to retrieve it, moving sideways and with great care, like a skier caught in deep snow. As he bent down to pick up the fender, he heard a noise that surprised him, a noise like something snapping. The last thing he saw was his car rolling backward down the ramp toward him. The last thing he heard was the orchestra of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, conducted by Sir Neville Marriner, with their beautiful rendition of \"Sheep May Safely Graze.\" The last thing he thought as he lay on the ground with the weight of his own car rolling over him was how curious it was that he of all people should be brought back into the fold in this way at the end.\n\n**MacEntee** , Manus (Dublin, and formerly of Kildangan, Co. Kildare)\u201426 June 2013 (tragically), in his 83rd year. Deeply regretted by his partner Sam, his wife of many years Deirdre (n\u00e9e O'Sullivan), his daughters Alma and Acushla and his son Macdara, his sons-in-law Michael and Liam Collins, his granddaughters Constance and Nora, his grandson-in-law Emmet and his great-grandsons Ernest and Oscar. Requiem Mass at Star of the Sea Church in Sandymount on Friday at 11:00, followed by a cremation service at Mount Jerome Cemetery.\n\n# Macdara\n\n\"I always thought he wanted to be buried at sea,\" said Acushla.\n\n\"You can't be serious,\" said Alma.\n\n\"That's what he always said he wanted,\" said Acushla, her words rising up and down the scale like notes on a piano.\n\n\"He said to it me too,\" said Deirdre. \"Many a time he told me he'd like a sea burial.\"\n\nThey were waiting for the undertaker, the four of them sitting in the hush of the waiting room\u2014they had turned down the offer of a home visit in favor of neutral ground.\n\n\"I did hear him mention it once or twice,\" said Alma, \"but I always assumed it was a joke. He used to say he'd like to be eaten by a crocodile, but I think it's safe to assume that was a joke too.\"\n\nNobody replied. Alma looked from one to the other of them, her eyes wide and unblinking as if to say, _surely_ you agree with me?\n\nMacdara coughed, to break the silence.\n\n\"I don't remember him ever showing any interest in sailing,\" said Acushla. \"Does anyone remember him ever showing any interest in sailing?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Deirdre quickly. \"Just sailors.\"\n\nMacdara leaned forward.\n\n\"If it's what he wanted, we could always ask.\"\n\nThe sound of his own voice was a surprise to him as much as it was to anyone else.\n\n\"We could always ask them,\" he said tentatively, \"whether it's possible?\"\n\nAs soon as he'd finished speaking, he sank farther into his chair, pulling his chin down on to his chest and his shoulders up to his ears. Alma leaned her head back against the wall, closing her eyes with a sigh, while Acushla propped an elbow on an elegantly crossed knee, wobbling her head encouragingly. His mother gave him a discreet wink, as if they were bridge partners and she was communicating something to him about their next move. Macdara was just on the point of venturing to speak again when the undertaker came into the room. He advanced with his arm extended to greet the grieving widow, who was already rising from her chair to accept his condolences.\n\n\"She's describing herself as his _wife_ ,\" Alma hissed as they were leaving. Her mother had disappeared back into the dark recesses of the funeral home in search of a bathroom.\n\n\"Well, technically she _is_ his wife,\" said Acushla, moving through the door Macdara was holding open for her. \"They were never divorced.\"\n\nThe three siblings formed a loose circle out on the pavement, assailed by a barrage of light and heat, along with the smell of chips from the takeaway next door.\n\n\"Sweet Jesus,\" said Alma. \"This presents us with a bit of a diplomatic situation.\"\n\n\"What do we do?\" asked Acushla, reaching up with a perfectly manicured hand to pull her sunglasses down over her eyes. \"You don't think she'll want to sit in the front pew in the church, do you?\"\n\n\"I don't see any indication of her taking a backseat. As far as she's concerned, she's the grieving widow.\"\n\n\"So, where does that leave poor Sam?\"\n\n\"Right where she always wanted him,\" said Alma. \"At the mercy of her generosity.\"\n\n\"Oh, pray,\" said Acushla. \"Pray she doesn't use this as an opportunity to get her revenge on Sam. I wouldn't put it past her to pull rank on him now that she can.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid we'll just have to make sure that doesn't happen,\" said Alma.\n\nAnd they all fell silent again as they contemplated the rocky path that lay ahead of them. Macdara turned to see the undertaker ushering their mother out the door of the funeral home. Her hair had come loose of its moorings and her cape hung lopsided off her stooped shoulders. As she squinted into the glare of the sunshine, Macdara was struck for the first time by how old she had become. She had gone and got old without him even noticing.\n\nIt was always his mother Macdara was closest to. Ever since he was small, his mother had been his silent ally, the champion of his every idiosyncrasy. There was no aberration Macdara could adopt, no whim of his that his mother would not indulge. From his refusal ever to eat meat that had any bones in it, or fruit that had any seeds in it (apples, pears, grapes\u2014Macdara had an unnatural fear of their offspring growing inside his belly), to his insistence on wearing wellies every day to school, his mother bent to every turn of his personality. Macdara's clothes had to be washed a dozen times before he wore them because he hated the feel of new fabric. He had to have flannel sheets because he found cotton too scratchy. His shoes had to be weathered by the shoemaker, and his hair had to be cut at home because he would not go to the barber's. On the rare occasions that Deirdre resolved to trim his fingernails, she would always have to ring the neighbors first, to warn them not to call the Guards when they heard the screams. When Macdara was sick, as he often was, his mother never forced him to go to school, allowing him to spend the day in her bed instead, reading detective stories. Some days he was allowed to stay in her bed even when he wasn't sick. Some days he was allowed to stay in her bed just because it was raining, or because it was cold, or because he didn't want to go to school.\n\n\"It's very hard for Macdara to go to school,\" his mother used to say, a phrase that his sisters pounced on and repeated ad nauseam. \"It's very hard for Macdara to go to school,\" they would mimic, bobbling their sleek little heads from side to side as they performed the imitation. And Macdara would skulk away, withdrawing further and further into his own silent world, a world that only his mother seemed to understand. Because the truth was that it _was_ very hard for Macdara to go to school. There were days when it was hard for Macdara to go out of the house. He was like a soft-shell crab, or a turtle without a shell. He seemed to have been born without any of the body armor that other people use to survive in the world.\n\nMacdara's father was baffled by him. With his boyish enthusiasm for life and his eternally optimistic view of human nature, Manus was at a loss to understand Macdara's fears, fears that were born not of experience but of some pathological sensitivity his father was not wired to comprehend. But while another man might have forced him to engage in blood sports and eat spare ribs with his bare hands, while another man would no doubt have argued that Macdara's weaknesses were all due to his mother's indulgence and that it was his duty as a father to provide a counterweight, Manus was happy to let Macdara off. Like a dog and cat who are forced to share the same house, Manus and Macdara managed to live alongside each other quite happily for years, while ignoring each other almost entirely. When his father moved out, Macdara was surprised by the size of the hole he left in the house, a hole that was filled by the sound of his mother shouting, and Alma slamming doors and Acushla's heartbroken sobbing.\n\nMacdara had pitied his sisters then, because their loss was so much greater than his. And he pitied them again now, because they had lost the parent they loved more. For his part, Macdara couldn't help but be relieved that it was his father and not his mother who had been the first to go.\n\nIt was his sisters who told him.\n\nThey appeared at the studio door, Alma with her head hanging down and Acushla hovering behind her. Macdara noticed straightaway how pale they both looked.\n\nAlma took a deep breath in through her mouth. She had a strange half-smile on her face, more of a grimace than a smile, and her eyes were all red.\n\n\"Macdara,\" she said. \"I'm afraid Dad's had an accident.\"\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" said Macdara. And he pictured the scene. He saw his father's car standing at a jaunty angle in the middle of a major intersection with smoke coming out of all its orifices as a distraught woman motorist inspected the damage to her new Mercedes. \"I hope there isn't too much damage.\"\n\nHis sisters looked at each other and it occurred to Macdara that they did seem afraid. They seemed afraid of _him_.\n\n\"Why are you _afraid_?\" he asked, seizing on that one word Alma had used, over all others. A word with the implication of something that was still to come, something that could even now be prevented. \"You both look like you've seen a ghost.\"\n\nNeither of them spoke, and all of a sudden Macdara too was very afraid.\n\nHe held up his right index finger.\n\n\"Don't tell me,\" he said, taking sudden command of the situation. \"Whatever it is, this thing that you were about to tell me. I don't want you to say it.\"\n\nHe turned away from them then, and walked back into the studio, leaving his sisters standing in the open doorway. Into his bedroom he went, and sat down on the end of the bed, with his hands cupping his knees. His mind was blank but his breath was coming hard and fast. He concentrated all of his attention on getting his breath back.\n\nAfter they'd been to the undertaker's, they returned to Macdara's studio to draft the death notice. Leaning their upper bodies in through the open door with their feet still planted outside in the garden, they called to Macdara's mind a pair of explorers surveying the interior walls of a cave.\n\n\"Come on in,\" he said to them, gathering his papers up off the table and removing stray clothes from the chairs. \"Sit down. Make yourselves at home.\"\n\nHe filled a jug of water from the tap and poured some lemon barley cordial into it. He set three tumblers on the table, and out of the kitchen press he took a pack of Nice biscuits, arranging a generous supply of them in a wide fan on a willow-pattern plate.\n\n\"Why do I get the feeling we're in an Enid Blyton novel?\" said Alma, slipping her shoes off as she sprawled in a chair. \"I feel like I'm one of the Famous Five.\"\n\n\"The Secret Seven,\" said Macdara, and despite the circumstances, he was aware of a feeling of great pride bubbling up in him, pride at having his sisters as guests here in his little house. \"I think the Secret Seven are the ones you're thinking of,\" he said happily. \"They were the ones who had a den.\" (When Macdara was a kid, he used to read those books over and over again\u2014it was the Five Find-Outers and Dog who were his favorites.)\n\n\"I was a Nancy Drew girl myself,\" said Alma, and to Macdara's great pleasure, she reached out for a biscuit and began to nibble at it. Her face was puffy with what Macdara recognized as the effects of medication. Her figure plumper as a result of all the gourmet meals Mick had been feeding her. A softness to her that had not been there before. For the first time in his life, Macdara was not scared of her.\n\nDoyenne of a hundred fund-raising committees, Acushla took a pad of paper out of her handbag and a freshly sharpened pencil. Flipping the cover of the pad back on itself and positioning the pencil expectantly over the blank page, she looked up at the others.\n\n\"Okay, where do we start?\"\n\n\"MacEntee,\" said Alma, settling back into her chair and closing her eyes as she began to dictate the copy. \"Manus. In his eighty-third year. As the result of a tragic accident...\"\n\nAcushla's head was bowed down sideways over her page, the tip of her tongue probing the corner of her mouth. The sound of her pencil scratching away at the surface of the paper.\n\n\"Deeply regretted by...\"\n\nMacdara waited to see what Alma would say next.\n\n\"... his loving partner Sam.\"\n\n_Scratch scratch scratch_ went Acushla's pencil.\n\n\"His ex-wife Deirdre...\"\n\nAcushla looked up.\n\n\"She's not going to like that.\"\n\nAlma threw her hands out in exasperation. Her poor fingers made Macdara wince. He couldn't look at them without feeling pain.\n\n\"We can't say 'wife,' as if they were still married,\" said Alma.\n\n\"We can't say 'ex-wife' either,\" said Acushla back to her.\n\n\"I've a suggestion,\" said Macdara.\n\nThey both turned to look at him, as if they had only just become aware of his presence.\n\n\"How about 'wife of many years'?\"\n\nAcushla froze as she considered it. Alma dipped her head like a conductor guiding an orchestra into a quiet section of a symphony.\n\n\"Do you know,\" she said, raising her head again. \"That could work.\"\n\n\"It's brilliant,\" said Acushla, scratching away furiously at the page. \"Absolutely brilliant.\"\n\n\"It's beautiful,\" said Alma. \"Although since we're being such sticklers for detail, I'm not sure it's entirely accurate to use the word 'tragedy.' It seems to me that 'a tragedy in his eighty-third year' is a bit of a contradiction in terms.\"\n\nMacdara brought his shoulders together to make himself smaller, and leaned in over the table.\n\n\"But it _is_ tragic,\" he said, fixing upon it as a point of fact.\n\nAlma raised her eyebrows as she waited for him to explain.\n\n\"By its very definition it's a tragedy. The death of a man because of a fatal flaw is defined as a tragedy.\"\n\n\"I don't understand,\" said Alma. \"What's the fatal flaw?\"\n\n\"Don't you see? That stupid car was the fatal flaw.\"\n\nAlma smiled and nodded. Something dawning in her eyes, something almost like respect.\n\n\"So we're sticking with 'tragedy'?\" asked Acushla, anxious to move on.\n\n\"Absolutely,\" said Alma. \"A tragedy it is.\"\n\nA tragedy was what it felt like to Macdara at times. The enormity of it taking him by the throat and tightening its grip on him until his eyes were watering and he could hardly breathe. It was in those moments that it seemed to Macdara that the world had stopped its turning, and it was hard for him to imagine that any other human being had ever been bereaved quite like he had been bereaved. That anybody else's death could ever have had quite such a profound effect on the physical world, altering the taste of all the foods in it, distorting the look of a room when he walked into it, and bending the scale of the streets and the buildings outside so that everything he looked at appeared strangely but inexplicably wrong. Only the sounds of the world were unchanged, the noise of the traffic and the exploding roar of the crowd from the stadium, the babble of the football fans gathered outside the pub after the match had finished. Macdara felt like shouting at them as he walked past, \"What are you laughing about? Did you not hear? My father _died_.\"\n\nAt other moments, it seemed to him the most ordinary thing in the world that his father should have died. Doesn't everybody die, after all? Why should his father be any different? In those moments it seemed to Macdara that it was a mistake to make too much of a fuss of this one ordinary old death. It seemed unseemly to make too much of it.\n\n\"At my age you don't get sad when someone old dies,\" said his mother. \"At my age you see it as a cause for celebration when someone of Manus's age dies.\"\n\nThey were all sitting around his mother's table, eating an Irish stew that a neighbor had dropped in. Nora had heated it up while Connie set the table. It was only when he began eating that Macdara discovered how hungry he was.\n\n\"You don't really mean that,\" said Acushla, looking at their mother with brimming eyes. Connie too had tears in her eyes. The expression on Nora's face was more like disappointment. Even Alma appeared shocked.\n\n\"Manus lived a long and rich life,\" said Deirdre, speaking with slow emphasis. \"He had the good fortune to be whisked away before falling prey to decrepitude. Something you should all get down on your knees and give thanks for, since you're the ones who would have ended up looking after him.\"\n\nBlinking her dry eyes, she stared brazenly back at them all, and for the first time in his life, Macdara saw something in her that he did not like. A ruthlessness that he'd never seen before. He found himself wondering when it had crept in.\n\nMacdara's father's death was reported in all the papers, as you might expect, and the TV news even ran a pre-prepared obituary. How long had it lain in wait? Macdara wondered, before experiencing a pang of something not unlike jealousy at the thought that there would be no obituaries to mark the passing of his own outwardly unremarkable life. Unless? Unless. Macdara still harbored an intermittent but ardent hope that he might yet achieve something remarkable with his life.\n\nIt was in this spirit of hope that he had sent his book off to his father. Taking every care to preserve his anonymity, he had printed the manuscript off and parceled it up, despite the clamor of voices in his head telling him he was a fool. He had walked to the post office, tormented by those voices. Even as he was standing in the queue, they would not fall silent.\n\nHe's going to hate it. This rubbish? Sure it's hardly even literate... Self-indulgent crap... What kind of delusional freak would think this worth publishing? What a shameful waste of paper and ink... You'd have been better off using the paper to wipe your arse... And to think, you could have been out doing something useful with your time, instead of writing this pathetic crap. Pathetic, pathetic, pathetic.\n\nTen, twelve times a night Macdara woke in the grip of a sickening panic, remembering with a physical lurch of his heart his wildly reckless act. What on earth had he been thinking, sending the book to his father? He would roll over on to his tummy in agony, burying his face in the pillow to smother the thought. He would contemplate for one wonderful moment the possibility that he had only dreamed that he had posted it, abandoning that fantasy with a despair that was almost hysterical. He would bang his forehead off the pillow over and over again, punishing himself for his own foolishness. Eventually he would turn over on to his back again, talking himself back to sleep with a flock of familiar reassurances, like sheep you might count.\n\nAt least he had not put his name to the book, that's what he told himself. There was no way his father could have known that he was the author. His father probably hadn't even had time to read the book before he died. If there was any comfort to be found for Macdara in Manus's sudden death, it was in the realization that in all likelihood he must have died before he got a chance to read his book.\n\nThey decided to wake him in the funeral home. It was not the custom to have a wake at home anymore, not in the city at least.\n\n\"That's a country thing,\" said Alma.\n\n\"I don't like the idea of having the body in the house,\" said Acushla. \"It gives me the creeps.\"\n\n\"Think of all the tea we'd have to make,\" said Deirdre. \"We'd have to give people _sandwiches_.\"\n\nMacdara agreed that on balance it was best to wake his father in the funeral home.\n\nIn death, his father looked like somebody else. A generic dead person, all barely covered bones and waxy skin. With his eyelids closed forever on his magnificent eyes, he could have been anybody.\n\n\"Who _is_ that?\" asked Ernie, eyes wide with awe as he was led up to the coffin.\n\n\"That's your great-grandfather,\" whispered Connie.\n\nMacdara could hear Ernie sucking this information into his chest in a raspy asthmatic wheeze.\n\n\"Here,\" said Connie, rooting around in her handbag, \"have a puff of your inhaler.\"\n\nOscar was up on tiptoes, trying to see over the rim of the coffin. Connie pushed him and his brother toward their grandmother and stood for a moment by herself at the head of the coffin. Macdara noticed her hands fluttering loose by her sides. It occurred to him that she was wondering whether she dared touch the corpse or not. As he watched, she placed a hand on the edge of the coffin for a moment before snatching it away.\n\n\"I can't believe he's gone,\" she said, sitting down beside Macdara. He could feel the swell of her sorrow rising and falling in her. She allowed herself to tilt a little to the side, so that her shoulder rested against his. He reached out a hand and patted her on the arm. He couldn't think of a thing to say.\n\n\"It's okay,\" said Connie. \"There's nothing you can say.\"\n\nOn the far side of the coffin, Connie's children had settled themselves on chairs between their grandparents, while Deirdre sat alone at the end of the row. Acushla was feeding the boys wine gums, dispensing the sweets straight out of her handbag one by one, while Liam tapped at the face of his phone. It occurred to Macdara that Connie's children would forever after associate the taste of wine gums with their great-grandfather's funeral. Those were the kind of things that children remembered.\n\nThe door of the room opened and out of the patch of daylight Mick and Alma materialized. Macdara noticed how Mick moved with practiced ease, working his way along the row of chairs to greet Acushla first, then Liam and finally Deirdre. Coming round the base of the coffin, he gave Connie a kiss on the cheek.\n\n\"Macdara,\" he said. \"I'm so sorry.\" He took Macdara's hand and grasped the flesh of his upper arm.\n\n\"It's all right,\" said Macdara, sitting back down again too quickly. No sooner was he sitting down than the door opened again and Nora came in. She had Sam with her, along with some other fellow Macdara did not recognize. He felt a stirring of anxiety at the presence of this stranger.\n\n\"Sam,\" he said, getting up and moving toward the door. He shook Sam's hand, taking care not to stand too close to him. He was worried, as always, about his breath. Worried there might be a smell off it, he liked to keep his distance from people in case this was so. (In school once, someone had made a comment about his breath, and he had been worrying about it ever since, despite his obsessive use of mouthwash and mints.)\n\n\"Sam,\" said Mick, closing in from one side. \"I'm so sorry.\" He pulled Sam into a half-hug, gripping his arm with one hand while the other went round Sam's shoulder. Sam was wearing a highly unsuitable burgundy velvet smoking jacket and a silk cravat. On his bottom half, a pair of jeans and runners. Acushla hovered beside Mick, waiting for her turn with him.\n\n\"Sam,\" she said gently. \"Do you want to come over and see Dad? He looks so nice, I think you should see him.\"\n\nSam allowed himself to be led over to the coffin. All eyes on him, he stood looking down at the face of the man he had lived with for more than three decades. Acushla stepped back a few paces to give him space.\n\n\"Do you think he knows what's happening?\" whispered Connie.\n\n\"Maybe it's just as well if he doesn't,\" Macdara whispered back.\n\n\"I'm not sure it's fair,\" he heard Alma say, her voice coming from somewhere behind him. \"It's not fair to have him here.\"\n\nMick's voice came in reply to her, somewhere above a whisper.\n\n\"Poor bugger. He looks like he doesn't have a clue what's going on.\"\n\nAnd still Sam stood beside the coffin. The twin candles that flanked it flickered and puffed breaths of white smoke out into the dark air. A door opened and closed. A child tumbled off a chair. Macdara watched as Sam reached his hand into the coffin and fumbled with the clothes Manus was wearing. It looked like he was trying to undo the buttons of his jacket.\n\n\"Oh, sweet Jesus,\" Macdara heard Alma mutter. \"What's he doing?\"\n\nThey all watched as Sam slipped his hand inside Manus's jacket, resting his palm on the place where his lover's heart had ceased beating.\n\nMacdara experienced a terrible rush of sorrow. For a moment he couldn't bear the weight of it and he let his head fall down on to his chest. When he looked up again, Nora and the stranger were on either side of Sam. Putting an arm gently around his shoulders, Nora led him away, guiding him past Acushla and Liam and the little boys, past Deirdre (who reached out and grasped his wrist without rising from her chair) and around the foot of the coffin to a chair at the end of the opposite row. He was sitting directly across from Deirdre now, with the coffin in between them, a discreet white satin sheet obscuring Manus's legs and feet. Was his father wearing shoes under there? wondered Macdara. Or was he just in his socks, or even his bare feet? Macdara's mind roamed these corridors with curious abandon, like a dog off its leash.\n\nThat was a good analogy, he thought, and he would have liked to write it down. But he had no notebook with him, no pen. No way of taking notes. Instead he sat studying the faces of his family lined up opposite him. He listened to their voices swirling around him. With his niece's melon-scented perfume fighting against the heady smell of candle wax, and his grand-nephews aiming surreptitious kicks at each other's shins while their grandmother turned to talk to her husband\u2014with his mother and Alma sitting side by side now and absentmindedly holding each other's hand, and the curly-haired stranger bending down to say something to Sam\u2014Macdara found his head flooded with thoughts. Thoughts that swooped down on him like birds gathering in a great oak tree. Words, sentences, whole paragraphs of prose settling around him like crows at dusk. He had a desperate urge to hold on to them, to grab them and stuff them into his pockets, these maddening little morsels of inspiration. And it was then that it came to him. As he sat by his father's coffin, wishing uselessly for a scrap of paper, or a sharp object that he could use to scratch words into the skin of his hand, it popped into his head. A sequence of words as beautifully jarring as it was perfect. As soon as it formed in his mind, he knew that he had found the title for his book. He knew also, with a crashing sense of defeat, that he would have forgotten it again by the time he had left this room.\n\nYou always think you'll remember these things, but you never do.\n\nThe letter arrived the following morning.\n\nIt was the day of the funeral, and Macdara recognized his father's handwriting immediately. He recognized the slanted, spiky script, executed as always in black ink with a thin-nibbed fountain pen. For one mad moment Macdara thought that his father was communicating with him from beyond the grave.\n\nCradling the letter in his open palms the way you might hold a wounded bird, he walked it over to the kitchen table and propped it up against a box of Alpen, taking a few steps back from the table to gain some distance from it. He needed time to think.\n\nThe address that had been handwritten by his father on the front of the envelope was the address of the PO box Macdara had hired at the local sorting office, at a cost of four hundred and seventy euro. The scheme for the hire of the PO box had been brewing in his mind for months. He had looked at it from every angle and it seemed to him that it was the only practical way to resolve the impasse in his head. The book was finished, had been finished for months, but there was no way on this earth that Macdara could even contemplate sending it to anyone until his father had read it. His father's opinion was the only opinion that mattered to him. His father's scorn was the only thing he feared. Because Macdara had written the book with only one reader in mind, and that reader was his father. It seemed to Macdara that there was something mystical about the way the letter had arrived on this of all days. He decided that he would shower first, and then he would get dressed, and only then would he open it.\n\nThe whole time he was in the shower, he was thinking about the letter. His mind like a wobbly weighing scale, one minute he was high on the hope that his father had liked the book, the next minute he had tipped over into the despairing certainty that he had hated it. As he dressed himself in his only suit\u2014a suit he'd had for more than thirty years\u2014it seemed to Macdara that he would be taking a great risk in opening the letter. If it was bad (as of course it would be), if it was as bad as he feared it would be, it would sully the day of his father's funeral. And Macdara wanted to keep the day of his father's funeral free of all worldly things.\n\nHe decided not to open the letter.\n\nThe book was three decades in the writing.\n\nYou do hear about this, don't you? You hear about people for whom it took thirty years to write a book. Macdara comes across these stories from time to time and he finds them comforting. What he hates hearing are stories of prolific writers, people who turn out a book every year for forty years. In Macdara's case, the writing is painfully slow, every sentence something to be worked and reworked, until eventually he is happy with it. Macdara has often spent a week on one sentence, a month on a single paragraph. And of course there have been mishaps. At one point a decade's work was wiped out when the old laptop he was using died\u2014it took him another year to recreate what was lost, and even then he couldn't be sure it was quite as good. Other times it seems to him that perhaps the rewrite was better, and he wonders should he destroy all his work and reconstruct it from memory, the way his father burns his toast and scrapes it?\n\nThe desire to write has been in him forever. He remembers riding around in the back of his father's car\u2014he was six years old, or maybe seven\u2014and there were trees going by the window, and Macdara was trying to find the right combination of words to describe them. Not to describe _what_ they were, that was something that didn't need describing. He yearned to describe _how_ they were. Like the pilot of a plane who traces words across the sky with puffs of smoke, or a graffiti artist armed with a fresh can of spray paint, all of Macdara's earliest instincts told him to carve out a place for himself in the world using nothing but words.\n\nThe first person to encourage him was his secondary-school English teacher. Macdara had landed into the school in fourth year, a refugee from the wreckage of his parents' marriage. It was thought that a bit of distance might put him out of harm's way, but the school was only a hundred miles from Dublin, and news traveled fast. By the time Macdara had unpacked his suitcase and stowed it under his bed, his story had done the rounds of the school, and by some unquestioned homophobic logic that was traded around the locker rooms along with ten-packs of Carrolls cigarettes, he had been labeled a bender. His English teacher encouraged him to pour what he was feeling out on to the page, which he did.\n\n\"Macdara is a great man for the use of the mixed metaphor,\" said the English teacher, closing in on Macdara's father at the parents' day at the end of the year.\n\nThe English teacher was most interested in Macdara's father. In particular there was the matter of a creative writing competition, which he was hoping Macdara's father would agree to judge.\n\n\"Macdara is very _earnest_ in his writing,\" he said, with a nudge in his voice, one eyebrow raised to suggest a shared joke. \"Sometimes a little _too_ earnest,\" he said. \"I'm trying to introduce the concept of creative restraint.\"\n\nMacdara's father fastened his famous blue eyes on the teacher and stared at him glacially as the mechanics of the proposed creative writing competition were explained to him. To Macdara's infinite relief, his father had dressed for minimum effect, in an almost-normal single-breasted tweed suit and a silk cravat, worn inside his open shirt.\n\n\"I wouldn't give you much for our smarmy friend,\" he said to Macdara afterward.\n\n\"He's an idiot,\" said Macdara, using great heat to disguise his colossal sense of betrayal. \"The guy's nothing but an idiot.\"\n\nHe was mortified that his work had been ridiculed. Sick with shame that his most solemn efforts had been made fun of. It would be more than three decades before Macdara dared to show his work to another human being, and even then it was under a thick cloak of anonymity.\n\n\"The word 'paradise' comes from the Persian word for garden,\" said the priest. \"In ancient Persia the greatest honor the king could bestow on one of his subjects was to invite them to walk with him in his garden in the cool of the evening.\n\n\"This is how we imagine Manus now,\" said the priest. \"Wandering the gardens of heaven, deep in conversation with the Lord. And Lord knows, they must have _plenty_ to talk about.\"\n\nLaughter broke out in the church, along with a gurgle of delight at the subversive nature of the joke. The priest was an amateur poet and a fellow Kildare man. An old friend of Manus's, at the end of the Mass he led his coffin out of the church with great pomp, holding the huge gilded cross high for all to see. Propping up the front right-hand side of the coffin with his left shoulder, Macdara fixed his eyes on the shuffling ruffle at the bottom of the priest's vestments, so as to avoid looking the mourners in the face as he passed. There was something touching and sad about the priest's sensible rubber-soled shoes, walking along under all those ruffles. Macdara always found people's shoes very touching and sad.\n\nFrom the balcony, the soloist was singing \"Nearer, My God, to Thee,\" which made Macdara even sadder.\n\nOutside the church, the sun fell down on them in warm yellow flakes. The little boys ran wild loops of the churchyard, like horses turned loose in a paddock, while the adults in the family were islanded by well-wishers. Macdara shook hands until his arm ached, and eventually the crowd began to thin. He could see his mother now, arching like a pergola over another old lady. His sisters, heads held high and laughing; they were both of them dressed up to the nines. He could see Sam being led to a car by Nando. (Macdara had been introduced to Nando outside the funeral home, and had judged him on the face of it to be a most trustworthy person.)\n\nHis father was to be cremated right after the funeral. The sea burial had turned out to be too complicated. To carry out a burial at sea, you had to have a special license from the Department of the Marine. You had to modify the coffin, by inserting a zinc lining and drilling holes into it, otherwise it would only float; there was even a question of weighing the body down. All things considered, it had been decided that it would be wiser to have Manus cremated, and to scatter his ashes at sea.\n\nMacdara sat beside his mother in the crematorium. Sam was with Nora and Nando, while Acushla and Alma sat side by side at the edge of the pew. As the curtains closed in on the coffin, they clung to each other, sobbing audibly. Macdara found their sudden outpouring of grief puzzling. It seemed like only a moment ago that they had been laughing. From some unseen speaker high up on the wall came the sound of music. Louis Armstrong, singing the mourners out into the sunshine.\n\nAfter the cremation, they all went to the pub. Acushla had wanted to put on a reception for everyone in her home and Alma had argued for a hotel, but Deirdre had insisted on going to the pub. She had insisted on the pub where she and Manus had met all those years ago, and where he and his friends had held court on so many a night. Nothing would do Deirdre but to have the reception upstairs in McDaids.\n\nThere were trays of sandwiches laid out on the bar when they arrived. Yellow light coming through the stained-glass windows. On the walls, black-and-white pictures of Manus and his cohort as young men. Macdara ordered a pint for himself, and one for Sam and Nora. Nando would only agree to having a half.\n\n\"I'm a useless drinker,\" said Nando apologetically.\n\n\"An excellent quality in a person,\" said Macdara. \"I wholeheartedly approve.\"\n\nHe raised his glass, making sure to catch Nando's eye before drinking from it\u2014someone had told him that it was deeply offensive to other cultures not to make eye contact while toasting. Macdara felt shy in the presence of Nando, as he often was in the company of anyone other than family. He began to long for an opportunity to escape the circle he found himself in, an opportunity that came soon enough with the arrival of a steady trickle of his father's various acquaintances; in twos and threes they came, clattering up the rickety stairs. From literary compatriots to country relations, from genuine friends to phoney hangers-on, they kept coming until the little room was heaving, the noise gathering like fumes under the glossy ceiling as the extractor fan in the wall whirred away inadequately. The temperature in the room was such that the men began shedding their suit jackets and ties, and opening up the buttons of their shirts. The women bared their tanned arms, giving the gathering a most un-funereal aspect. After three pints, Macdara could feel himself getting drunk, but that didn't stop him going to the bar to order a fourth. It wasn't often he had the opportunity to get drunk.\n\nHe found himself standing facing Acushla. Her face flushed from the heat, she wore her cardigan draped elegantly over the shoulders of her sleeveless black dress, and she was holding her glass of white wine out in front of her like a model displaying some kind of kitchen product in an advertisement. Her husband was standing beside her with his arm wound around the small of her back. Liam had his face turned to one side while he talked to someone behind him.\n\n\"You know that Daddy loved you,\" Acushla was saying, her voice pitched higher than usual.\n\n\"Of course,\" said Macdara, stumbling forward as he leaned in toward her. She put the palm of her free hand flat on his chest to stop his fall, leaning in to shout into his ear above the noise of the room. \"I know you weren't as close to him as me and Alma were, but that doesn't mean he didn't love you.\"\n\nAnd Macdara was about to tell her that he had never imagined this to be the case when he stopped himself. Acushla's reassurances had raised a question in his head, a question that had never existed before. He frowned as he contemplated it, swaying a little on the spot where he stood. Stepping to the side, he set his half-drunk pint down on the bar and made for the loo, aware only of a desire to get away from the noise and the people so that he could think.\n\nThe men's room was empty, but even so Macdara made for a cubicle. He had never been able to bring himself to use a urinal in a public toilet, preferring to lock himself into a cubicle so that he could sit down. Letting his suit trousers fall toward the wet tiled floor, he sat on the toilet, half closing his eyes to bring the graffiti on the back of the cubicle door into focus. There was a burst of noise as the door outside opened and closed again. In the conversation that followed, he identified his brother-in-law's voice, along with another voice that he didn't recognize. Desperately, Macdara strained to restrain his bladder, unable to bear the indignity of being heard to urinate.\n\n\"Well, we won't see his like again,\" Mick was saying, with drunken emphasis.\n\n\"You said it,\" said the other man. \"They broke the mold when they made old Manus.\"\n\nMacdara heard a stream of piss, and then another. He listened out for the sound of the taps being turned on for them to wash their hands, and the warm-air hand drier being used to dry them, but those sounds never came. Instead he heard the door hinge opening, and a burst of noise from outside as they left. Only when the door had closed behind them again did Macdara finally let go of his bladder. He washed his hands carefully outside before emerging furtively from the men's room. Grabbing his suit jacket from the hook in the hallway, he left the pub without saying good night to anyone.\n\nThe letter was waiting for him where he'd left it. Like a small stone that finds its way into your sock, or a scratch on the lens of your sunglasses, he had been acutely aware of it all day. He had been forced to apply great concentration to the ignoring of it. Now here it was, sitting patiently on the table. Another moment and he would be sitting down, reading its contents.\n\nHe took two steps back from the table and turned toward the fridge, postponing the decision momentarily while he searched for something to eat. There were two cold sausages that he had stowed earlier on the top shelf; they were glued to the china saucer by a pool of their own congealed fat. Macdara withdrew the saucer from the fridge and put it to rest on the kitchen counter while he dropped two slices of bread into the toaster. He peeled the sausages off the plate and split them each lengthways with a knife, revealing the globby sausagemeat inside. When the toast popped, he buttered it generously. He tiled one slice of toast with the cold sausages, using the other slice as a lid. Taking the sandwich in both hands, he began to eat it, marveling at the deliciousness of this thing that he had made. For a moment there was nothing in his mind, only the deliciousness of the cold sausage sandwich. But then the letter caught his eye. He realized that he did not want to open it.\n\nAs long as the letter went unopened, Macdara's world remained unchanged. But once he had opened it, once he had read its contents, he would be brought down one of two paths. Either his father had disliked the book (and the likelihood of this was very much uppermost in Macdara's mind), in which case Macdara would have to live forever with his father's disapprobation, a burden that would weigh heavily on a father-son relationship that had up until now managed to remain miraculously unconfrontational. In the unlikely event that his father had _liked_ the book (and it occurred to Macdara that this outcome was almost as terrifying as the prospect of his disliking it), well, that brought with it a whole new set of problems. If his father had liked the book, then there was never any reason for Macdara to have feared his scorn, and no need to have kept his writing a secret from him. If his father turned out to have liked the book, then Macdara would see that he had squandered the opportunity of a friendship with Manus, one based on mutual respect and the pursuit of a shared craft, rather than the pact of mutual misunderstanding they had observed with each other since Macdara was a child.\n\nIt occurred to Macdara now, as he licked the last bit of melted butter out of the corner of his mouth and burped a dry bubble of sausage-scented Guinness fumes out of his belly, it occurred to him that there was nothing to be gained by opening the letter. By not opening the letter, he could maintain forever the equilibrium that had existed between him and his father. An equilibrium that had lasted until the final whistle (or the final gasp of a dodgy handbrake). There was no point in revisiting it now. Revisiting it would only bring trouble.\n\nWith this thought in mind, Macdara took his father's letter and tore it in two. Observing glimpses of black ink where the envelope and the letter inside it had been rent, he resisted the temptation to peek, tearing those halves in two again, and those halves in two, and those halves in two, until all that remained were small flakes of writing paper and small flakes of envelope, like homemade confetti. Macdara swept them off the table into his cupped hand and dumped them into the trash can.\n\nAs he climbed into bed in his vest and underpants, having given himself a special amnesty from flossing and brushing his teeth, his head was spinning from the drink, his stomach unsure about the sausage sandwich, but his mind was untroubled by worries of any kind. He was asleep within seconds.\n\nThe letter!\n\nOh, Jesus, the letter. Macdara sprang out of bed and lurched through the kitchen, headfirst into the bin. Fingers scrabbling through butter-smeared paper and coffee grounds and melon pips, he began fishing out the scraps. There were fewer of them than you would imagine, and they had found their way farther down into the bin than he would have thought possible. He had to turn the contents out on to a newspaper on the floor, pawing his way through a soggy potpourri of eggshells and breadcrumbs, a melon half-shell with its reduced sticker still clinging to it, a toilet roll tube that he had neglected to recycle. Somewhere amid all this waste were his father's last words to him.\n\nMacdara laid the fragments out on the kitchen counter like pieces of a jigsaw. But what he had before him was more of a mosaic. Tiny shards of paper stained with ink that was no longer black but all the colors of an oil spill. Whatever it was that was wet in the bin, it had made of his father's script a watery batik. As his hangover swarmed noisily around his head, as the fact of his father's death uncoiled itself inside his belly, it became clear to Macdara that it was not going to be possible to reconstruct the letter.\n\nHe closed his eyes and let the tears slowly squeeze their way out of him. Tears that had been years in the forming. It was a surprise to Macdara what a relief it was to let them finally seep through.\n\nIt was a few weeks before they got round to going through his father's things.\n\nIn that time, it had been agreed that Nando would sleep in the apartment at night, so that Sam would not be on his own. The meager resources of the state would be called upon to provide carers for Sam during the day, with the family filling any remaining gaps between them. On the whole, it seemed to Macdara a most satisfactory resolution of the rather precarious situation Sam had been left in by Manus's death.\n\nSam seemed largely unaware of Manus's absence, and when on occasion he did comment on it, he seemed to absorb without emotion the explanation that Manus was dead. He showed no signs of being distressed, expressing only vague regret, as if it were the death of someone he hardly knew. \"Oh, dear,\" he would say, whenever he was reminded of it. \"Oh, dear,\" he would mutter, with mild surprise. \"That's very sad.\" It was only when Acushla went to clear out some of her father's things, only then did Sam become upset.\n\n\"We'll have to do it behind his back,\" she told Macdara. \"The next time the carer takes him out, we can all go round. It will be nice for us all to do it together.\"\n\nMacdara arrived first, followed within the space of a few seconds by his sisters. Wearing their sunglasses on their heads and carrying empty wine boxes and rolls of trash bags, they looked like aging film stars who had been sentenced to community service. One silver-haired, the other crowned a pale wheaten gold.\n\n\"Why don't we make a start on the clothes,\" said Acushla, tearing off a bin bag and handing it to Alma. \"Three piles,\" she said, pointing out spaces on the bedroom floor with a manicured fingertip. \"One for the bin. One for the charity shop. One for things we might want to keep.\"\n\nAlma nodded, and it occurred to Macdara how odd it was to hear Acushla telling Alma what to do. Stranger still to see Alma doing it.\n\nWhile his sisters worked their way through his father's wardrobe, Macdara made a start on his desk. Into a trash bag he tossed all the old matchbooks and swizzle sticks that he found in the middle drawer, all the paper clips and leaking batteries and dried-up pens. Checkbook stubs going back decades and business cards belonging to publishers long swallowed up by conglomerates, all of them went into the bin too. His father's much-stamped old passports he put aside as a memento, along with a box of slides that appeared to have been taken at somebody's wedding. Macdara held one of them up to the light and saw a clutch of women wearing sixties-style clothing; the images were too indistinct for him to recognize any of them.\n\nIn the side drawers, Macdara found his father's correspondence. Folders of documents relating to bank accounts and insurance policies. His father had filed and labeled them all meticulously, for fear of anything falling by the wayside. The documentation relating to his work was limited to a single drawer containing a sheaf of annual statements from his publisher. (The manuscript of his father's book, and most of his personal correspondence, had long since been donated to a university archive.) The previous year's royalties amounted to less than a hundred euro, something Macdara found very poignant. But his sadness was banished in an instant by his discovery in one of the drawers of a Time Out bar. Macdara laughed out loud at this joke from beyond the grave.\n\nIn the left-hand bottom drawer, he found what he was looking for. His own unbound manuscript, held loosely together by its original twine binding. On the first page, his father had inscribed in slanting capital letters his suggestion for a title. Turning the pages, Macdara could see that his father had peppered the margins with handwritten notes. As he breathlessly leafed through them, he was aware of the invisible dust of his father's final movements falling out from between the pages.\n\nBefore he left\u2014with the manuscript of his book carefully stashed in a supermarket carrier bag and his father's passports tucked away in the pocket of his jacket\u2014Macdara helped himself to a small selection of his father's more flamboyant clothing. Now that his father was gone, it seemed important to Macdara that his heirs adopt a little of his eccentricity. Otherwise the family would only sink back into the ordinariness whence they came, something Macdara was determined not to allow to happen.\n\n**_You are hereby invited to join_**\n\n**_Deirdre O'Sullivan_**\n\n**_in celebrating her 80th_**\n\n**_birthday at her home on_**\n\n**_Saturday 5 October at 6:00._**\n\n**_Strictly no presents._**\n\n**_Each guest is asked to_**\n\n**_prepare a short party piece._**\n\n**_R.S.V.P._**\n\n# Deirdre\n\nDeirdre woke on the morning of her party and noticed, for the first time in months, a chill in the air. A chill that registered first on the tip of her nose, and then in the cool intake of breath coming into contact with her warm lungs. A newborn feeling, brought on by the change of season. She felt nostalgic already for the summer that was gone. Eager at the same time for the joys of winter, she found herself thinking with longing of log fires and beef stew. Freezing-cold water straight from the tap. She was surprised how strong a pull was exerted on her by these temporal things.\n\nShe hopped out of bed and put on her robe\u2014a sensible purple fleece Acushla had bought for her in Marks & Spencer, it was undeniably comfortable, and Deirdre found herself wearing it more and more recently, despite the loss of self incurred. To her horror, comfort had begun to be more important to her than style, which was exactly what she had always feared from old age. She belted the robe loosely around her waist and slid her feet into her Chinese slippers\u2014slippers Manus had brought back for her from Hong Kong a hundred years ago. They were duck-egg blue with brocade birds on them, and faded though they were, Deirdre loved them.\n\nStopping off briefly at the lavatory on the return, Deirdre proceeded down two flights of stairs, alighting in her vast bare entrance hall just as a slab of ruby light from the stained-glass fanlight over the door fell in a diagonal across the bare floorboards, spotlighting the two wooden crates of champagne that were stacked against the wall. Veuve Clicquot, Deirdre had chosen, with a flush of pleasure at the thought of how Manus would have appreciated the reference to her widowhood. But of course Manus wasn't here to appreciate it, something Deirdre kept having to remind herself of, over and over again.\n\nIt wasn't that she had forgotten that he was dead. Only in her dreams was she under any illusion that he was still alive; during her waking hours she was fully aware of his absence. It was the nature of that absence that she was struggling with. The obstinately finite nature of it. It seemed unreasonable to Deirdre that death should claim Manus so absolutely. That his absence could not be alleviated by the occasional visit, the way someone living down the country might pop up to Dublin for a day, dropping in for a quick cup of tea before disappearing again. That he might not pass by in his car one afternoon with a beep and a flutter of the hand. In particular, it seemed unreasonable to Deirdre that he could not make even a brief appearance at her party. \"For One Night Only,\" as the ad in the newspaper might say of an old-time crooner coming out of retirement. She found herself frustrated by the fact that this was not going to be possible.\n\nDeirdre very much wanted Manus to be at her party. His presence had been her central motivation for having the party in the first place. In conceiving it, she had imagined herself putting on a final display of bravura, largely for his benefit. One last magnificent performance that he would chuckle over afterward, wondering at her capacity to surprise him even after all these years. With a crushing sense of anticlimax, Deirdre realized that she was throwing a party for someone who wasn't going to be there.\n\nIt was not part of Deirdre's plan that Manus would die before her. She had her letter to him written already, a letter that was to be given to him after her death, and in that letter she had said the one thing she had never said to him before, the thing she had been holding out on saying to him all these years. It was her last card, and one that she had delighted in hoarding, but she had always planned to lay it facedown on the table when the time came. The fact that she forgave him.\n\nWhen her children came to break the news to her that Manus had died, Deirdre was sitting in an old wing-backed chair in the breakfast room at the back of the house. A tray in her lap, she was busy licking the envelopes for her invitations. The dry taste of glue on her tongue\u2014a taste that reminded her of the Holy Communion wafers she had not received since she was a girl\u2014she was just licking the last of them when something made her look up at the window.\n\nThrough the wobbly glass she saw her three children making their way up the garden toward the house. Solemn-faced and single file, they weaved along the overgrown path, ducking their heads every so often to avoid the overhanging roses. Deirdre put her tray aside and stood to receive them. When they told her what had happened, explaining it to her several times before she understood what it was they were saying, she sank back down into her chair. She looked up at her children's faces, seeing the same expression of alarm in all their eyes.\n\n\"I don't believe it,\" she said in a tone of genuine wonderment. \"He's gone and done it to me again.\"\n\nWhen Manus left Deirdre, she was in her late forties. Menopausal and wretchedly mercurial with it, she was just struggling to come to terms with the loss of her youth when she was faced with the loss of her husband too. An event that gutted the household like a fire. In the aftermath of it, Deirdre was forced into survival mode, for the sake of the children. That first night without him, they sat in front of the TV in the breakfast room and ate greasy chips straight out of their wrappers. A treat that Deirdre had thought up because she couldn't bear the thought of them all sitting round the kitchen table without him, it failed miserably to alleviate the gloomy pall of his absence.\n\nThe children were all in shock, of course, although it manifested itself in different ways. Whereas Alma took to a round of aggressive serial dating, punishing any man who dared come near her for her father's act of faithlessness, Acushla cried herself to sleep every night, soaking her pillowcase with bitterly disenchanted tears. And while Macdara gave no obvious indication of having been affected by his father's defection, Deirdre would come down in the mornings to find the washing machine mid-cycle and his sheets inside. Macdara was fourteen years old at the time, and he had stopped wetting the bed when he was seven; the return of the habit was a clear sign of his distress. When Deirdre found a vile little note in the pocket of his school trousers\u2014a note that had been composed by a number of his classmates, judging by the varied handwriting\u2014she decided to send him off to boarding school, a decision she was forced to make alone because Manus and Sam had embarked on an extended tour of South America. From then on, Manus seemed always to be away whenever there was cause for either crisis or celebration.\n\nIt was while Manus was in India that Alma announced that she was getting married; he was in Indonesia when Acushla got engaged. When Acushla dropped out of college, he was on a road trip across Spain, and when Macdara had to be got home from France, Manus was on a remote Greek island and could not be contacted. When Deirdre accompanied Acushla to England to have the abortion, Manus was in Japan. When Mick and Alma broke up, he was wintering in South Africa. All the time Manus was gallivanting about the world, sending swashbuckling postcards from ever-more-glamorous locations, Deirdre was manning the home front. Like the survivor of a nuclear disaster, she was foraging about in the supermarket shelves for food that was past its sell-by date, dressed in secondhand clothes and Alma's cast-off Doc Marten boots. Although in fairness Manus never failed to meet her alimony payments, Deirdre never stopped worrying about money.\n\nAnd whereas Deirdre was forced to live out the rest of her life in the dark, creaking old house they had bought when they were first married, Manus settled like a soap bubble into his weightless glass apartment above the tree line. The lightness of his life\u2014the gliding, ethereal quality to him as he got older\u2014it seemed to Deirdre in such sharp contrast to the merciless gravity that weighed her down. Stocky as a stevedore, with arms and legs as thick as tree trunks, she was the product of all the years of heavy lifting she had done in his absence. What she wanted now more than anything was something of the lightness he had so effortlessly achieved. And just when she had found a way of achieving that, just when she had come up with a way, at last, of setting herself free, Manus went and pulled the rug out from under her again. In dying before Deirdre ever had the chance to implement her plan, he had stolen a march on her, and here she was, for the second time, left with the task of carrying her children through their grieving.\n\nDeirdre saw no reason to cancel the party. Acushla wanted to call it off, for fear of what people would think, and Alma suggested postponing it, at least until after Christmas. Even Macdara was in two minds.\n\n\"I don't know,\" he said, when he came into the kitchen with his invitation in his hand. (Deirdre had held off on posting them for a few weeks, in order to give things a chance to settle.) \"It's hard to see how we'll be in the mood.\" He turned the gilt-edged card over to study the back of it, even though there was nothing written there.\n\n\"On the other hand,\" ventured Deirdre, \"maybe it's just what we all need, to cheer us up.\"\n\nMacdara frowned, looking at the ceiling as if he was trying to add something up in his head. Ever since Manus had died, Deirdre had noticed this curious focus in him; his mind seemed very busy all the time, but elsewhere. She had the feeling that every word she said to him went unheard, like snow falling in the darkness. She tried speaking very softly, to get his attention.\n\n\"If anything, your father's death underlines the need for the rest of us to live for the day.\"\n\nLike a child who is jealous of a sibling's birthday, Deirdre was anxious for the attention to shift to her. For weeks they had spoken of nothing but Manus. And while at first Deirdre had borne the weight of their grief with good grace, the protracted cycle of mourning had started to irritate her. Acushla in particular had not stopped crying since Manus died. They only had to mention his name and she was off again. It seemed to Deirdre a profoundly unoriginal response to what was essentially a perfectly natural occurrence.\n\n\"At my age, you don't get sad when someone dies,\" she said, repeating once again what she had said to everyone at the funeral. \"When someone our age dies with all their faculties intact, it's a cause for celebration.\"\n\nHow many times over the course of those first few days, had she delivered those lines with her customary swagger to a mildly shocked audience. And while it was all part of a script she had spent a lifetime honing, to her own ears it had started to sound somewhat unconvincing. Like a priest saying prayers to a God he had come to doubt the existence of, or a mathematician following the rules of a formula he had come to question, Deirdre could not escape the unsettling feeling that she was talking nonsense.\n\n\"Everyone has to die sometime,\" she said as they left the church after the month's mind for Manus. They were all standing in the churchyard in the evening sunshine, and it seemed to Deirdre an opportune time to inject a little buoyancy into the proceedings. But no sooner had she said it than Acushla's eyes began to well up again. Her sister took her arm to steady her.\n\n\"Mother,\" said Alma, fixing her eyes on Deirdre. \"That's enough.\"\n\nDeirdre looked around at her family, seeking support from some quarter, but none of them would meet her eye. Connie had bent down to tuck Ernie's shirt into his trousers and Nora had turned to see where Nando had got to with Sam. Liam and Mick had their heads down, muttering something to each other. Even Macdara would not look at her, choosing to stare at his shoes instead. Deirdre found herself marooned by her own doing.\n\nIn the aftermath of Manus's death, Deirdre was forced to consider the possibility that she had underestimated the resilience of her family. She had counted on them taking his death in their stride, treating it with a minimum of sentimentality and a heavy dose of black humor. What she had not counted on was their grief, a grief that was as profound as it was genuine; the effect it had on her was discombobulating. And while she never once considered the possibility that she too was grieving, she found herself looking out the kitchen window every so often, half expecting to see his car sliding up to the pavement. A dozen times every morning she found herself putting on the kettle and warming the teapot for a ritual that no longer took place. Over and over again she emptied the water out of the teapot without ever having made the tea, and still she could not admit, even to herself, that she was missing him.\n\nDeirdre was going to invite some friends to her party, but then she realized she didn't have any. She had managed to divest herself of them all, semi-deliberately, as the years went by. She had come to the conclusion that it was not possible to maintain multiple friendships; it required far too much effort. It required you to do things that you didn't want to do, and to go to things you didn't want to go to, like other people's drinks parties, and their children's weddings. Like their dreaded retirement dinners, or the launch parties for their ghastly self-published memoirs. \"I can't imagine anything I'd like less,\" she began saying, because she had decided that she was too old for making excuses. \"If you don't mind me saying so, I'd prefer to have my toenails pulled out,\" she would say, in response to an invitation to a golden wedding anniversary, or a ladies' lunch, thinking that surely people would be amused by her honesty and appreciative of it. But they weren't a bit amused. It turned out that people were very easily offended, something that surprised Deirdre enormously. It baffled her to see how thin-skinned people were. You'd think they'd be a bit more hardy.\n\n\"I know this isn't your kind of thing,\" said Acushla when she stopped by one day with the newspaper. (Ever thoughtful, Acushla had taken upon herself her father's habit of bringing Deirdre the paper.) \"You don't have to do it if you don't want to,\" she went on, and Deirdre couldn't help but be irritated by her overly apologetic tone. \"It's just this thing I've been invited to. They give out awards to women who've done something during the year.\"\n\n\"Are you telling me that you've won one of these awards?\"\n\nIt was as Deirdre had feared.\n\n\"There's a dinner,\" said Acushla. \"I can always bring Liam, but I thought I'd ask you first, on the off chance that you might like to be there.\"\n\nDeirdre was just about to make her excuses when something in Acushla's expression gave her pause for thought.\n\n\"You don't have to answer now,\" said Acushla, cutting her off before she had a chance to say anything. \"Why don't you think about it and come back to me closer to the time?\"\n\nAnd Deirdre nodded, even though she knew with absolute certainty that she would never in a million years feel like getting all dressed up on a winter's evening only to sit through three courses of mediocre food in a hotel ballroom with a gaggle of silly women when she could be at home in her warm bed with a TV box set.\n\nIt was Alma who was responsible for getting her hooked on the box sets, with a gift of _Downton Abbey_ that Deirdre found indecently enjoyable (even though Maggie Smith's performance made her ill with envy).\n\n\"I had lunch with her the other day,\" said Mich\u00e9al MacAoda, when Deirdre bumped into him on Baggot Street. She was on her way to the liquor store to order the champagne for her party, and thankfully she had dressed for the occasion, choosing to wear a wine-colored silk blouse, pinned at the neck with the antique cameo brooch her mother had given her as a wedding present. She wore a long tweed skirt with deep pockets, and instead of her usual lace-up leather ankle boots, she had on a pair of soft brown leather brogues that she had long ago stolen from Manus, she and he having precisely the same-sized feet. Her suede gloves were one yellow and one brown, their partners lost long ago; it seemed to Deirdre they provided exactly the right note of eccentricity. When she saw Mich\u00e9al walking toward her on Baggot Street, she realized that she had been expecting to meet someone.\n\nHe stopped a few feet away from her and pointed at her. Deirdre was reminded of the famous poster of Kitchener: WANTS YOU!\n\n\"Deirdre O'Sullivan,\" he said.\n\n\"Mich\u00e9al MacAoda.\" She stepped forward to kiss him on both cheeks, a sense of her own long-lost glamour returning to her as a result of this encounter. It was Mich\u00e9al who had directed her in _The Cherry Orchard_ at the Gate, and at the wrap party he had made a fumbling pass at her. A pass that Deirdre had gently deflected, the memory of it was nonetheless fond to her.\n\n\"Isn't that funny,\" he said, gazing at her. \"I was only thinking about you the other day.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" said Deirdre, opening her eyes wide and plumping out her mouth.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said. \"It was after I met Maggie Smith. I had lunch with her the other day, and she planted the idea in my head of putting together a stage production of _Downton._ \"\n\nAnd of course, Deirdre knew what he was going to say next.\n\n\"I thought of you immediately.\"\n\n\"Oh, Mich\u00e9al. Don't be ridiculous. I haven't set foot on the stage for thirty years!\"\n\n\"Nonsense, Deirdre. You could do it in your sleep. The more I think about it, there's no one else who _could_ do it. It's got your name written all over it.\"\n\n\"All I can promise you is that I'll think about it,\" was what she said as they parted.\n\n\"You'll do more than think about it,\" he said, holding his finger up in the air in a parting shot.\n\nAs Deirdre sailed across Baggot Street, she was aware of an irresistible energy rising in her, an energy that signalled the advent of a new and most inconvenient lease of life.\n\nThe storm came on the afternoon of the party, with heavy rains and a high wind that sounded like a swarm of police sirens converging on some daring heist, or a dreadful car accident occasioned by the rain. Listening to the wail being carried on the air, Deirdre found it hard to believe that it was only the sound of the wind.\n\n\"Would you listen to that?\" she said. \"It sounds like the end of the world.\"\n\nShe had been planning on draping a string of candles in jam jars along the railings that bordered the front steps, but clearly that wasn't going to be possible now.\n\n\"I wonder would we put them inside? We could set them up inside the fanlight\u2014that way people would be able to see them from the outside when they arrive.\"\n\nMacdara came and stood beside her, looking up at where she was indicating.\n\n\"You'll need to use the stepladder,\" she said.\n\nAgain he hesitated, waiting for her to say more.\n\n\"It's in the cupboard under the stairs.\"\n\nAnd where any of the other members of the family would have been exasperated with Macdara for not knowing this, where the girls would have wondered whether he kept anything in his head but pure air, where his father (when he was alive) would have marveled at his ability to move through the world without accumulating any knowledge of the nuts and bolts of life, Deirdre did not entertain any of these thoughts. She had long ago accepted Macdara for what he was, and expected nothing else of him.\n\nDeirdre had arranged for Macdara to receive her guests for her. Not because she wanted to make a grand entrance, but because she very much wanted to watch them arrive without them being able to see her.\n\nShe put the finishing touches to her outfit, using her cameo brooch to fasten the long purple velvet cloak she had chosen to wear over her silk evening dress (a cloak she had worn when she played Gertrude in a 1983 production of _Hamlet_ on the Abbey stage; she had liked it so much that she couldn't resist filching it). She adjusted her satin headband so that the feather she'd attached to it rose dramatically from just behind her left ear. Then, turning out the light in her bedroom, she pulled a low upholstered chair up to the window and sat down. With the curtains partly drawn, she peered down into the empty street, waiting for her family to arrive.\n\nIt had stopped raining momentarily, but there was still a lot of water on the ground. A taxi swept to a stop at the gate, spreading great wings of water out on either side of it; it was lucky there was no one walking along the pavement or they would have been soaked. Mick appeared on the far side of the taxi and, coming around behind it, opened the door for Alma. She stuck one foot out first, letting it dangle rather inelegantly above the pavement. Then, getting ahold of herself, she managed to rise quite gracefully out of the taxi, with the help of the arm he offered her. She winked at him mischievously, and muttered something to him. They brought the best out in each other, those two, no question about it. As they climbed the front steps of the house, they were wobbling with laughter, but what it was they were laughing about Deirdre could not discern. She watched from above as the front door was opened from within and a handful of light was thrown over them. From below, she heard Macdara's voice.\n\n\"The animals came in two by two, hurrah, hurrah.\"\n\n\"Ah, Noah,\" said Alma, picking up on the joke.\n\n\"What a God-awful night,\" said Mick, stepping inside. The front door closed behind them, cutting off the sound of their voices. Deirdre sat very still for a moment, wondering would she be able to hear them downstairs now, but she couldn't. All she could hear was the low, buzzing static of the air in her room, and the sound of her own breathing, slightly faster and shallower than usual because of her excitement. She rolled her shoulders in their sockets, one by one, moving her head in a slow circle on her neck, with her eyes closed, to ease up the tension. These were things she had learned to do before going on stage.\n\nShe heard a sound outside and opened her eyes again just in time to see Nora and Nando coming through the gate. Nando had a guitar case slung across his back and Nora was carrying a wet paper bag in her arms, which Deirdre identified instantly as a gift. (It was just like Nora to flout the no-gift directive, even though she was the one who could least afford it.) They had no coats on them, no hats or scarves, no umbrella. Their hair was plastered to their heads and their faces were damp with rain, as if they'd been crying happy tears. As they flopped up the steps, Deirdre was thinking how nice it was to see Nora so happy. How odd it was that it should be this man\u2014a man who had landed in their lives from the other side of the world\u2014to finally tether her to home.\n\nLiam and Acushla were coming down the street. It had started raining again and Liam was holding a large black umbrella over their heads, Acushla struggling to keep up with him in her high heels. Oh, wouldn't you think she'd wear more sensible shoes on a night like this? But then Acushla never had an ounce of common sense. Poor Acushla.\n\nWhen Deirdre saw Connie and Emmet and the boys come traipsing up the front steps, she rose out of her chair. Gripping her lower back with her hands for support, she straightened up, allowing herself one last glance in the mirror before she swept down the stairs with the train of her cloak slithering step by step after her.\n\nWhen Deirdre entered the room, she had a chance to take a quick mental snapshot of her family before they turned to greet her.\n\nMacdara was standing in the center of the room, holding a bottle of champagne in his raised hand. Connie stood before him with her glass held out to receive it. She was balancing on a pair of platform wedges, with one little boy wrapped around her ankle. His brother was on all fours, disappearing behind the curtains. Liam stood peering out of the window, as if he was waiting for someone to arrive, while Nando was moving round the walls, studying the gallery of framed photographs, with Nora at his side as a guide. He had his arm snaked across the small of her back and she had hers stretched across his, like a pair of figure skaters about to execute some complex move. Emmet was hovering over by the table where the food was laid out. He had helped himself to a canap\u00e9, and as he chewed the half he had already bitten off, he was squinting at what remained in his hand, trying to figure out what it was. Over by the fireplace, Alma had settled herself into an armchair with her skirt pulled up over her knees to show off her legs and her face raised as she listened to something Mick was saying. He was standing with his back to the roaring fire, his hands splayed behind him to warm them while he talked to his wife. Acushla stood before them with a plate of canap\u00e9s, bending from the waist in the manner of an air hostess to offer one to Alma. Oh, why on earth didn't we just let her be an air hostess? thought Deirdre in a flash of clarity. It seemed so obvious to her now that Acushla was born to be an air hostess.\n\n\"Mum!\" said Acushla when she caught sight of Deirdre.\n\n\"Grandmother!\" said Connie, turning round. She had to drag her foot along the carpet with the child still clinging to her ankle.\n\nDeirdre felt time speeding up as they all converged on her.\n\n\"Deirdre,\" said Mick, advancing with his arms held wide. \"You look magnificent!\"\n\n\"Happy birthday, old girl,\" whispered Macdara as he brushed past her.\n\n\"Happy birthday, Gran-Mum,\" said the little boys, and Deirdre found herself wondering was that the moment when she had first loosened her grip on her own life, when she had allowed herself to be called Gran-Mum.\n\n\"Happy birthday, Grandmother,\" said Nora, coming forward to kiss her.\n\n\"Where's Sam?\" asked Deirdre. She had just noticed that Sam wasn't there.\n\n\"Oh, we decided it wasn't fair to bring him,\" said Nora. \"He's not really able to handle crowds, he gets stressed. He's much happier at home with the carer.\"\n\nFor a moment Deirdre was disappointed that Sam wasn't there, until it occurred to her that there had been a time when she and Sam could have been friends\u2014at any time over the years she could have made friends with him\u2014but that time had now come and gone. She had a sense of her life being carried rapidly downstream, of things and people being swept into the past, and herself along with them. A great desire in her to grab on to something. Anything, to still the passage of time.\n\nIt was Alma who volunteered to kick off the party pieces. She got to her feet in front of the fire, stepping out of her shoes so that she was standing in her stockings. Without her heels she was smaller, but somehow all the more powerful for it. She pushed the huge satin wrap she wore to the very edges of her shoulders and with her eyes closed she began to sing \"Down by the Salley Gardens.\" Alma was no singer, but she had chosen her piece well, rendering it so low and so slow that it was the words you heard, and not the singing of them. By the final verse she had abandoned any pretense of singing, devoting to those beautiful lines the full glory of her speaking voice.\n\nBefore the applause had even died down, Acushla was on her feet. Her choice of a Patsy Cline song was unfortunate. Too raw, too exposed, too high on the scale. As she sang, she couldn't quite hit all the notes. But this imperfect performance brought out only tenderness in Deirdre. She was aware of a fierce pride, verging almost on admiration, for this daughter of hers whose desires always ran so far ahead of her. Deirdre wondered was it too late for her to tell Acushla that she was proud of her. For one dreadful moment it seemed to her that she had left it too late, until she remembered the shy invitation to the Women of the Year awards\u2014an invitation Deirdre had actively considered turning down. She remembered it now with relief and vowed to accept it.\n\nWhen Acushla finished singing, she looked to Deirdre for approval and Deirdre saw that her daughter needed her still. She needed her now perhaps more than ever. She needed her mother to witness her triumph.\n\nAfter a short break to fill up people's glasses, Nando played an Argentinian folk song on the guitar. (\"He _would_ play the guitar,\" Deirdre heard Mick mutter to Alma.) Next up was Emmet, who told a long and inappropriate joke about a necrophiliac Frenchman. Alma flared her nostrils and narrowed her eyes at him. Acushla looked nervously at Deirdre to see if she was offended, which she wasn't, and Deirdre saw Nora glance pityingly at Connie, who sat ruffling Oscar's hair with her fingers as if she hadn't heard.\n\nFor his party piece, Oscar stood in the center of the room and turned his tongue upside down in his mouth. He was made to go round the room repeating the trick up close for all his older relatives. Then it was announced that Ernie would recite a poem, dedicated to his great-grandmother.\n\n\"MASHED POTATO, A LOVE POEM,\" he said, speaking in a loud monotone. \"BY SIDNEY HODDES.\"\n\n\"Stand out into the middle of the room,\" hissed Connie, giving him a little shove with her fingertips as if he were a small toy boat that she was pushing out toward the middle of a pond.\n\n\"Turn around to face Gran-Mum,\" shouted Acushla.\n\nErnie repositioned himself to face his great-grandmother, his face flushed as he resumed his recitation.\n\n\"Start again,\" said Alma. \"Start from the top.\"\n\n\"Nice and slow,\" said Acushla.\n\n\"Would you leave the poor child alone,\" said Liam. \"He's doing grand. Go on, Ernie. You're doing grand.\"\n\nErnie hesitated, looking up at the ceiling with immense seriousness, and it occurred to Deirdre that she would very much like to see this little boy become a man. It would be most interesting to see what kind of a man he would make, this aptly named earnest little boy. Only after he had finished reciting his poem did he realize that he'd forgotten a couple of lines in the middle, but by then everyone was clapping so hard that he retreated gratefully to his spot at his mother's feet.\n\n\"Who's next?\" asked Acushla, looking round the room. \"Macdara?\"\n\nReluctantly Macdara unfurled himself from the shadows. He took a piece of paper from the inside pocket of his jacket and unfolded it.\n\n\"This is something I wrote for you,\" he said, without looking up at Deirdre.\n\nThe room fell into silence. Falling with a bump, as everyone became still.\n\n\"Shush,\" said Connie to Oscar. \"Shush now.\"\n\nMacdara prepared to read, with all of them looking at him expectantly, quizzically even; they were not sure what was coming. Once he had started reading, Deirdre noticed that their heads began to bow, as if they were in church. Their faces took on soulful expressions while they listened, and Deirdre saw Alma place a hand on Mick's knee and Mick cover it with one of his. Liam sank down on to the arm of Acushla's chair, and Acushla sagged a little toward him until her shoulder was resting against his arm. Connie propped her chin on top of Oscar's head and absentmindedly kissed him over and over again. Nora and Nando sat back to back on the floor, each of them looking up at the ceiling, while Emmet watched Macdara with great intent. When the reading was finished, Deirdre understood that Macdara had become a different person in all of their eyes, and that this was his present to her, the answer to a question that she alone had never asked of him.\n\nMacdara's head drooped and his face flushed bright red amid the explosion of compliments that followed his reading.\n\n\"Mick,\" said Acushla, clapping her hands together like a giddy child. \"We haven't had Mick yet.\"\n\n\"No better man,\" said Liam with a dash of malice as his brother got to his feet. (Liam alone had refused to perform a party piece, showing a determination that Deirdre couldn't help but admire. Deirdre had always had a soft spot for Liam. Of her two sons-in-law, he was the one she preferred, perhaps because nobody else did.)\n\nMick set his wineglass down on a side table and coughed to clear his throat. He lurched his shoulders back and smoothed his hands over his belly.\n\n\"Help me out here, will you, son?\" he said to Nando, and with a nudge from Nora, Nando took up his guitar. He sat with his hand poised at the strings, his face alert as he waited to hear what it was that Mick was going to sing. Everyone else knew, of course. There was only one song that Mick had ever learned to sing, and that was \"Fernando.\" Before he even began, they were all smiling in anticipation, waiting for that familiar first line. And what Mick lacked in skill, he made up for in passion. He even had the Swedish accent to go with it. Hand on his heart like an opera singer, he held the other hand out to Alma as he sang. She was curled into her chair by the fire as she listened to him. A dreamy look on her face, and a memory there of the young girl she had been when first she met him. When Mick came to the chorus, they all sang along. And silly as it was, Deirdre felt like they were singing the story of their own lives, and each other's lives, in all their glorious imperfection. Mick's party piece was such a success that when it was finished, they launched into another round of the chorus, just for the joy of it.\n\n\"Folly that!\" said Mick triumphantly as he sat down. And for a moment it seemed that nobody would. But then Nora rose off the floor, dragging Connie with her by the arm. The boys were thrown off her in a tumble on to the carpet.\n\nOf the whole lot of them, Connie was by far and away the best singer, but to Deirdre's infinite irritation she never seemed to know the words of a single song. (Deirdre had told her more than once that it was a sinful waste of her talent not to learn the words of a few songs.) Nora, on the other hand, always knew the words but couldn't sing to save her life. The two of them together, Deirdre dreaded to think.\n\n\"Don't look so worried,\" said Nora. \"We've been practicing.\"\n\nShe nodded at Nando, who sounded a few notes on his guitar. The two girls stood, shifty and solemn, with their backs to the fire. As Connie's steel-fired voice lit into the first line of their serenade, Deirdre recognized with a smile what it was that they'd chosen, and she realized to her amazement that Connie had even taken the trouble to learn the words. Nora made a husky attempt at balancing the duet, but when the chorus came round, even she couldn't dampen the sound of Connie's voice, which had the power to fill a cathedral to the rafters. The song they had chosen was an anthem to love, and shamefully sentimental as it was, it did seem to Deirdre, as she listened to her granddaughters singing in glorious disharmony, that she was surrounded by love. The love of her family, there was no getting away from it. There was no getting away from the love she felt for them. And the result of all this love was that it would not be possible for her to leave them. Reluctantly Deirdre reached the conclusion that had always been lying in wait for her\u2014the conclusion that for her, at least, there was to be no easy way out.\n\nWith weary resignation, she saw that she would be forced to make that appointment to have her cataracts seen to. She would have to see someone about her hip too, perhaps even submit to surgery to fix it. She would force herself to do her pelvic-floor exercises again, in order to control her bladder. She would get a man in to look at the leaking roof, and the guttering at the back of the house, maybe even get the garden cut back. She would carry on patching herself and her surroundings as best she could, until they could be patched no more. This would be her gift to her family, a gift they would never even be aware of receiving.\n\n\"My party piece is a joke,\" she announced, springing it on them with relish. They would have been expecting her to produce a song. Taking advantage of the element of surprise, she launched straight into her piece at a nice jaunty pace, as befitted her choice of material.\n\n\"Now, Paddy Englishman, Paddy Irishman and Paddy Scotsman were on an expedition to chart a previously unexplored section of a notoriously dangerous river, a river that runs through the most impenetrable rain forest in the world, when they were captured by cannibals.\"\n\nSilence in the room; all Deirdre could hear was the sound of two logs collapsing into each other in the grate. The sound of Oscar's heavy breathing, and Acushla delicately clearing her throat.\n\n\"The cannibals tied the three men to a stake and announced their intention to skin them alive, make canoes out of their skins, and eat their flesh.\"\n\nErnie and Oscar's eyes widened and their mouths fell open. Oscar shunted himself back a few inches, so that he was tucked in between his mother's legs. Ernie put up his hand, as if he were in class.\n\n\"Wait,\" he said. \"How did Paddy Englishman, Paddy Irishman and Paddy Scotsman understand what the cannibals were saying to them?\"\n\n\"Good question!\" said Deirdre. \"The thing is, they had a translator.\"\n\nErnie seemed to be satisfied with that.\n\n\"'We're going to give you one last request, before we kill you,' said the chief cannibal. 'I'll have a cup of tea,' said Paddy Englishman. So the cannibals gave him a cup of tea, and then they skinned him alive, made a canoe out of his skin, and roasted his flesh on the fire.\n\n\"'What's your last request?' they asked Paddy Scotsman. 'I'll have a whisky,' he said. So they gave him a whisky, and they skinned him alive, made a canoe out of his skin, and roasted his flesh on the fire.\n\n\"So now it was Paddy Irishman's turn. 'What's your last request?' asked the chief cannibal. 'I'll have a fork,' said Paddy Irishman. Well, the cannibals were a bit confused at that, but since it was his last request, they gave him a fork. And do you know what he said?\"\n\nDeirdre paused now in the telling. She surveyed the faces of her family. Then, taking the imaginary fork in her fist, she stabbed herself vigorously in the chest, puncturing herself over and over again as she rolled out her punch line.\n\n\"'You're not makin' no fuckin' canoe out of me.'\"\n\nNever before had Deirdre spoken that word out loud, and never again would she. But on this occasion, no other word would do. She had rehearsed the piece out loud, using all manner of lesser expletives, but none of them had quite the impact she desired. She was amazed by the illicit thrill it gave her to use that dreadful, vulgar word. She was gratified by the stunned reaction of her family. For a full second they stared at her in amazement, then, under cover of the raucous applause that followed (with Emmet wolf-whistling through his fingers and Connie shouting, \"Way to go, old girl\"), Deirdre raised her glass in the air.\n\n\"To Manus,\" she said solemnly, dedicating to him the swan song she had planned for herself.\n\nThe room fell silent as they all raised their glasses. In the aftermath of the toast, Deirdre looked out beyond the circle her family formed in front of the fire, through the empty dining room and out the back window to where the night sky lay curiously empty. She could just about make out the stadium, barely visible in the darkness. With all but its most essential lights extinguished, it looked like a great ocean liner out at sea. Deirdre felt all the wistfulness of someone standing on the shore, knowing that the ship she had seen in the night would be gone in the morning, but she would still be here.\n\n**Proof That We Existed,** by Macdara MacEntee (Little, Brown \u20ac14.99)\n\nThis magnificent debut novel, an epic study of the human spirit, took more than three decades to write and runs to nearly eight hundred pages. Its publication comes less than a year after the death of the author's father, Manus, and while the timing is undoubtedly poignant, the scale of Macdara MacEntee's achievement is sure to secure a place for father and son among the great dynasties of the literary world.\n\n# Epilogue\n\nOf all the things that happened that year, it was the summer that would be most vividly remembered. Long after people had forgotten all about the horsemeat scandal, and the countrywide flooding, long after the abortion controversy had merged in people's memories with abortion controversies of other years, they would remember that glorious summer. When a popular radio program marked the turn of the year by conducting a poll of their listeners to identify the highs and lows of the twelve months just gone, it was not the country's exit from the IMF bailout that prevailed. It was not the election of a new pope, nor the visit to Dublin by Michelle Obama. The highlight of the year, as voted by radio listeners, was the long, hot summer.\n\nOf course for Manus's family, that summer would forever be associated with his death. Whenever anyone mentioned the long, hot summer, they would think not of children leaping joyously from piers, or of young people languishing on their backs in parks. Their thoughts turned instead to the sea of sunglasses that surrounded them in the churchyard on the day of his funeral. The smell of sunscreen as the mourners leaned in close to kiss them. The taste of the ice-creams they had eaten on their way to the crematorium. (Deirdre had insisted on stopping the funeral cort\u00e8ge to treat the children to an ice-cream, a move that took the undertakers by surprise but would no doubt have delighted Manus.)\n\nThey scattered his ashes the following spring, on a dry day at the end of March. They timed the trip for high tide, gathering at midday at a small harbor to the south of the city, where Liam had arranged for the use of a boat. As soon as they arrived, Liam climbed into the back and busied himself with the outboard engine, with Emmet to assist him. Mick stood in the well of the boat, holding a hand out to help the ladies as one by one they hopped down from the pier. Acushla settled the little boys in the bow, while Connie checked the fastenings on their life jackets. Alma and Deirdre took refuge on a bench running along the far side, Alma rooting in her handbag for her sunglasses, while Deirdre struggled to contain her hair in the wind. Macdara stood for a moment, one hand raised to hold his father's fedora to his head, as he enjoyed the sensation of the sea shifting under his feet. The taste of the salt in the air.\n\n\"Who are we waiting for?\" shouted Liam from the back of the boat. He had the engine started and was keen to get going.\n\n\"Just Sam and Nora and Nando,\" shouted Acushla. \"But we can't go without them. They've got the ashes.\"\n\nNo sooner had she said it than they appeared, rushing along the pier carrying rugs and bags and rain gear.\n\n\"Sorry we're late,\" said Nora, as she stood at the edge and looked down at them.\n\nShe reached her hand out to Nando and he handed her a cooler bag. She passed it down to Mick.\n\n\"Now,\" she said, \"watch out for Grandad.\"\n\nShe dropped a small rucksack down into the boat. Mick caught it with both hands, hugging it to his chest like a rugby ball.\n\n\"Jesus,\" he said. \"It wouldn't do to drop that.\" Carefully, he stowed it under a bench, with his raincoat wrapped around it to protect it from the spray.\n\n\"Take care now,\" he said, sticking a hand out to help Nora down. As they took their seats along the near side, Nando looked around him eagerly, as if he found them all delightful. It seemed to Macdara that it gave the family an added gloss to be seen through the eyes of this new person in their midst. It made them all seem shiny and new.\n\n\"Macdara,\" Acushla called out. \"Do you want to sit here?\" Already she was moving her handbag on to her lap and sliding her bum along the bench, shunting Alma and her mother further up to make space for him.\n\n\"I'm grand, thanks,\" said Macdara, standing with his feet apart to steady himself as the boat picked up speed. He was enjoying the feel of the wind in his face. The treat of being out at sea. Ahead of them, the chimneys at Poolbeg rose out of a low band of sea mist. A string of white sails appeared as bunting on the skyline. The sunlight fell on the water like splatters of rain.\n\nThe little boys were kneeling in the bow, each of them with an arm draped over the side, their fingers trailing the jade-green water. Connie was kneeling between them, with a firm grip on each of their life jackets. The boat turned as it left the protection of the harbor, smacking the waves sideways on now, so that great slaps of spray poured over the side. The little boys squealed with delight. Nando had taken an expensive-looking camera out of his bag and he had the lens trained on Connie and the lads, taking photograph after photograph of them.\n\nThe boat climbed the waves, and fell. Climbed, and fell, and Macdara allowed himself to drop down on to a seat beside Mick before he was knocked down. He took his father's hat off before it was blown away. With Dalkey Island ahead of them, Liam guided the boat between the island and the shore. Halfway through the Sound, he let the engine cut out and they all became aware of the seagulls, their screams like a hundred creaking farm gates.\n\n\"How's this for the spot?\" Liam shouted out.\n\nMick stood and looked around him. He saw the island, pockmarked by ruined fortifications and rocks and some scraggly goats. A seal popped its head up and disappeared down again under the waves. A slender yacht cut through the water of the Sound like a knife. A yacht with a black sail, it created an atmosphere of great and solemn melancholy, like something out of an Arthurian legend.\n\n\"Seems like as good a place as any,\" he said, looking to Alma for approval. She shrugged, as if to say, Sure. Mick looked to Sam, to check with him, and Sam looked back without giving any indication whether he understood what was going on. Nora put her arm around Sam's back and drew him in toward her, so that their two heads were almost touching. What she said to him could not be heard by the others because her words were carried away by the wind, but they saw that Sam was nodding.\n\n\"Let's do it,\" she said. And she reached her arm out for her dad to pass her the rucksack. Opening up the zip and taking out a small cardboard carton, she paused and looked around her.\n\n\"Who wants to do the honors?\"\n\nNobody answered.\n\n\"Okay, I'll do it,\" said Nora. \"If that's okay with everyone?\"\n\nShe got to her feet.\n\n\"Don't anyone else stand up,\" shouted Mick, \"or the boat will tip over!\"\n\nNora propped one knee up on the bench and leaned out over the edge of the boat.\n\n\"Which way is the wind blowing?\" she shouted, looking back toward Liam.\n\n\"That way,\" roared Liam, throwing his arm out the side of the boat, in the manner of an airport groundsman guiding an incoming plane toward its gate.\n\n\"Okay,\" said Nora. \"Here goes.\"\n\nShe opened the carton and for a moment nothing happened. Holding it from the bottom with both hands, she pitched it and a small cloud of dust billowed out. Like a swarm of bees suddenly released from a hive, it was picked up by the wind before spreading out and falling down into the sea. Nora gave the box one last shake, just to make sure there was nothing left in it.\n\n\"That's it,\" she said, turning back into the boat. She turned the carton upside down to demonstrate that it was empty.\n\nA seagull overhead let out a single high-pitched shriek. A moment later the rest of the flock followed with a spiral of raucous laughter.\n\n\"Well done,\" said Macdara. \"Well done, Nora.\"\n\nAnd he started clapping. Whether it was for his father or for Nora, he wasn't sure, but everyone else joined in, even the little boys.\n\n\"It's more like coral,\" said Nora with surprise. \"It looks more like coral than ashes.\"\n\nAnd it seemed to Macdara that it was just like Nora to inject the moment with a little poetry.\n\n\"I think the occasion calls for a song,\" said Deirdre, and she got to her feet. Moving unsteadily toward the center of the boat, she swung the loose end of her cape over her shoulder, in preparation for her performance. Fiddling for a moment with the hairpins that so inadequately held her hair up, she closed her eyes as she began to sing. The song she had chosen was a sea shanty, and a great favorite of Manus's. As she sang it, her voice was thrown about by the wind, which gave it an added bravery, and an added beauty.\n\n_Dress me up in me oilskins and jumper,_\n\n_No more on the docks I'll be seen,_\n\n_Just tell me old shipmates, I'm takin' a trip, mates,_\n\n_And I'll see you some day in Fiddlers' Green._\n\nAlma and Acushla were huddled together along one side of the boat, each of them staring down at the wet, shifting floor as they listened to their mother sing. Nora and Nando were sitting opposite them, Nora with her cheek resting on Nando's woolly shoulder and her eyes on her grandmother's face. Macdara and Mick sat facing Connie and the boys, and for once the boys were still, their small, grave faces framed by their huge life jackets as they listened to the singing. Connie's eyes shone with tears that she made no attempt to wipe away. Liam was sitting at the back of the boat, with his arm on the tiller to steady it and his face turned out to sea. Emmet was standing up at the back, a black shadow against the blue sky.\n\nAs she reached the final verse, Deirdre stretched a hand out toward Sam. Taking his hand in hers, she held on to it tight while she sang, her other hand stretched out to hold Mick's. For a moment Macdara was afraid that Mick would attempt to further the chain by grabbing his hand, but to his relief he didn't. Macdara was content to sit beside Mick, but not touching. When Deirdre got to the final chorus, they all joined in, and it seemed to Macdara that he had never known a moment of such perfect contentment as this, with the boat bobbing gently on the waves and his whole family in it, singing in unison.\n\n# ACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n\nThe events and characters in this book are entirely fictional, but I have consulted many people in the course of my research. For their expertise on vintage cars, I am grateful to Donal Byrne and Donal Morrissy. Neal Massey advised me on the ins and outs of a burial at sea. Aengas Mac Grianna was kind enough to talk to me about his experiences on _Celebrity MasterChef Ireland,_ while Mair\u00e9ad Delaney's vast knowledge of the Abbey Theater's history was a great resource\u2014to her and all the staff behind the scenes at the Abbey, my sincere thanks. To the late Garry Henderson, I owe the Hellmann's mayonnaise story as well as the beautiful \"Fiddler's Green,\" a verse of which is included by kind permission of John Conolly. For those readers who have a day-to-day memory of the summer of 2013, I confess that I have bent the weather in places to suit my purposes. The bit about the long, hot summer, I did not make up.\n\nMy agent Marianne Gunn O'Connor has been a stalwart support, as has her sub-agent Vicki Satlow. My former colleagues in RT\u00c9 have been unfailingly kind. Paul Durcan stepped forward with encouragement when I most needed it. Margaret Daly and Cormac Kinsella offered their wisdom and expertise most generously. To all of them, a warm thank-you.\n\nMy editors Rebecca Saunders and Helen Atsma worked hard to make this book the best book it could be. I am hugely grateful to both of them. Thanks also to Kati Nicholl, Joanna Smyth and Jane Selley for their valuable input. It has been my pleasure to work with Manpreet Grewal, Tamsyn Berryman, Maddie West and Stephanie Melrose from Little, Brown in London. Breda Purdue and Jim Binchy along with Siobh\u00e1n Tierney and all the team at Hachette in Dublin have been, as always, wonderful.\n\nMary Reynolds and Karen Coleman Muldowney helped in different but important ways. So too did Ray Murphy and Margaret Dunne. Hilary McGouran and Valerie Bistany read the book at various stages in its development, and their suggestions were enormously helpful. \u00c1ine Lawlor was a valuable early reader as were Sara Burke and Aoife Kavanagh. Finally and most importantly, I am grateful for the support of my family in encouraging me on this path I've chosen. I want to thank my brother Kevin and my sister Meg for their faith in me, and their love. My father Des, for his constant friendship and wise counsel; he also bore with good grace the theft of some of his gentle eccentricities. For Mark and Lucy and Clara, there are not enough words.\n\n# _Also by this author_\n\nTHIS IS HOW IT ENDS\n\n### Thank you for buying this ebook, published by Hachette Digital.\n\nTo receive special offers, bonus content, and news about our latest ebooks and apps, sign up for our newsletters.\n\nSign Up\n\nOr visit us at hachettebookgroup.com\/newsletters\n\n# Contents\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Title Page\n  3. Welcome\n  4. Dedication\n  5. Prologue\n  6. Alma\n  7. Mick\n  8. Acushla\n  9. Connie\n  10. Liam\n  11. Nora\n  12. Manus\n  13. Macdara\n  14. Deirdre\n  15. Epilogue\n  16. Acknowledgments\n  17. Also by this Author\n  18. Newsletters\n  19. Copyright\n\n# Navigation\n\n  1. Begin Reading\n  2. Table of Contents\n\n# Copyright\n\nThis book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2015, 2016 by Kathleen MacMahon\n\nCover design by Lisa Honerkamp\n\nPainting by Francis Livingston\n\nCover copyright \u00a9 2016 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.\n\nAll rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author's intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author's rights.\n\nGrand Central Publishing\n\nHachette Book Group\n\n1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104\n\nhachettebookgroup.com\n\ntwitter.com\/grandcentralpub\n\nFirst ebook edition: July 2016\n\nGrand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.\n\nThe Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.\n\nThe Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.\n\nThe publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.\n\nISBN 978-1-4555-1133-4\n\nE3-20160602-JV-PC\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\n\n\nProduced by Juliet Sutherland, Renald Levesque and the\nOnline Distributed Proofreaders Europe at\nhttp:\/\/dp.rastko.net\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCHRISTIANITY\n\nAND\n\nGREEK PHILOSOPHY;\n\nOR, THE RELATION BETWEEN\nSPONTANEOUS AND REFLECTIVE THOUGHT IN GREECE\nAND THE POSITIVE TEACHING OF\nCHRIST AND HIS APOSTLES.\n\n\nBY B.F. COCKER, D.D.,\n\nPROFESSOR OF MORAL AND MENTAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN\n\n\"Plato made me know the true God, Jesus Christ showed me the way to\nhim.\"\n                                                        ST. AUGUSTINE\n\n\n\n\nNEW YORK: CARLTON & LANAHAN.\nSAN FRANCISCO: E. THOMAS.\nCINCINNATI: HITCHCOCK & WALDEN.\n\n1870.\n\n\n\nEntered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by HARPER &\nBROTHERS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United\nStates for the Southern District of New York.\n\n\n\n\nTO\n\nD.D. WHEDON, D.D.,\n\nMY EARLIEST LITERARY FRIEND, WHOSE VIGOROUS WRITINGS HAVE\nSTIMULATED MY INQUIRIES, WHOSE COUNSELS HAVE GUIDED\nMY STUDIES, AND WHOSE KIND AND GENEROUS WORDS\nHAVE ENCOURAGED ME TO PERSEVERANCE\nAMID NUMEROUS DIFFICULTIES,\nI DEDICATE THIS VOLUME AS A TOKEN OF MY MORE THAN ORDINARY AFFECTION\n\n_THE AUTHOR_.\n\n\n\n\nPREFACE.\n\n\nIn preparing the present volume, the writer has been actuated by a\nconscientious desire to deepen and vivify our faith in the Christian\nsystem of truth, by showing that it does not rest _solely_ on a special\nclass of facts, but upon all the facts of nature and humanity; that its\nauthority does not repose _alone_ on the peculiar and supernatural\nevents which transpired in Palestine, but also on the still broader\nfoundations of the ideas and laws of the reason, and the common wants\nand instinctive yearnings of the human heart. It is his conviction that\nthe course and constitution of nature, the whole current of history, and\nthe entire development of human thought in the ages anterior to the\nadvent of the Redeemer centre in, and can only be interpreted by, the\npurpose of redemption.\n\nThe method hitherto most prevalent, of treating the history of human\nthought as a series of isolated, disconnected, and lawless movements,\nwithout unity and purpose; and the practice of denouncing the religions\nand philosophies of the ancient world as inventions of satanic mischief,\nor as the capricious and wicked efforts of humanity to relegate itself\nfrom the bonds of allegiance to the One Supreme Lord and Lawgiver, have,\nin his judgment, been prejudicial to the interests of all truth, and\nespecially injurious to the cause of Christianity. They betray an utter\ninsensibility to the grand unities of nature and of thought, and a\nstrange forgetfulness of that universal Providence which comprehends all\nnature and all history, and is yet so minute in its regards that it\nnumbers the hairs on every human head, and takes note of every sparrow's\nfall, A juster method will lead us to regard the entire history of human\nthought as a development towards a specific end, and the providence of\nGod as an all-embracing plan, which sweeps over all ages and all\nnations, and which, in its final consummation, will, through Christ,\n\"gather together all things in one, both things which are in heaven and\nthings which are on earth.\"\n\nThe central and unifying thought of this volume is _that the necessary\nideas and laws of the reason, and the native instincts of the human\nheart, originally implanted by God, are the primal and germinal forces\nof history; and that these have been developed under conditions which\nwere first ordained, and have been continually supervised by the\nprovidence of God_. God is the Father of humanity, and he is also the\nGuide and Educator of our race. As \"the offspring of God,\" humanity is\nnot a bare, indeterminate potentiality, but a living energy, an active\nreason, having definite qualities, and inheriting fundamental principles\nand necessary ideas which constitute it \"the image and likeness of God.\"\nAnd though it has suffered a moral lapse, and, in the exercise of its\nfreedom, has become alienated from the life of God, yet God has never\nabandoned the human race. He still \"magnifies man, and sets his heart\nupon him.\" \"He visits him every morning, and tries him every moment.\"\n\"The inspiration of the Almighty still gives him understanding.\" The\nillumination of the Divine Logos still \"teacheth man knowledge.\" The\nSpirit of God still comes near to and touches with strong emotion every\nhuman heart. \"God has never left himself without a witness\" in any\nnation, or in any age. The providence of God has always guided the\ndispersions and migrations of the families of the earth, and presided\nover and directed the education of the race. \"He has foreordained the\ntimes of each nation's existence, and fixed the geographical boundaries\nof their habitations, _in order that they should seek the Lord_, and\nfeel after and find Him who is not far from any one of us.\" The\nreligions of the ancient world were the painful effort of the human\nspirit to return to its true rest and centre--the struggle to \"find Him\"\nwho is so intimately near to every human heart, and who has never ceased\nto be the want of the human race. The philosophies of the ancient world\nwere the earnest effort of human reason to reconcile the finite and the\ninfinite, the human and the Divine, the subject and God. An overruling\nProvidence, which makes even the wrath of man to praise Him, took up all\nthese sincere, though often mistaken, efforts into his own plan, and\nmade them sub-serve the purpose of redemption. They aided in developing\namong the nations \"the desire of salvation,\" and in preparing the world\nfor the advent of the Son of God. The entire course and history of\nDivine providence, in every nation, and in every age, has been directed\ntowards the one grand purpose of \"reconciling all things to Himself.\"\nChristianity, as a comprehensive scheme of reconciliation, embracing\n\"all things,\" can not, therefore, be properly studied apart from the\nages of earnest thought, of profound inquiry, and of intense religious\nfeeling which preceded it. To despise the religions of the ancient\nworld, to sneer at the efforts and achievements of the old philosophers,\nor even to cut them off in thought from all relation to the plans and\nmovements of that Providence which has cared for, and watched over, and\npitied, and guided all the nations of the earth, is to refuse to\ncomprehend Christianity itself.\n\nThe author is not indifferent to the possibility that his purpose may be\nmisconceived. The effort may be regarded by many conscientious and\nesteemed theologians with suspicion and mistrust. They can not easily\nemancipate themselves from the ancient prejudice against speculative\nthought. Philosophy has always been regarded by them as antagonistic to\nChristian faith. They are inspired by a commendable zeal for the honor\nof dogmatic theology. Every essay towards a profounder conviction, a\nbroader faith in the unity of all truth, is branded with the opprobrious\nname of \"rationalism.\" Let us not be terrified by a harmless word.\nSurely religion and right reason must be found in harmony. The author\nbelieves, with Bacon, that \"the foundation of all religion is right\nreason.\" The abnegation of reason is not the evidence of faith, but the\nconfession of despair. Sustained by these convictions, he submits this\nhumble contribution to theological science to the thoughtful\nconsideration of all lovers of Truth, and of Christ, the fountain of\nTruth. He can sincerely ask upon it the blessing of Him in whose fear it\nhas been written, and whose cause it is the purpose of his life to\nserve.\n\nThe second series, on \"Christianity and Modern Thought,\" is in an\nadvanced state of preparation for the press.\n\n      NOTE.--It has been the aim of the writer, as far as the\n      nature of the subject would permit, to adapt this work to\n      general readers. The references to classic authors are,\n      therefore, in all cases made to accessible English\n      translations (in Bohn's Classical Library); such changes,\n      however, have been made in the rendering as shall present\n      the doctrine of the writers in a clearer and more forcible\n      manner. For valuable services rendered in this department of\n      the work, by Martin L. D'Ooge, M. A., Acting Professor of\n      Greek Language and Literature in the University of Michigan,\n      the author would here express his grateful acknowledgment.\n\n\n\n\nCONTENTS.\n\n\n     CHAPTER I.\n     ATHENS, AND THE MEN OF ATHENS.\n\n     CHAPTER II.\n     THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.\n\n     CHAPTER III.\n     THE RELIGION OF THE ATHENIANS.\n\n     CHAPTER IV.\n     THE RELIGION OF THE ATHENIANS: ITS MYTHOLOGICAL AND SYMBOLICAL\n     ASPECTS.\n\n     CHAPTER V.\n     THE UNKNOWN GOD.\n\n     CHAPTER VI.\n     THE UNKNOWN GOD (_continued_).\n       IS GOD COGNIZABLE BY REASON?\n\n     CHAPTER VII.\n     THE UNKNOWN GOD (_continued_).\n       IS GOD COGNIZABLE BY REASON? (_continued_).\n\n     CHAPTER VIII.\n     THE PHILOSOPHERS OF ATHENS.\n       PRE-SOCRATIC SCHOOL.\n     _Sensational_: THALES--ANAXIMENES--HERACLITUS--ANAXIMANDER\n     LEOCIPPUS--DEMOCRITUS.\n\n     CHAPTER IX.\n     THE PHILOSOPHERS OF ATHENS (_continued_).\n       PRE-SOCRATIC SCHOOL (_continued_)\n     _Idealist_: Pythagoras--Xenophanes--Parmenides--Zeno. _Natural\n     Realist_: Anaxagoras.\n       THE SOCRATIC SCHOOL.\n       Socrates.\n\n     CHAPTER X\n     THE PHILOSOPHERS OF ATHENS (_continued_).\n       THE SOCRATIC SCHOOL (_continued_).\n       Plato.\n\n     CHAPTER XI.\n     THE PHILOSOPHERS OF ATHENS (_continued_).\n       THE SOCRATIC SCHOOL (_continued_).\n       Plato.\n\n     CHAPTER XII.\n\n     THE PHILOSOPHERS OF ATHENS (_continued_).\n       THE SOCRATIC SCHOOL (_continued_).\n       Aristotle.\n\n     CHAPTER XIII.\n     THE PHILOSOPHERS OF ATHENS (_continued_).\n       POST-SOCRATIC SCHOOL.\n       Epicurus and Zeno.\n\n     CHAPTER XIV.\n     The Propaedeutic Office of Greek Philosophy.\n\n     CHAPTER XV.\n     The Propaedeutic Office of Greek Philosophy (_continued_).\n\n\n\n\n\"_Ye men of Athens_, all things which I behold bear witness to your\ncarefulness in religion; for, as I passed through your city and beheld\nthe objects of your worship, I found amongst them an altar with this\ninscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD; whom, therefore, ye worship, though ye\nknow; Him not, Him declare I unto you. God who made the world and all\nthings therein, seeing He is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in\ntemples made with hands; neither is He served by the hands of men, as\nthough he needed any thing; for He giveth unto all life, and breath, and\nall things. And He made of one blood all the nations of mankind to dwell\nupon the face of the whole earth; and ordained to each the appointed\nseasons of their existence, and the bounds of their habitation, that\nthey should seek God, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him,\nthough he be not far from every one of us: for in Him we live, and move,\nand have our being; as certain of your own poets have said, _For we are\nalso His offspring_. Forasmuch, then, as we are the offspring of God, we\nought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or\nstone, graven by the art and device of man. Howbeit, those past times of\nignorance God hath overlooked; but now He commandeth all men everywhere\nto repent, because He hath appointed a day wherein He will judge the\nworld in righteousness by that Man whom He hath ordained; whereof He\nhath given assurance unto all, in that He hath raised Him from the\ndead.\"--Acts xvii. 22-31.\n\n\n\n\nCHRISTIANITY\nAND\nGREEK PHILOSOPHY\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER I.\n\nATHENS, AND THE MEN OF ATHENS.\n\n\n\"Is it not worth while, for the sake of the history of men and nations,\nto study the surface of the globe in its relation to the inhabitants\nthereof?\"--Goethe.\n\nThere is no event recorded in the annals of the early church so replete\nwith interest to the Christian student, or which takes so deep a hold on\nthe imagination, and the sympathies of him who is at all familiar with\nthe history of Ancient Greece, as the one recited above. Here we see the\nApostle Paul standing on the Areopagus at Athens, surrounded by the\ntemples, statues, and altars, which Grecian art had consecrated to Pagan\nworship, and proclaiming to the inquisitive Athenians, \"the strangers\"\nwho had come to Athens for business or for pleasure, and the\nphilosophers and students of the Lyceum, the Academy, the Stoa, and the\nGarden, \"_the unknown God_.\"\n\nWhether we dwell in our imagination on the artistic grandeur and\nimposing magnificence of the city in which Paul found himself a solitary\nstranger, or recall the illustrious names which by their achievements in\narts and philosophy have shed around the city of Athens an immortal\nglory,--or whether, fixing our attention on the lonely wanderer amid the\nporticoes, and groves, and temples of this classic city, we attempt to\nconceive the emotion which stirred his heart as he beheld it \"wholly\ngiven to idolatry;\" or whether we contrast the sublime, majestic theism\nproclaimed by Paul with the degrading polytheism and degenerate\nphilosophy which then prevailed in Athens, or consider the prudent and\nsagacious manner in which the apostle conducts his argument in view of\nthe religious opinions and prejudices of his audience, we can not but\nfeel that this event is fraught with lessons of instruction to the\nChurch in every age.\n\nThat the objects which met the eye of Paul on every hand, and the\nopinions he heard everywhere expressed in Athens, must have exerted a\npowerful influence upon the current of his thoughts, as well as upon the\nstate of his emotions, is a legitimate and natural presumption. Not only\nwas \"his spirit stirred within him\"--his heart deeply moved and agitated\nwhen he saw the city wholly given to idolatry--but his thoughtful,\nphilosophic mind would be engaged in pondering those deeply interesting\nquestions which underlie the whole system of Grecian polytheism. The\ncircumstances of the hour would, no doubt, in a large degree determine\nthe line of argument, the form of his discourse, and the peculiarities\nof his phraseology. The more vividly, therefore, we can represent the\nscenes and realize the surrounding incidents; the more thoroughly we can\nenter into sympathy with the modes of thought and feeling peculiar to\nthe Athenians; the more perfectly we can comprehend the spirit and\ntendency of the age; the more immediate our acquaintance with the\nreligious opinions and philosophical ideas then prevalent in Athens, the\nmore perfect will be our comprehension of the apostle's argument, the\ndeeper our interest in his theme. Some preliminary notices of Athens and\n\"the Men of Athens\" will therefore be appropriate as introductory to a\nseries of discourses on Paul's sermon on Mars' Hill.\n\nThe peculiar connection that subsists between Geography and History,\nbetween a people and the country they inhabit, will justify the\nextension of our survey beyond the mere topography of Athens. The people\nof the entire province of Attica were called Athenians (_Athenaioi_) in\ntheir relation to the state, and Attics _(Attikoi_) in regard to their\nmanners, customs, and dialect.[1] The climate and the scenery, the forms\nof contour and relief, the geographical position and relations of\nAttica, and, indeed, of the whole peninsula of Greece, must be taken\ninto our account if we would form a comprehensive judgment of the\ncharacter of the Athenian people.\n\nThe soil on which a people dwell, the air they breathe, the mountains\nand seas by which they are surrounded, the skies that overshadow\nthem,--all these exert a powerful influence on their pursuits, their\nhabits, their institutions, their sentiments, and their ideas. So that\ncould we clearly group, and fully grasp all the characteristics of a\nregion--its position, configuration, climate, scenery, and natural\nproducts, we could, with tolerable accuracy, determine what are the\ncharacteristics of the people who inhabit it. A comprehensive knowledge\nof the physical geography of any country will therefore aid us\nmaterially in elucidating the natural history, and, to some extent, the\nmoral history of its population. \"History does not stand _outside_ of\nnature, but in her very heart, so that the historian only grasps a\npeople's character with true precision when he keeps in full view its\ngeographical position, and the influences which its surroundings have\nwrought upon it.\"[2]\n\n[Footnote 1: Niebuhr's \"Lectures on Ethnography and Geography,\" p. 91.]\n\n[Footnote 2: Ritter's \"Geographical Studies,\" p. 34.]\n\nIt is, however, of the utmost consequence the reader should understand\nthat there are two widely different methods of treating this deeply\ninteresting subject--methods which proceed on fundamentally opposite\nviews of man and of nature. One method is that pursued by Buckle in his\n\"History of Civilization in England.\" The tendency of his work is the\nassertion of the supremacy of material conditions over the development\nof human history, and indeed of every individual mind. Here man is\npurely passive in the hands of nature. Exterior conditions are the\nchief, if not the _only_ causes of man's intellectual and social\ndevelopment. So that, such a climate and soil, such aspects of nature\nand local circumstances being given, such a nation necessarily\nfollows.[3] The other method is that of Carl Ritter, Arnold Guyot, and\nCousin.[4] These take account of the freedom of the human will, and the\npower of man to control and modify the forces of nature. They also take\naccount of the original constitution of man, and the primitive type of\nnations; and they allow for results arising from the mutual conflict of\ngeographical conditions. And they, especially, recognize the agency of a\nDivine Providence controlling those forces in nature by which the\nconfiguration of the earth's surface is determined, and the distribution\nof its oceans, continents, and islands is secured; and a providence,\nalso, directing the dispersions and migrations of nations--determining\nthe times of each nation's existence, and fixing the geographical bounds\nof their habitation, all in view of the _moral_ history and spiritual\ndevelopment of the race,--\"that they may feel after, and find the living\nGod.\" The relation of man and nature is not, in their estimation, a\nrelation of cause and effect. It is a relation of adjustment, of\nharmony, and of reciprocal action and reaction. \"Man is not\"--says\nCousin--\"an effect, and nature the cause, but there is between man and\nnature a manifest harmony of general laws.\"... \"Man and nature are two\ngreat effects which, coming from the same cause, bear the same\ncharacteristics; so that the earth, and he who inhabits it, man and\nnature, are in perfect harmony.\"[5] God has created both man and the\nuniverse, and he has established between them a striking harmony. The\nearth was made for man; not simply to supply his physical wants, but\nalso to minister to his intellectual and moral development. The earth is\nnot a mere dwelling-place of nations, but a school-house, in which God\nhimself is superintending the education of the race. Hence we must not\nonly study the _events_ of history in their chronological order, but we\nmust study the earth itself as the _theatre_ of history. A knowledge of\nall the circumstances, both physical and moral, in the midst of which\nevents take place, is absolutely necessary to a right judgment of the\nevents themselves. And we can only elucidate properly the character of\nthe actors by a careful study of all their geographical and ethological\nconditions.\n\n[Footnote 3: See chap. ii. \"History of Civilization.\"]\n\n[Footnote 4: Ritter's \"Geographical Studies;\" Guyot's \"Earth and Man;\"\nCousin's \"History of Philosophy,\" lec. vii., viii., ix.]\n\n[Footnote 5: Lectures, vol. i. pp. 162, 169.]\n\nIt will be readily perceived that, in attempting to estimate the\ninfluence which exterior conditions exert in the determination of\nnational character, we encounter peculiar difficulties. We can not in\nthese studies expect the precision and accuracy which is attained in the\nmathematical, or the purely physical sciences. We possess no control\nover the \"materiel\" of our inquiry; we have no power of placing it in\nnew conditions, and submitting it to the test of new experiments, as in\nthe physical sciences. National character is a _complex_ result--a\nproduct of the action and reaction of primary and secondary causes. It\nis a conjoint effect of the action of the primitive elements and laws\noriginally implanted in humanity by the Creator, of the free causality\nand self-determining power of man, and of all the conditions, permanent\nand accidental, within which the national life has been developed. And\nin cases where _physical_ and _moral_ causes are blended, and\nreciprocally conditioned and modified in their operation;--where primary\nresults undergo endless modifications from the influence of surrounding\ncircumstances, and the reaction of social and political\ninstitutions;--and where each individual of the great aggregate wields a\ncausal power that obeys no specific law, and by his own inherent power\nsets in motion new trains of causes which can not be reduced to\nstatistics, we grant that we are in possession of no instrument of exact\nanalysis by which the complex phenomena of national character may be\nreduced to primitive elements. All that we can hope is, to ascertain, by\npsychological analysis, what are the fundamental ideas and laws of\nhumanity; to grasp the exterior conditions which are, on all hands,\nrecognized as exerting a powerful influence upon national character; to\nwatch, under these lights, the manifestations of human nature on the\ntheatre of history, and then apply the principles of a sound historic\ncriticism to the recorded opinions of contemporaneous historians and\ntheir immediate successors. In this manner we may expect, at least, to\napproximate to a true judgment of history.\n\nThere are unquestionably fundamental powers and laws in human nature\nwhich have their development in the course of history. There are certain\nprimitive ideas, imbedded in the constitution of each individual mind,\nwhich are revealed in the universal consciousness of our race, under the\nconditions of experience--the exterior conditions of physical nature and\nhuman society. Such are the ideas of cause and substance; of unity and\ninfinity, which govern all the processes of discursive thought, and lead\nus to the recognition of Being _in se_;--such the ideas of right, of\nduty, of accountability, and of retribution, which regulate all the\nconceptions we form of our relations to all other moral beings, and\nconstitute _morality_;--such the ideas of order, of proportion, and of\nharmony, which preside in the realms of art, and constitute the\nbeau-ideal of _esthetics_;--such the ideas of God, the soul, and\nimmortality, which rule in the domains of _religion_, and determine man\na religious being. These constitute the identity of human nature under\nall circumstances; these characterize humanity in all conditions. Like\npermanent germs in vegetable life, always producing the same species of\nplants; or like fundamental types in the animal kingdom, securing the\nsame homologous structures in all classes and orders; so these\nfundamental ideas in human nature constitute its sameness and unity,\nunder all the varying conditions of life and society. The acorn must\nproduce an oak, and nothing else. The grain of wheat must always produce\nits kind. The offspring of man must always bear his image, and always\nexhibit the same fundamental characteristics, not only in his corporeal\nnature, but also in his mental constitution.\n\nBut the germination of every seed depends on conditions _ab extra_, and\nall germs are modified, in their development, by geographical and\nclimatal surroundings. The development of the acorn into a mature and\nperfect oak greatly depends on the exterior conditions of soil, and\nmoisture, light, and heat. By these it may be rendered luxuriant in its\ngrowth, or it may be stunted in its growth. It may barely exist under\none class of conditions, or it may perish under another. The Brassica\noleracea, in its native habitat on the shore of the sea, is a bitter\nplant with wavy sea-green leaves; in the cultivated garden it is the\ncauliflower. The single rose, under altered conditions, becomes a double\nrose; and creepers rear their stalks and stand erect. Plants, which in a\ncold climate are annuals, become perennial when transported to the\ntorrid zone.[6] And so human nature, fundamentally the same under all\ncircumstances, may be greatly modified, both physically and mentally, by\ngeographical, social, and political conditions. The corporeal nature of\nman--his complexion, his physiognomy, his stature; the intellectual\nnature of man--his religious, ethical, and esthetical ideas are all\nmodified by his surroundings. These modifications, of which all men\ndwelling in the same geographical regions, and under the same social and\npolitical institutions, partake, constitute the _individuality_ of\nnations. Thus, whilst there is a fundamental basis of unity in the\ncorporeal and spiritual nature of man, the causes of diversity are to be\nsought in the circumstances in which tribes and nations are placed in\nthe overruling providence of God.\n\n[Footnote 6: See Carpenter's \"Compar. Physiology,\" p. 625; Lyell's\n\"Principles of Geology,\" pp. 588, 589.]\n\nThe power which man exerts over material conditions, by virtue of his\nintelligence and freedom, is also an important element which, in these\nstudies, we should not depreciate or ignore. We must accept, with all\nits consequences, the dictum of universal consciousness that man is\n_free_. He is not absolutely subject to, and moulded by nature. He has\nthe power to control the circumstances by which he is surrounded--to\noriginate new social and physical conditions--to determine his own\nindividual and responsible character--and he can wield a mighty\ninfluence over the character of his fellow-men. Individual men, as\nLycurgus, Solon, Pericles, Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon have left the\nimpress of their own mind and character upon the political institutions\nof nations, and, in indirect manner, upon the character of succeeding\ngenerations of men. Homer, Plato, Cicero, Bacon, Kant, Locke, Newton,\nShakspeare, Milton have left a deep and permanent impression upon the\nforms of thought and speech, the language and literature, the science\nand philosophy of nations. And inasmuch as a nation is the aggregate of\nindividual beings endowed with spontaneity and freedom, we must grant\nthat exterior conditions are not omnipotent in the formation of national\ncharacter. Still the free causality of man is exercised within a narrow\nfield. \"There is a strictly necessitative limitation drawing an\nimpassable boundary-line around the area of volitional freedom.\" The\nhuman will \"however subjectively free\" is often \"objectively unfree;\"\nthus a large \"uniformity of volitions\" is the natural consequence.[7]\nThe child born in the heart of China, whilst he may, in his personal\nfreedom, develop such traits of character as constitute his\nindividuality, must necessarily be conformed in his language, habits,\nmodes of thought, and religious sentiments to the spirit of his country\nand age. We no more expect a development of Christian thought and\ncharacter in the centre of Africa, unvisited by Christian teaching, than\nwe expect to find the climate and vegetation of New England. And we no\nmore expect that a New England child shall be a Mohammedan, a Parsee, or\na Buddhist, than that he shall have an Oriental physiognomy, and speak\nan Oriental language. Indeed it is impossible for a man to exist in\nhuman society without partaking in the spirit and manners of his country\nand his age. Thus all the individuals of a nation represent, in a\ngreater or less degree, the spirit of the nation. They who do this most\nperfectly are the _great_ men of that nation, because they are at once\nboth the product and the impersonation of their country and their age.\n\"We allow ourselves to think of Shakspeare, or of Raphael, or of Phidias\nas having accomplished their work by the power of their individual\ngenius, but greatness like theirs is never more than the highest degree\nof perfection which prevails widely around it, and forms the environment\nin which it grows. No such single mind in single contact with the facts\nof nature could have created a Pallas, a Madonna, or a Lear; such vast\nconceptions are the growth of ages, the creation of a nation's spirit;\nand the artist and poet, filled full with the power of that spirit, but\ngave it form, and nothing but form. Nor would the form itself have been\nattained by any isolated talent. No genius can dispense with\nexperience.... Noble conceptions already existing, and a noble school of\nexecution which will launch mind and hand upon their true courses, are\nindispensable to transcendent excellence. Shakspeare's plays were as\nmuch the offspring of the long generations who had pioneered the road\nfor him, as the discoveries of Newton were the offspring of those of\nCopernicus.\"[8] The principles here enounced apply with equal force to\nphilosophers and men of science. The philosophy of Plato was but the\nripened fruit of the pregnant thoughts and seminal utterances of his\npredecessors,--Socrates, Anaxagoras, and Pythagoras; whilst all of them\ndo but represent the general tendency and spirit of their country and\ntheir times. The principles of Lord Bacon's \"Instauratio Magna\" were\nincipient in the \"Opus Majus\" of Roger Bacon, the Franciscan friar. The\nsixteenth century matured the thought of the thirteenth century. The\ninductive method in scientific inquiry was immanent in the British mind,\nand the latter Bacon only gave to it a permanent form. It is true that\ngreat men have occasionally appeared on the stage of history who, like\nthe reformers Luther and Wesley, have seemed to be in conflict with the\nprevailing spirit of their age and nation, but these men were the\ncreations of a providence--that providence which, from time to time, has\n_supernaturally_ interposed in the moral history of our race by\ncorrective and remedial measures. These men were inspired and led by a\nspirit which descended from on high. And yet even they had their\nprecursors and harbingers. Wyckliffe and John Huss, and Jerome of Prague\nare but the representatives of numbers whose names do not grace the\nhistoric page, who pioneered the way for Luther and the Reformation. And\nno one can read the history of that great movement of the sixteenth\ncentury without being persuaded there were thousands of Luther's\npredecessors and contemporaries who, like Staupitz and Erasmus, lamented\nthe corruptions of the Church of Rome, and only needed the heroic\ncourage of Luther to make them reformers also. Whilst, therefore, we\nrecognize a free causal power in man, by which he determines his\nindividual and responsible character, we are compelled to recognize the\ngeneral law, that national character is mainly the result of those\ngeographical and ethological, and political and religious conditions in\nwhich the nations have been placed in the providence of God.\n\n[Footnote 7: See Dr. Wheedon's \"Freedom of the Will,\" pp. 164, 165.]\n\n[Footnote 8: Froude, \"Hist. of England,\" pp. 73, 74.]\n\nNations, like persons, have an _Individuality_. They present certain\ncharacteristic marks which constitute their proper identity, and\nseparate them from the surrounding nations of the earth; such, for\nexample, as complexion, physiognomy, language, pursuits, customs,\ninstitutions, sentiments, ideas. The individuality of a nation is\ndetermined mainly from _without_, and not, like human individuality,\nfrom within. The laws of a man's personal character have their home in\nthe soul; and the peculiarities and habits, and that conduct of life,\nwhich constitute his responsible character are, in a great degree, the\nconsequence of his own free choice. But dwelling, as he does, in\nsociety, where he is continually influenced by the example and opinions\nof his neighbors; subject, as he is, to the ceaseless influence of\nclimate, scenery, and other terrestrial conditions, the characteristics\nwhich result from these relations, and which are common to all who dwell\nin the same regions, and under the same institutions, constitute a\nnational individuality. Individual character is _variable_ under the\nsame general conditions, national character is _uniform_, because it\nresults from causes which operate alike upon all individuals.\n\nNow, that man's complexion, his pursuits, his habits, his ideas are\ngreatly modified by his geographical surroundings, is the most obvious\nof truths. No one doubts that the complexion of man is greatly affected\nby climatic conditions. The appearance, habits, pursuits of the man who\nlives within the tropics must, necessarily, differ from those of the man\nwho dwells within the temperate zone. No one expects that the dweller on\nthe mountain will have the same characteristics as the man who resides\non the plains; or that he whose home is in the interior of a continent\nwill have the same habits as the man whose home is on the islands of the\nsea. The denizen of the primeval forest will most naturally become a\nhuntsman. The dweller on the extended plain, or fertile mountain <DW72>,\nwill lead a pastoral, or an agricultural life. Those who live on the\nmargin of great rivers, or the borders of the sea, will \"do business on\nthe great waters.\" Commerce and navigation will be their chief pursuits.\nThe people whose home is on the margin of the lake, or bay, or inland\nsea, or the thickly studded archipelago, are mostly fishermen. And then\nit is a no less obvious truth that men's pursuits exert a moulding\ninfluence on their habits, their forms of speech, their sentiments, and\ntheir ideas. Let any one take pains to observe the peculiarities which\ncharacterize the huntsman, the shepherd, the agriculturist, or the\nfisherman, and he will be convinced that their occupations stamp the\nwhole of their thoughts and feelings; color all their conceptions of\nthings outside their own peculiar field; direct their simple philosophy\nof life; and give a tone, even, to their religious emotions.\n\nThe general aspects of nature, the climate and the scenery, exert an\nappreciable and an acknowledged influence on the _mental_\ncharacteristics of a people. The sprightliness and vivacity of the\nFrank, the impetuosity of the Arab, the immobility of the Russ, the\nrugged sternness of the Scot, the repose and dreaminess of the Hindoo\nare largely due to the country in which they dwell, the air they\nbreathe, the food they eat, and the landscapes and skies they daily look\nupon. The nomadic Arab is not only indebted to the country in which he\ndwells for his habit of hunting for daily food, but for that love of a\nfree, untrammelled life, and for those soaring dreams of fancy in which\nhe so ardently delights. Not only is the Swiss determined by the\npeculiarities of his geographical position to lead a pastoral life, but\nthe climate, and mountain scenery, and bracing atmosphere inspire him\nwith the love of liberty. The reserved and meditative Hindoo, accustomed\nto the profuse luxuriance of nature, borrows the fantastic ideas of his\nmythology from plants, and flowers, and trees. The vastness and infinite\ndiversity of nature, the colossal magnitude of all the forms of animal\nand vegetable life, the broad and massive features of the landscape, the\naspects of beauty and of terror which surround him, and daily pour their\nsilent influences upon his soul, give vividness, grotesqueness, even, to\nhis imagination, and repress his active powers. His mental character\nbears a peculiar and obvious relation to his geographical\nsurroundings.[9]\n\n[Footnote 9: Ritter, \"Geograph. Studies,\" p. 287.]\n\nThe influence of external nature on the imagination--the _creative_\nfaculty in man--is obvious and remarkable. It reveals itself in all the\nproductions of man--his architecture, his sculpture, his painting, and\nhis poetry. Oriental architecture is characterized by the boldness and\nmassiveness of all its parts, and the monotonous uniformity of all its\nfeatures. This is but the expression, in a material form, of that\nshadowy feeling of infinity, and unity, and immobility which an unbroken\ncontinent of vast deserts and continuous lofty mountain chains would\nnaturally inspire. The simple grandeur and perfect harmony and graceful\nblending of light and shade so peculiar to Grecian architecture are the\nproduct of a country whose area is diversified by the harmonious\nblending of land and water, mountain and plain, all bathed in purest\nlight, and canopied with skies of serenest blue. And they are also the\nproduct of a country where man is released from the imprisonment within\nthe magic circle of surrounding nature, and made conscious of his power\nand freedom. In Grecian architecture, therefore, there is less of the\nmassiveness and immobility of nature, and more of the grace and dignity\nof man. It adds to the idea of permanence a _vital_ expression. \"The\nDoric column,\" says Vitruvius, \"has the proportion, strength, and beauty\nof man.\" The Gothic architecture had its birthplace among a people who\nhad lived and worshipped for ages amidst the dense forests of the north,\nand was no doubt an imitation of the interlacing of the overshadowing\ntrees. The clustered shaft, and lancet arch, and flowing tracery,\nreflect the impression which the surrounding scenery had woven into the\ntexture of the Teutonic mind.\n\nThe history of painting and of sculpture will also show that the varied\n\"styles of art\" are largely the result of the aspects which external\nnature presented to the eye of man. Oriental sculpture, like its\narchitecture, was characterized by massiveness of form and tranquillity\nof expression; and its painting was, at best, but  sculpture. The\nmost striking objects are colossal figures, in which the human form is\nstrangely combined with the brute, as in the winged bulls of Nineveh and\nthe sphinxes of Egypt. Man is regarded simply as a part of nature, he\ndoes not rise above the plane of animal life. The soul has its\nimmortality only in an eternal metempsychosis--a cycle of life which\nsweeps through all the brute creation. But in Grecian sculpture we have\nless of nature, more of man; less of massiveness, more of grace and\nelegance; less repose, and more of action. Now the connection between\nthese styles of art, and the countries in which they were developed, is\nat once suggested to the thoughtful mind.\n\nAnd then, finally, the literature of a people equally reveals the\nimpress of surrounding cosmical conditions. \"The poems of Ossian are but\nthe echo of the wild, rough, cloudy highlands of his Scottish home.\" The\nforest songs of the wild Indian, the <DW64>'s plaintive melodies in the\nrice-fields of Carolina, the refrains in which the hunter of Kamtchatka\nrelates his adventures with the polar bear, and in which the South Sea\nIslander celebrates his feats and dangers on the deep, all betoken the\ninfluence which the scenes of daily life exert upon the thoughts and\nfeelings of our race. \"To what an extent nature can express herself in,\nand modify the culture of the individual, as well as of an entire\npeople, can be seen on Ionian soil in the verse of Homer, which, called\nforth under the most favorable sky, and on the most luxuriant shore of\nthe Grecian archipelago, not only charms us to-day, but bearing this\nimpress, has determined what shall be the classic form throughout all\ncoming time.\"[10]\n\n[Footnote 10: See Ritter, pp. 288, 289. Poetic art has unquestionably\nits _geographical_ distributions like the fauna and flora of the globe.\n\"If you love the images, not merely of a rich, but of a luxuriant fancy;\nif you are pleased with the most daring flights; if you would see a\npoetic creation full of wonders, then turn your eye to the poetry of the\n_orient_, where all forms appear in purple; where each flower glows like\nthe morning ray resting on the earth. But if, on the contrary, you\nprefer depth of thought, and earnestness of reflection; if you delight\nin the colossal, yet pale forms, which float about in mist, and whisper\nof the mysteries of the spirit-land, and of the vanity of all things,\nexcept honor, then I must point you to the hoary _north_.... Or if you\nsympathize with that deep feeling, that longing of the soul, which does\nnot linger on the earth, but evermore looks up to the azure tent of the\nstars, where happiness dwells, where the unquiet of the beating heart is\nstill, then you must resort to the romantic poetry of the\n_west_.\"--\"_Study of Greek Literature_,\" Bishop Esaias Tegner, p. 38.]\n\nIn seeking, therefore, to determine correctly what are the\ncharacteristics of a nation, we must endeavor to trace how far the\nphysical constitution of that people, their temperament, their habits,\ntheir sentiments, and their ideas have been formed, or modified, under\nthe surrounding geographical conditions, which, as we have seen, greatly\ndetermine a nation's individuality. Guided by these lights, let us\napproach the study of \"_the men of Athens_.\"\n\n_Attica_, of which Athens was the capital, and whose entire populations\nwere called \"Athenians,\" was the most important of all the Hellenic\nstates. It is a triangular peninsula, the base of which is defined by\nthe high mountain ranges of Cithaeron and Parnes, whilst the two other\nsides are washed by the sea, having their vertex at the promontory of\nSunium, or Cape Colonna. The prolongation of the south-western line\ntowards the north until it reaches the base at the foot of Mount\nCithaeron, served as the line of demarkation between the Athenian\nterritory and the State of Megara. Thus Attica may be generally\ndescribed as bounded on the north-east by the channel of the Negropont;\non the south-west by the gulf of AEgina and part of Megara; and on the\nnorth-west by the territory which formed the ancient Boeotia, including\nwithin its limits an area of about 750 miles.[11]\n\nHills of inferior elevation connect the mountain ranges of Cithaeron and\nParnes with the mountainous surface of the south-east of the peninsula.\nThese hills, commencing with the promontory of Sunium itself, which\nforms the vertex of the triangle, rise gradually on the south-east to\nthe round summit of Hymettus, and onward to the higher peak of\nPentelicus, near Marathon, on the east. The rest of Attica is all a\nplain, one reach of which comes down to the sea on the south, at the\nvery base of Hymettus. Here, about five miles from the shore, an abrupt\nrock rises from the plain, about 200 feet high, bordered on the south by\nlower eminences. That rock is the Acropolis. Those lower eminences are\nthe Areopagus, the Pmyx, and the Museum. In the valley formed by these\nfour hills we have the Agora, and the varied undulations of these hills\ndetermine the features of the city of Athens.[12]\n\n[Footnote 11: See art. \"Attica,\" _Encyc. Brit._]\n\n[Footnote 12: See Conybeare and Howson's \"Life and Epistles of St.\nPaul,\" vol. i. p. 346.]\n\nNearly all writers on the topography of Athens derive their materials\nfrom Pausanias, who visited the city in the early part of the second\ncentury, and whose \"Itinerary of Greece\" is still extant.[13] He entered\nthe city by the Peiraic gate, the same gate at which Paul entered some\nsixty years before. We shall place ourselves under his guidance, and, so\nfar as we are able, follow the same course, supplying some omissions, as\nwe go along, from other sources. On entering the city, the first\nbuilding which arrested the attention of Pausanias was the Pompeium, so\ncalled because it was the depository of the sacred vessels, and also of\nthe garments used in the annual procession in honor of Athena (Minerva),\nthe tutelary deity of Athens, from whom the city derived its name. Near\nthis edifice stood a temple of Demeter (Ceres), containing statues of\nthat goddess, of her daughter Persephone, and of Iacchus, all executed\nby Praxiteles; and beyond were several porticoes leading from the city\ngates to the outer Ceramicus, while the intervening space was occupied\nby various temples, the Gymnasium of Hermes, and the house of Polytion,\nthe most magnificent private residence in Athens.\n\n[Footnote 13: The account here given of the topography of Athens is\nderived mainly from the article on \"Athens\" in the _Encyc. Brit._]\n\nThere were two places in Athens known by the name of Ceramicus, one\nwithout the walls, forming part of the suburbs; and the other within the\nwalls, embracing a very important section of the city. The outer\nCeramicus was covered with the sepulchres of the Athenians who had been\nslain in battle, and buried at the public expense; it communicated with\nthe inner Ceramicus by the gate Dipylum. The Ceramicus within the city\nprobably included the Agora, the Stoa Basileios, and the Stoa Poecile,\nbesides various other temples and public buildings.\n\nHaving fairly passed the city gates, a long street is before us with a\ncolonnade or cloister on either hand; and at the end of this street, by\nturning to the left, we might go through the whole Ceramicus to the open\ncountry, and the groves of the Academy. But we turn to the right, and\nenter the Agora,--the market-place, as it is called in the English\ntranslation of the sacred narrative.\n\nWe are not, however, to conceive of the market-place at Athens as\nbearing any resemblance to the bare, undecorated spaces appropriated to\nbusiness in our modern towns; but rather as a magnificent public square,\nclosed in by grand historic buildings, of the highest style of\narchitecture; planted with palm-trees in graceful distribution, and\nadorned with statues of the great men of Athens and the deified heroes\nof her mythology, from the hands of the immortal masters of the plastic\nart. This \"market-place\" was the great centre of the public life of the\nAthenians,--the meeting-place of poets, orators, statesmen, warriors,\nand philosophers,--a grand resort for leisure, for conversation, for\nbusiness, and for news. Standing in the Agora, and looking towards the\nsouth, is the _Museum,_ so called because it was believed that _Musaeus_,\nthe father of poetry, was buried there. Towards the north-west is the\n_Pnyx,_ a sloping hill, partially levelled into an open area for\npolitical assemblies. To the north is seen the craggy eminence of the\n_Areopagus_, and on the north-east is the _Acropolis_ towering high\nabove the scene, \"the crown and glory of the whole.\"\n\nThe most important buildings of the Agora are the Porticoes or\ncloisters, the most remarkable of which are the Stoa Basileios, or\nPortico of the king; the Stoa Eleutherius, or Portico of the Jupiter of\nFreedom; and the Stoa Poecile, or Painted Porch. These Porticoes were\ncovered walks, the roof being supported by columns, at least on one\nside, and by solid masonry on the other. Such shaded walks are almost\nindispensable in the south of Europe, where the people live much in the\nopen air, and they afford a grateful protection from the heat of the\nsun, as well as a shelter from the rain. Seats were also provided where\nthe loungers might rest, and the philosophers and rhetoricians sit down\nfor intellectual conversation. The \"Stoic\" school of philosophy derived\nits name from the circumstance that its founder, Zeno, used to meet and\nconverse with his disciples under one of these porticoes,--the Stoa\nPoecile. These porticoes were not only built in the most magnificent\nstyle of architecture, but adorned with paintings and statuary by the\nbest masters. On the roof of the Stoa Basileios were statues of Theseus\nand the Day. In front of the Stoa Eleutherius was placed the divinity to\nwhom it was dedicated; and within were allegorical paintings,\ncelebrating the rise of \"the fierce democracy.\" The Stoa Poecile derived\nits name from the celebrated paintings which adorned its walls, and\nwhich were almost exclusively devoted to the representation of national\nsubjects, as the contest of Theseus with the Amazons, the more glorious\nstruggle at Marathon, and the other achievements of the Athenians; here\nalso were suspended the shields of the Scionaeans of Thrace, together\nwith those of the Lacedemonians, taken at the island of Sphacteria.\n\nIt is beyond our purpose to describe all the public edifices,--the\ntemples, gymnasia, and theatres which crowd the Ceramic area, and that\nportion of the city lying to the west and south of the Acropolis. Our\nobject is, if possible, to convey to the reader some conception of the\nancient splendor and magnificence of Athens; to revive the scenes amidst\nwhich the Athenians daily moved, and which may be presumed to have\nexerted a powerful influence upon the manners, the taste, the habits of\nthought, and the entire character of the Athenian people. To secure this\nobject we need only direct attention to the Acropolis, which was crowded\nwith the monuments of Athenian glory, and exhibited an amazing\nconcentration of all that was most perfect in art, unsurpassed in\nexcellence, and unrivalled in richness and splendor. It was \"the\npeerless gem of Greece, the glory and pride of art, the wonder and envy\nof the world.\"\n\nThe western side of the Acropolis, which furnished the only access to\nthe summit of the hill, was about 168 feet in breadth; an opening so\nnarrow that, to the artists of Pericles, it appeared practicable to fill\nup the space with a single building, which, in serving the purpose of a\ngateway to the Acropolis, should also contribute to adorn, as well as\nfortify the citadel. This work, the greatest achievement of civil\narchitecture in Athens, which rivalled the Parthenon in felicity of\nexecution, and surpassed it in boldness and originality of design,\nconsisted of a grand central colonnade closed by projecting wings. This\nincomparable edifice, built of Pentelic marble, received the name of\nPropylaea from its forming the vestibule to the five-fold gates by which\nthe citadel was entered. In front of the right wing there stood a small\nIonic temple of pure white marble, dedicated to Nike Apteros (Wingless\nVictory).\n\nA gigantic flight of steps conducted from the five-fold gates to the\nplatform of the Acropolis, which was, in fact, one vast composition of\narchitecture and sculpture dedicated to the national glory. Here stood\nthe Parthenon, or temple of the Virgin Goddess, the glorious temple\nwhich rose in the proudest period of Athenian history to the honor of\nMinerva, and which ages have only partially effaced. This magnificent\ntemple, \"by its united excellences of materials, design, and decoration,\ninternal as well as external, has been universally considered the most\nperfect which human genius ever planned and executed. Its dimensions\nwere sufficiently large to produce an impression of grandeur and\nsublimity, which was not disturbed by any obtrusive subdivision of\nparts; and, whether viewed at a small or greater distance, there was\nnothing to divert the mind of the spectator from contemplating the unity\nas well as majesty of mass and outline; circumstances which form the\nfirst and most remarkable characteristic of every Greek temple erected\nduring the purer ages of Grecian taste and genius.\"[14]\n\n[Footnote 14: Leake's \"Topography of Athens,\" p. 209 et seq.]\n\nIt would be impossible to convey any just and adequate conception of the\nartistic decorations of this wonderful edifice. The two pediments of the\ntemple were decorated with magnificent compositions of statuary, each\nconsisting of about twenty entire figures of colossal size; the one on\nthe western pediment representing the birth of Minerva, and the other,\non the eastern pediment, the contest between that goddess and Neptune\nfor the possession of Attica. Under the outer cornice were ninety-two\ngroups, raised in high relief from tablets about four feet square,\nrepresenting the victories achieved by her companions. Round the inner\nfrieze was presented the procession of the Parthenon on the grand\nquinquennial festival of the Panathenaea. The procession is represented\nas advancing in two parallel columns from west to east; one proceeding\nalong the northern, the other along the southern side of the temple;\npart facing inward after turning the angle of the eastern front, and\npart meeting towards the centre of that front.\n\nThe statue of the virgin goddess, the work of Phidias, stood in the\neastern chamber of the cella, and was composed of ivory and gold. It had\nbut one rival in the world, the Jupiter Olympus of the same famous\nartist. On the summit or apex of the helmet was placed a sphinx, with\ngriffins on either side. The figure of the goddess was represented in an\nerect martial attitude, and clothed in a robe reaching to the feet. On\nthe breast was a head of Medusa, wrought in ivory, and a figure of\nVictory about four cubits high. The goddess held a spear in her hand,\nand an aegis lay at her feet, while on her right, and near the spear, was\na figure of a serpent, believed to represent that of Erichthonius.\n\nAccording to Pliny, the entire height of the statue was twenty-six\ncubits (about forty feet), and the artist, Phidias, had ingeniously\ncontrived that the gold with which the statue was encrusted might be\nremoved at pleasure. The battle of the Centaurs and Lapithae was carved\nupon the sandals; the battle of the Amazons was represented on the aegis\nwhich lay at her feet, and on the pedestal was sculptured the birth of\nPandora.\n\nThe temple of Erechtheus, the most ancient structure in Athens, stood on\nthe northern side of the Acropolis. The statue of Zeus Polieus stood\nbetween the Propylaea and the Parthenon. The brazen colossus of Minerva,\ncast from the spoils of Marathon, appears to have occupied the space\nbetween the Erechtheium and the Propylaea, near the Pelasgic or northern\nwall. This statue of the tutelary divinity of Athens and Attica rose in\ngigantic proportions above all the buildings of the Acropolis, the\nflashing of whose helmet plumes met the sailor's eye as he approached\nfrom the Sunian promontory. And the remaining space of the wide area was\nliterally crowded with statuary, amongst which were Theseus contending\nwith the Minotaur; Hercules strangling the serpents; the Earth imploring\nshowers from Jupiter; and Minerva causing the olive to sprout, while\nNeptune raises the waves. After these works of art, it is needless to\nspeak of others. It may be sufficient to state that Pausanias mentions\nby name towards three hundred remarkable statues which adorned this part\nof the city even after it had been robbed and despoiled by its several\nconquerors.\n\nThe Areopagus, or hill of Ares (Mars), so called, it is said, in\nconsequence of that god having been the first person tried there for the\ncrime of murder, was, beyond all doubt, the rocky height which is\nseparated from the western end of the Acropolis by a hollow, forming a\ncommunication between the northern and southern divisions of the city.\nThe court of the Areopagus was simply an open space on the highest\nsummit of the hill, the judges sitting in the open air, on rude seats of\nstone, hewn out of the solid rock. Near to the spot on which the court\nwas held was the sanctuary of the Furies, the avenging deities of\nGrecian mythology, whose presence gave additional solemnity to the\nscene. The place and the court were regarded by the people with\nsuperstitious reverence.\n\nThis completes, our survey of the principal buildings, monuments, and\nlocalities within the city of Athens. We do not imagine we have\nsucceeded in conveying any adequate idea of the ancient splendor and\nglory of this city, which was not only the capital of Attica, but also\n\n     \"The eye of Greece, mother of art and eloquence.\"\n\nWe trust, however, that we have contributed somewhat towards awakening\nin the reader's mind a deeper interest in these classic scenes, and\nenabling him to appreciate, more vividly, the allusions we may hereafter\nmake to them.\n\nThe mere dry recital of geographical details, and topographical notices\nis, however, of little interest in itself, and by itself. A tract of\ncountry derives its chief interest from its historic _associations_--its\nimmediate relations to man. The events which have transpired therein,\nthe noble or ignoble deeds, the grand achievements, or the great\ndisasters of which it has been the theatre, these constitute the living\nheart of its geography. Palestine has been rendered forever memorable,\nnot by any remarkable peculiarities in its climate or scenery, but by\nthe fact that it was the home of God's ancient people--the Hebrews and\nstill more, because the ardent imagination of the modern traveller still\nsees upon its mountains and plains the lingering footprints of the Son\nof God. And so Attica will always be regarded as a classic land, because\nit was the theatre of the most illustrious period of ancient\nhistory--_the period of youthful vigor in the life of humanity, when\nviewed as a grand organic whole_.\n\nHere on a narrow spot of less superficies than the little State of Rhode\nIsland there flourished a republic which, in the grandeur of her\nmilitary and naval achievements, at Marathon, Thermopylae, Plataea, and\nSalamis, in the sublime creations of her painters, sculptors, and\narchitects, and the unrivalled productions of her poets, orators, and\nphilosophers, has left a lingering glory on the historic page, which\ntwenty centuries have not been able to eclipse or dim. The names of\nSolon and Pericles; of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; of Isocrates and\nDemosthenes; of Myron, Phidias, and Praxiteles; of Herodotus, Xenophon,\nand Thucydides; of Sophocles and Euripides, have shed an undying lustre\non Athens and Attica.\n\nHow much of this universal renown, this imperishable glory attained by\nthe Athenian people, is to be ascribed to their geographical position\nand surroundings, and to the elastic, bracing air, the enchanting\nscenery, the glorious skies, which poured their daily inspiration on the\nAthenian mind, is a problem we may scarcely hope to solve.\n\nOf this, at least, we may be sure, that all these geographical and\ncosmical conditions were ordained by God, and ordained, also, for some\nnoble and worthy end. That God, \"the Father of all the families of the\nearth,\" cared for the Athenian people as much as for Jewish and\nChristian nations, we can not doubt. That they were the subjects of a\nProvidence, and that, in God's great plan of human history, they had an\nimportant part to fulfill, we must believe. That God \"determined the\ntime of each nation's existence, and fixed the geographical bounds of\nits habitation,\" is affirmed by Paul. And that the _specific_ end for\nwhich the nation had its existence was fulfilled, we have the fullest\nconfidence. _So far, therefore, as we can trace the relation that\nsubsists between the geographical position and surroundings of that\nnation, and its national characteristics and actual history, so far are\nwe able to solve the problem of its destiny; and by so much do we\nenlarge our comprehension of the plan of God in the history of our\nrace_.\n\nThe geographical position of Greece was favorable to the freest\ncommercial and maritime intercourse with the great historic\nnations--those nations most advanced in science, literature, and art.\nBounded on the west by the Adriatic and Ionian seas, by the\nMediterranean on the south, and on the east by the AEgean Sea, her\npopulations enjoyed a free intercommunication with the Egyptians,\nHebrews, Persians, Phoenicians, Romans, and Carthaginians. This\npeculiarity in the geographical position of the Grecian peninsula could\nnot fail to awaken in its people a taste for navigation, and lead them\nto active commercial intercourse with foreign nations.[15] The boundless\noceans on the south and east, the almost impassable mountains on the\nwest and north of Asia, presented insurmountable obstacles to commercial\nintercourse. But the extended border-lands and narrow inland seas of\nSouthern Europe allured man, in presence of their opposite shores, to\nthe perpetual exchange of his productions. An arm of the sea is not a\nbarrier, but rather a tie between the nations. Appearing to separate, it\nin reality draws them together without confounding them.[16] On such a\ntheatre we may expect that commerce will be developed on an extensive\nscale.[17] And, along with commerce, there will be increased activity in\nall departments of productive industry, and an enlarged diffusion of\nknowledge. \"Commerce,\" says Ritter, \"is the great mover and combiner of\nthe world's activities.\" And it also furnishes the channels through\nwhich flow the world's ideas. Commerce, both in a material and moral\npoint of view, is the life of nations. Along with the ivory and ebony,\nthe fabrics and purple dyes, the wines and spices of the Syrian\nmerchant, there flowed into Greece the science of numbers and of\nnavigation, and the art of alphabetical writing from Phoenicia. Along\nwith the fine wheat, and embroidered linen, and riches of the farther\nIndias which came from Egypt, there came, also, into Greece some\nknowledge of the sciences of astronomy and geometry, of architecture and\nmechanics, of medicine and chemistry; together with the mystic wisdom of\nthe distant Orient. The scattered rays of light which gleamed in the\neastern skies were thus converged in Greece, as on a focal point, to be\nrendered more brilliant by contact with the powerful Grecian intellect,\nand then diffused throughout the western world. Thus intercourse with\nsurrounding nations, by commerce and travel, contact therewith by\nimmigrations and colonizations, even collisions and invasions also,\nbecame, in the hands of a presiding Providence, the means of diffusing\nknowledge, of quickening and enlarging the active powers of man, and\nthus, ultimately, of a higher civilization.\n\n[Footnote 15: Humboldt's \"Cosmos,\" vol. ii. p. 143.]\n\n[Footnote 16: Cousin, vol. i. pp. 169, 170.]\n\n[Footnote 17: The advantageous situation of Britain for commerce, and\nthe nature of the climate have powerfully contributed to the perfection\nof industry among her population. Had she occupied a central, internal\nstation, like that of Switzerland, the facilities of her people for\ndealing with others being so much the less, their progress would have\nbeen comparatively slow, and, instead of being highly improved, their\nmanufactures would have been still in infancy. But being surrounded on\nall sides by the sea, that \"great highway of nations,\" they have been\nable to maintain an intercourse with the most remote as well as the\nnearest countries, to supply them on the easiest terms with their\nmanufactures, and to profit by the peculiar products and capacities of\nproduction possessed by other nations. To the geographical position and\nclimate of Great Britain, her people are mainly indebted for their\nposition as the first commercial nation on earth.--See art.\n\"Manufactrues,\" p. 277, _Encyc. Brit_.]\n\nThen further, the peculiar configuration of Greece, the wonderful\ncomplexity of its coast-line, its peninsular forms, the number of its\nislands, and the singular distribution of its mountains, all seem to\nmark it as the theatre of activity, of movement, of individuality, and\nof freedom. An extensive continent, unbroken by lakes and inland seas,\nas Asia, where vast deserts and high mountain chains separate the\npopulations, is the seat of immobility.[18] Commerce is limited to the\nbare necessities of life, and there are no inducements to movement, to\ntravel, and to enterprise. There are no conditions prompting man to\nattempt the conquest of nature. Society is therefore stationary as in\nChina and India. Enfolded and imprisoned within the overpowering\nvastness and illimitable sweep of nature, man is almost unconscious of\nhis freedom and his personality. He surrenders himself to the disposal\nof a mysterious \"_fate_\" and yields readily to the despotic sway of\nsuperhuman powers. The State is consequently the reign of a single\ndespotic will. The laws of the Medes and Persians are unalterable. But\nin Greece we have extended border-lands on the coast of navigable seas;\npeninsulas elaborately articulated, and easy of access. We have\nmountains sufficiently elevated to shade the land and diversify the\nscenery, and yet of such a form as not to impede communication. They are\nusually placed neither in parallel chains nor in massive groups, but are\nso disposed as to inclose extensive tracts of land admirably adapted to\nbecome the seats of small and independent communities, separated by\nnatural boundaries, sometimes impossible to overleap. The face of the\ninterior country,--its forms of relief, seemed as though Providence\ndesigned, from the beginning, to keep its populations socially and\npolitically disunited. These difficulties of internal transit by land\nwere, however, counteracted by the large proportion of coast, and the\naccessibility of the country by sea. The promontories and indentations\nin the line of the Grecian coast are hardly less remarkable than the\npeculiar elevations and depressions of the surface. \"The shape of\nPeloponnesus, with its three southern gulfs, the Argolic, Laconian, and\nMessenian, was compared by the ancient geographers to the leaf of a\nplane-tree: the Pagasaean gulf on the eastern side of Greece, and the\nAmbrakian gulf on the western, with their narrow entrances and\nconsiderable area, are equivalent to internal lakes: Xenophon boasts of\nthe double sea which embraces so large a portion of Attica; Ephorus, of\nthe triple sea by which Boeotia was accessible from west, north, and\nsouth--the Euboean strait, opening a long line of country on both sides\nto coasting navigation. But the most important of all Grecian gulfs are\nthe Corinthian and Saronic, washing the northern and north-eastern\nshores of Peloponnesus, and separated by the narrow barrier of the\nIsthmus of Corinth. The former, especially, lays open AEtolia, Phokis,\nand Boeotia, as the whole northern coast of Peloponnesus, to water\napproach.... It will thus appear that there was no part of Greece proper\nwhich could be considered as out of the reach of the sea, whilst most\nparts of it were easy of access. The sea was thus the sole channel for\ntransmitting improvements and ideas as well as for maintaining\nsympathies\" between the Hellenic tribes.[19] The sea is not only the\ngrand highway of commercial intercourse, but the empire of movement, of\nprogress, and of freedom. Here man is set free from the bondage imposed\nby the overpowering magnitude and vastness of continental and oceanic\nforms. The boisterous and, apparently, lawless winds are made to obey\nhis will. He mounts the sea as on a fiery steed and \"lays his hand upon\nher mane.\" And whilst thus he succeeds, in any measure, to triumph over\nnature, he wakes to conscious power and freedom. It is in this region of\ncontact and commingling of sea and land where man attains the highest\nsuperiority. Refreshing our historic recollections, and casting our eyes\nupon the map of the world, we can not fail to see that all the most\nhighly civilized nations have lived, or still live, on the margin of the\nsea.\n\n[Footnote 18: Cousin, vol. i. pp. 151, 170.]\n\n[Footnote 19: Grote's \"Hist, of Greece,\" vol. ii. pp. 221, 225.]\n\nThe peculiar configuration of the territory of Greece, its forms of\nrelief, \"so like, in many respects, to Switzerland,\" could not fail to\nexert a powerful influence on the character and destiny of its people.\nIts inclosing mountains materially increased their defensive power, and,\nat the same time, inspired them with the love of liberty. Those\nmountains, as we have seen, so unique in their distribution, were\nnatural barriers against the invasion of foreign nations, and they\nrendered each separate community secure against the encroachments of the\nrest. The pass of Thermopylae, between Thessaly and Phocis, that of\nCithaeron, between Boeotia and Attica; and the mountain ranges of Oneion\nand Geraneia, along the Isthmus of Corinth, were positions which could\nbe defended against any force of invaders. This signal peculiarity in\nthe forms of relief protected each section of the Greeks from being\nconquered, and at the same time maintained their separate autonomy. The\nseparate states of Greece lived, as it were, in the presence of each\nother, and at the same time resisted all influences and all efforts\ntowards a coalescence with each other, until the time of Alexander.\nTheir country, a word of indefinite meaning to the Asiatic, conveyed to\nthem as definite an idea as that of their own homes. Its whole\nlandscape, with all its historic associations, its glorious monuments of\nheroic deeds, were perpetually present to their eyes. Thus their\npatriotism, concentrated within a narrow sphere, and kept alive by the\nsense of their individual importance, their democratic spirit, and their\nstruggles with surrounding communities to maintain their independence,\nbecame a strong and ruling passion. Their geographical surroundings had,\ntherefore, a powerful influence upon their political institutions.\nConquest, which forces nations of different habits, characters, and\nlanguages into unity, is at last the parent of degrading servitude.\nThese nations are only held together, as in the Roman empire, by the\niron hand of military power. The despot, surrounded by a foreign\nsoldiery, appears in the conquered provinces, simply to enforce tribute,\nand compel obedience to his arbitrary will. But the small Greek\ncommunities, protected by the barriers of their seas and gulfs and\nmountains, escaped, for centuries, this evil destiny. The people, united\nby identity of language and manners and religion, by common interest and\nfacile intercommunication, could readily combine to resist the invasions\nof foreign nations, as well as the encroachments of their own rulers.\nAnd they were able to easily model their own government according to\ntheir own necessities and circumstances and common interests, and to\nmake the end for which it existed the sole measure of the powers it was\npermitted to wield.[20]\n\n[Footnote 20: _Encyc. Brit_, art. \"Greece.\"]\n\nThe soil of Attica was not the most favorable to agricultural pursuits.\nIn many places it was stony and uneven, and a considerable proportion\nwas bare rock, on which nothing could be grown. Not half the surface was\ncapable of cultivation. In this respect it may be fitly compared to some\nof the New England States. The light, dry soil produced excellent\nbarley, but not enough of wheat for their own consumption. Demosthenes\ninforms us that Athens brought every year, from Byzantium, four hundred\nthousand _medimni_ of wheat. The alluvial plains, under industrious\ncultivation, would furnish a frugal subsistence for a large population,\nand the mildness of the climate allowed all the more valuable products\nto ripen early, and go out of season last. Such conditions, of course,\nwould furnish motives for skill and industry, and demand of the people\nfrugal and temperate habits. The luxuriance of a tropical climate tends\nto improvidence and indolence. Where nature pours her fullness into the\nlap of ease, forethought and providence are little needed. There is none\nof that struggle for existence which awakens sagacity, and calls into\nexercise the active powers of man. But in a country where nature only\nyields her fruits as the reward of toil, and yet enough to the\nintelligent culture of the soil, there habits of patient industry must\nbe formed. The alternations of summer and winter excite to forethought\nand providence, and the comparative poverty of the soil will prompt to\nfrugality. Man naturally aspires to improve his condition by all the\nmeans within his power. He becomes a careful observer of nature, he\ntreasures up the results of observation, he compares one fact with\nanother and notes their relations, and he makes new experiments to test\nhis conclusions, and thus he awakes to the vigorous exercise of all his\npowers. These physical conditions must develop a hardy, vigorous,\nprudent, and temperate race; and such, unquestionably, were the Greeks.\n\"Theophrastus, and other authors, amply attest the observant and\nindustrious agriculture prevalent in Greece. The culture of the vine and\nolive appears to have been particularly elaborate and the many different\naccidents of soil, level, and exposure which were to be found, afforded\nto observant planters materials for study and comparison.\"[21] The\nGreeks were frugal in their habits and simple in their modes of life.\nThe barley loaf seems to have been more generally eaten than the wheaten\nloaf; this, with salt fish and vegetables, was the common food of the\npopulation. Economy in domestic life was universal. In their manners,\ntheir dress, their private dwellings, they were little disposed to\nostentation or display.\n\n[Footnote 21: Grote, \"Hist. of Greece,\" vol. ii. p. 230.]\n\nThe climate of Attica is what, in physical geography, would be called\n_maritime_. \"Here are allied the continental vigor and oceanic softness,\nin a fortunate union, mutually tempering each other.\"[22] The climate of\nthe whole peninsula of Greece seems to be distinguished from that of\nSpain and Italy, by having more of the character of an inland region.\nThe diversity of local temperature is greater; the extremes of summer\nand winter more severe. In Arcadia the snow has been found eighteen\ninches thick in January, with the thermometer at 16 deg. Fahrenheit, and it\nsometimes lies on the ground for six weeks. The summits of the central\nchains of Pindus and most of the Albanian mountains are covered with\nsnow from the beginning of November to the end of March. In Attica,\nwhich, being freely exposed to the sea, has in some measure an insular\nclimate, the winter sets in about the beginning of January. About the\nmiddle of that month the snow begins to fall, but seldom remains upon\nthe plain for more than a few days, though it lies on the summit of the\nmountain for a month.[23] And then, whilst Boeotia, which joins to\nAttica, is higher and colder, and often covered with dense fogs, Attica\nis remarkable for the wonderful transparency, dryness, and elasticity of\nits atmosphere. All these climatal conditions exerted, no doubt, a\nmodifying influence upon the character of the inhabitants.[24] In a\ntropical climate man is enfeebled by excessive heat. His natural\ntendency is to inaction and repose. His life is passed in a \"strenuous\nidleness.\" His intellectual, his reflective faculties are overmastered\nby his physical instincts. Passion, sentiment, imagination prevail over\nthe sober exercises of his reasoning powers. Poetry universally\npredominates over philosophy. The whole character of Oriental language,\nreligion, literature is intensely imaginative. In the frozen regions of\nthe frigid zone, where a perpetual winter reigns, and where lichens and\nmosses are the only forms of vegetable life, man is condemned to the\nlife of a huntsman, and depends mainly for his subsistence on the\nprecarious chances of the chase. He is consequently nomadic in his\nhabits, and barbarous withal. His whole life is spent in the bare\nprocess of procuring a living. He consumes a large amount of oleaginous\nfood, and breathes a damp heavy atmosphere, and is, consequently, of a\ndull phlegmatic temperament. Notwithstanding his uncertain supplies of\nfood, he is recklessly improvident, and indifferent to all the lessons\nof experience. Intellectual pursuits are all precluded. There is no\nmotive, no opportunity, and indeed no disposition for mental culture.\nBut in a temperate climate man is stimulated to high mental activity.\nThe alternations of heat and cold, of summer and of winter, an elastic,\nfresh, and bracing atmosphere, a diversity in the aspects of nature,\nthese develop a vivacity of temperament, a quickness of sensibility as\nwell as apprehension, and a versatility of feeling as well as genius.\nHistory marks out the temperate zone as the seat of the refined and\ncultivated nations.\n\n[Footnote 22: Guyot, \"Earth and Man,\" p. 181.]\n\n[Footnote 23: _Encyc. Brit._, art. \"Greece.\"]\n\n[Footnote 24: The influence of climatic conditions did not escape the\nattention of the Greeks. Herodotus, Hippocrates, and Aristotle speak of\nthe climate of Asia as more enervating than that of Greece. They\nregarded the changeful character and diversity of local temperature in\nGreece as highly stimulating to the energies of the populations. The\nmarked contrast between the Athenians and the Boeotians was supposed to\nbe represented in the light and heavy atmosphere which they respectively\nbreathed.--_Grote_, vol. ii. pp. 232-3.]\n\nThe natural scenery of Greece was of unrivalled grandeur--surpassing\nItaly, perhaps every country in the world. It combined in the highest\ndegree every feature essential to the highest beauty of a landscape\nexcept, perhaps, large rivers. But this was more than compensated for by\nthe proximity of the sea, which, by its numerous arms, seemed to embrace\nthe land on nearly every side. Its mountains, encircled with zones of\nwood, and capped with snow, though much lower than the Alps, are as\nimposing by the suddenness of their elevation--\"pillars of heaven, the\nfosterers of enduring snows.\"[25] Rich sheltered plains lie at their\nfeet, covered with an unequally woven mantle of trees, and shrubs, and\nflowers,--\"the verdant gloom of the thickly-mantling ivy, the narcissus\nsteeped in heavenly dew, the golden-beaming crocus, the hardy and\never-fresh-sprouting olive-tree,\"[26] and the luxuriant palm, which\nnourishes amid its branches the grape swelling with juice. But it is the\ncombination of these features, in the most diversified manner, with\nbeautiful inland bays and seas, broken by headlands, inclosed by\nmountains, and studded with islands of every form and magnitude, which\ngives to the scenery of Greece its proud pre-eminence. \"Greek scenery,\"\nsays Humboldt, \"presents the peculiar charm of an intimate blending of\nsea and land, of shores adorned with vegetation, or picturesquely girt\nwith rocks gleaming in the light of aerial tints, and an ocean beautiful\nin the play of the ever-changing brightness of its deep-toned wave.\"[27]\nAnd over all the serene, deep azure skies, occasionally veiled by light\nfleecy clouds, with vapory purple mists resting on the distant mountain\ntops. This glorious scenery of Greece is evermore the admiration of the\nmodern traveller. \"In wandering about Athens on a sunny day in March,\nwhen the asphodels are blooming on Colones, when the immortal mountains\nare folded in a transparent haze, and the AEgean slumbers afar among his\nisles,\" he is reminded of the lines of Byron penned amid these scenes--\n\n[Footnote 25: Pindar.]\n\n[Footnote 26: Sophocles, \"oedipus at Colonna.\"]\n\n[Footnote 27: \"Cosmos,\" vol. ii. p. 25.]\n\n     \"Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild;\n     Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields,\n     Thine olives ripe as when Minerva smiled,\n     And still his honeyed wealth Hymettus yields;\n     There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds,\n     The freeborn wanderer of the mountain air;\n     Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds,\n     Still in his beams Mendeli's marbles glare;\n     Art, Glory, Freedom fail, but nature still is fair.\"[28]\n\n[Footnote 28: Canto ii., v. lxxxvi., \"Childe Harold.\"]\n\nThe effect of this scenery upon the character, the imagination, the\ntaste of the Athenians must have been immense. Under the influence of\nsuch sublime objects, the human mind becomes gifted as with inspiration,\nand is by nature filled with poetic images. \"Greece became the\nbirth-place of taste, of art, and eloquence, the chosen sanctuary of the\nmuses, the prototype of all that is graceful, and dignified, and grand\nin sentiment and action.\"\n\nAnd now, if we have succeeded in clearly presenting and properly\ngrouping the facts, and in estimating the influence of geographical\nposition and surroundings on national character, we have secured the\nnatural _criteria_ by which we examine, and even correct the portraiture\nof the Athenian character usually presented by the historian.\n\nThe character of the Athenians has been sketched by Plutarch[29] with\nconsiderable minuteness, and his representations have been permitted,\nuntil of late years, to pass unchallenged. He has described them as at\nonce passionate and placable, easily moved to anger, and as easily\nappeased; fond of pleasantry and repartee, and heartily enjoying a\nlaugh; pleased to hear themselves praised, and yet not annoyed by\ncriticism and censure; naturally generous towards those who were poor\nand in humble circumstances, and humane even towards their enemies;\njealous of their liberties, and keeping even their rulers in awe. In\nregard to their intellectual traits, he affirms their minds were not\nformed for laborious research, and though they seized a subject as it\nwere by intuition, yet wanted patience and perseverance for a thorough\nexamination of all its bearings. \"An observation,\" says the writer of\nthe article on \"_Attica_,\" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, \"more\nsuperficial in itself, and arguing a greater ignorance of the Athenians,\ncan not easily be imagined.\" Plutarch lived more than three hundred\nyears after the palmy days of the Athenian Demos had passed away. He was\na Boeotian by birth, not an Attic, and more of a Roman than a Greek in\nall his sympathies. We are tempted to regard him as writing under the\ninfluence of prejudice, if not of envy. He was scarcely reliable as a\nbiographer, and as materials for history his \"Parallel Lives\" have been\npronounced \"not altogether trustworthy.\"[30]\n\n[Footnote 29: \"De Praecept.\"]\n\n[Footnote 30: _Encyc. of Biography_, art. \"Plutarch.\"]\n\nThat the Athenians were remarkable for the ardor and vivacity of their\ntemperament,--that they were liable to sudden gusts of passion,--that\nthey were inconstant in their affections, intolerant of dictation,\nimpatient of control, and hasty to resent every assumption of\nsuperiority,--that they were pleased with flattery, and too ready to\nlend a willing ear to the adulation of the demagogue,--and that they\nwere impetuous and brave, yet liable to be excessively elated by\nsuccess, and depressed by misfortune, we may readily believe, because\nsuch traits of character are in perfect harmony with all the facts and\nconclusions already presented. Such characteristics were the natural\nproduct of the warm and genial sunlight, the elastic bracing air, the\nethereal skies, the glorious mountain scenery, and the elaborate\nblending of sea and land, so peculiar to Greece and the whole of\nSouthern Europe.[31] These characteristics were shared in a greater or\nless degree by all the nations of Southern Europe in ancient times, and\nthey are still distinctive traits in the Frenchman, the Italian, and the\nmodern Greek.[32]\n\n[Footnote 31: \"As the skies of Hellas surpassed nearly all other\nclimates in brightness and elasticity, so, also, had nature dealt most\nlovingly with the inhabitants of this land. Throughout the whole being\nof the Greek there reigned supreme a quick susceptibility, out of which\nsprang a gladsome serenity of temper, and a keen enjoyment of life;\nacute sense, and nimbleness of apprehension; a guileless and child-like\nfeeling, full of trust and faith, combined with prudence and forecast.\nThese peculiarities lay so deeply imbedded in the inmost nature of the\nGreeks that no revolutions of time and circumstances have yet been able\nto destroy them; nay, it may be asserted that even now, after centuries\nof degradation, they have not been wholly extinguished in the\ninhabitants of ancient Hellas.\"--\"_Education of the Moral Sentiment\namongst the Ancient Greeks_.\" By FREDERICK JACOBS, p. 320.]\n\n[Footnote 32: These are described by the modern historian and traveller\nas lively, versatile, and witty. \"The love of liberty and independence\ndoes not seem to be rooted out of the national character by centuries of\nsubjugation. They love to command; but though they are loyal to a good\ngovernment, they are apt readily to rise when their rights and liberties\nare infringed. As there is little love of obedience among them, so\nneither is there any toleration of aristocratic pretensions.\"--_Encyc.\nBrit._, art. \"Greece.\"]\n\nThe consciousness of power, the feeling of independence, the ardent love\nof freedom induced in the Athenian mind by the objective freedom of\nmovement which his geographical position afforded, and that\nsubordination and subserviency of physical nature to man so peculiar to\nGreece, determined the democratic character of all their political\ninstitutions. And these institutions reacted upon the character of the\npeople and intensified their love of liberty. This passionate love of\npersonal freedom, amounting almost to disease, excited them to a\nconstant and almost distressing vigilance. And it is not to be wondered\nat if it displayed itself in an extreme jealousy of their rulers, an\nincessant supervision and criticism of all their proceedings, and an\nintense and passionate hatred of tyrants and of tyranny. The popular\nlegislator or the successful soldier might dare to encroach upon their\nliberties in the moment when the nation was intoxicated and dazzled with\ntheir genius, their prowess, and success; but a sudden revulsion of\npopular feeling, and an explosion of popular indignation, would overturn\nthe one, and ostracism expel the other. Thus while inconstancy, and\nturbulence, and faction seem to have been inseparable from the\ndemocratic spirit, the Athenians were certainly constant in their love\nof liberty, faithful in their affection for their country,[33] and\ninvariable in their sympathy and admiration for that genius which shed\nglory upon their native land. And then they were ever ready to repair\nthe errors, and make amends for the injustice committed under the\ninfluence of passionate excitement, or the headlong impetuosity of their\ntoo ardent temperament. The history of Greece supplies numerous\nillustrations of this spirit. The sentence of death which had been\nhastily passed on the inhabitants of Mytilene was, on sober reflection,\nrevoked the following day. The immediate repentance and general sorrow\nwhich followed the condemnation of the ten generals, as also of\nSocrates, are notable instances.\n\n[Footnote 33: When immense bribes were offered by the king of Persia to\ninduce the Athenians to detach themselves from the alliance with the\nrest of the Hellenic States, she answered by the mouth of Aristides\n\"that it was impossible for all the gold in the world to tempt the\nRepublic of Athens, or prevail with it to sell its liberty and that of\nGreece!\"]\n\nIn their private life the Athenians were courteous, generous, and\nhumane. Whilst bold and free in the expression of their opinions, they\npaid the greatest attention to rules of politeness, and were nicely\ndelicate on points of decorum. They had a natural sense of what was\nbecoming and appropriate, and an innate aversion to all extravagance. A\ngraceful demeanor and a quiet dignity were distinguishing traits of\nAthenian character. They were temperate and frugal[34] in their habits,\nand little addicted to ostentation and display. Even after their\nvictories had brought them into contact with Oriental luxury and\nextravagance, and their wealth enabled them to rival, in costliness and\nsplendor, the nations they had conquered, they still maintained a\nrepublican simplicity. The private dwellings of the principal citizens\nwere small, and usually built of clay; their interior embellishments\nalso were insignificant--the house of Polytion alone formed an\nexception.[35] All their sumptuousness and magnificence were reserved\nfor and lavished on their public edifices and monuments of art, which\nmade Athens the pride of Greece and the wonder of the world.\nIntellectually, the Athenians were remarkable for their quickness of\napprehension, their nice and delicate perception, their intuitional\npower, and their versatile genius. Nor were they at all incapable of\npursuing laborious researches, or wanting in persevering application and\nindustry, notwithstanding Plutarch's assertion to the contrary. The\ncircumstances of every-day life in Attica, the conditions which\nsurrounded the Athenian from childhood to age, were such as to call for\nthe exercise of these qualities of mind in the highest degree. Habits of\npatient industry were induced in the Athenian character by the poverty\nand comparative barrenness of the soil, demanding greater exertion to\nsupply their natural wants. And an annual period of dormancy, though\nunaccompanied by the rigors of a northern winter, called for prudence in\nhusbanding, and forethought and skill in endeavoring to increase their\nnatural resources. The aspects of nature were less massive and\nawe-inspiring, her features more subdued, and her areas more\ncircumscribed and broken, inviting and emboldening man to attempt her\nconquest. The whole tendency of natural phenomena in Greece was to\nrestrain the imagination, and discipline the observing and reasoning\nfaculties in man. Thus was man inspired with confidence in his own\nresources, and allured to cherish an inquisitive, analytic, and\nscientific spirit. \"The French, in point of national character, hold\nnearly the same relative place amongst the nations of Europe that the\nAthenians held amongst the States of Ancient Greece.\" And whilst it is\nadmitted the French are quick, sprightly, vivacious, perhaps sometimes\nlight even to frivolity, it must be conceded they have cultivated the\nnatural and exact sciences with a patience, and perseverance, and\nsuccess unsurpassed by any of the nations of Europe. And so the\nAthenians were the Frenchmen of Greece. Whilst they spent their \"leisure\ntime\"[36] in the place of public resort, the porticoes and groves,\n\"hearing and telling the latest news\" (no undignified or improper mode\nof recreation in a city where newspapers were unknown), whilst they are\ncondemned as \"garrulous,\" \"frivolous,\" \"full of curiosity,\" and\n\"restlessly fond of novelties,\" we must insist that a love of study, of\npatient thought and profound research, was congenial to their natural\ntemperament, and that an inquisitive and analytic spirit, as well as a\ntaste for subtile and abstract speculation, were inherent in the\nnational character. The affluence, and fullness, and flexibility, and\nsculpture-like finish of the language of the Attics, which leaves far\nbehind not only the languages of antiquity, but also the most cultivated\nof modern times, is an enduring monument of the patient industry of the\nAthenians.[37] Language is unquestionably the highest creation of\nreason, and in the language of a nation we can see reflected as in a\nmirror the amount of culture to which it has attained. The rare balance\nof the imagination and the reasoning powers, in which the perfection of\nthe human intellect is regarded as consisting, the exact correspondence\nbetween the thought and the expression, \"the free music of prosaic\nnumbers in the most diversified forms of style,\" the calmness, and\nperspicuity, and order, even in the stormiest moments of inspiration,\nrevealed in every department of Greek literature, were not a mere happy\nstroke of chance, but a product of unwearied effort--and effort too\nwhich was directed by the criteria which reason supplied. The plastic\nart of Greece, which after the lapse of ages still stands forth in\nunrivalled beauty, so that, in presence of the eternal models it\ncreated, the modern artist feels the painful lack of progress was not a\nspontaneous outburst of genius, but the result of intense application\nand unwearied discipline. The achievements of the philosophic spirit,\nthe ethical and political systems of the Academy, the Lyceum, the Stoa,\nand the Garden, the anticipations, scattered here and there like\nprophetic hints, of some of the profoundest discoveries of \"inductive\nscience\" in more modern days,--all these are an enduring protest against\nthe strange misrepresentations of Plutarch.\n\n[Footnote 34: These are still characteristics of the Greeks. \"They are\nan exceedingly temperate people; drunkenness is a vice remarkably rare\namongst them; their food also is spare and simple; even the richest are\ncontent with a dish of vegetables for each meal, and the poor with a\nhandful of olives or a piece of salt fish.... All other pleasures are\nindulged with similar propriety; their passions are moderate, and\ninsanity is almost unknown amongst them.\"--_Encyc. Brit._, art.\n\"Greece.\"]\n\n[Footnote 35: Niebuhr's Lectures, vol. i. p. 101.]\n\n[Footnote 36: Eukaireo corresponds exactly to the Latin _vacare_, \"to be\nat leisure.\"]\n\n[Footnote 37: Frederick Jacobs, on \"Study of Classic Antiquity,\" p. 57.]\n\nIn Athens there existed a providential collocation of the most favorable\nconditions in which humanity can be placed for securing its highest\nnatural development. Athenian civilization is the solution, on the\ntheatre of history, of the problem--What degree of perfection can\nhumanity, under the most favorable conditions, attain, without the\nsupernatural light, and guidance, and grace of Christianity?[38] \"Like\ntheir own goddess Athene the people of Athens seem to spring full-armed\ninto the arena of history, and we look in vain to Egypt, Syria, and\nIndia, for more than a few seeds that burst into such marvellous growth\non the soil of Attica.\"[39]\n\n[Footnote 38: It has been asserted by some theological writers, Watson\nfor example, that no society of civilized men has been, or can be\nconstituted without the aid of a religion directly communicated by\nrevelation, and transmitted by oral tradition;--\"that it is possible to\nraise a body of men into that degree of civil improvement which would\nexcite the passion for philosophic investigation, without the aid of\nreligion... can have no proof, and is contradicted by every fact and\nanalogy with which we are acquainted.\" (_Institutes_, vol. i. p. 271;\nsee also Archbishop Whately, \"Dissertation,\" etc., vol. i. _Encyc.\nBrit._, p. 449-455).\n\nThe fallacy of the reasoning by which this doctrine is sought to be\nsustained is found in the assumption \"that to all our race the existence\nof a First Cause is a question of philosophy,\" and that the idea of God\nlies at the end of \"a gradual process of inquiry\" and induction, for\nwhich a high degree of \"scientific culture\" is needed. Whereas the idea\nof a First Cause lies at the beginning, not at the end of philosophy;\nand philosophy is simply the analysis of our natural consciousness of\nGod, and the presentation of the idea in a logical form. Faith in the\nexistence of God is not the result of a conscious process of reflection;\nit is the spontaneous and instinctive logic of the human mind, which, in\nview of phenomena presented to sense, by a necessary law of thought\nimmediately and intuitively affirms a personal Power, an intelligent\nMind as the author. In this regard, there is no difference between men\nexcept the clearness with which they apprehend, and the logical account\nthey can render to themselves, of this instinctive belief. Spontaneous\nintuition, says Cousin, is the genius of all men; reflection the genius\nof few men. \"But Leibnitz had no more confidence in the principle of\ncausality, and even in his favorite principle of sufficient reason, than\nthe most ignorant of men;\" the latter have this principle within them,\nas a law of thought, controlling their conception of the universe, and\ndoing this almost unconsciously; the former, by an analysis of thought,\nsucceeded in defining and formulating the ideas and laws which\nnecessitate the cognition of a God. The function of philosophy is simply\nto transform alethes doxa into itisteme--right opinion into science,--to\nelucidate and logically present the immanent thought which lies in the\nuniversal consciousness of man.\n\nThat the possession of the idea of God is essential to the social and\nmoral elevation of man,--that is, to the civilization of our race, is\nmost cheerfully conceded. That humanity has an end and destination which\ncan only be secured by the true knowledge of God, and by a participation\nof the nature of God, is equally the doctrine of Plato and of Christ.\nNow, if humanity has a special end and destination, it must have some\ninstinctive tendings, some spermatic ideas, some original forces or\nlaws, which determine it towards that end. All development supposes some\noriginal elements to be unfolded or developed. Civilization is but the\ndevelopment of humanity according to its primal idea and law, and under\nthe best exterior conditions. That the original elements of humanity\nwere unfolded in some noble degree under the influence of philosophy is\nclear from the history of Greece; there the most favorable natural\nconditions for that development existed, and Christianity alone was\nneeded to crown the result with ideal perfection.]\n\n[Footnote 39: Max Muller, \"Science of Language,\" p. 404, 2d series.]\n\nHere the most perfect ideals of beauty and excellence in physical\ndevelopment, in manners, in plastic art, in literary creations, were\nrealized. The songs of Homer, the dialogues of Plato, the speeches of\nDemosthenes, and the statues of Phidias, if not unrivalled, are at least\nunsurpassed by any thing that has been achieved by their successors.\nLiterature in its most flourishing periods has rekindled its torch at\nher altars, and art has looked back to the age of Pericles for her\npurest models. Here the ideas of personal liberty, of individual rights,\nof freedom in thought and action, had a wonderful expansion. Here the\nlasting foundations of the principal arts and sciences were laid, and in\nsome of them triumphs were achieved which have not been eclipsed. Here\nthe sun of human reason attained a meridian splendor, and illuminated\nevery field in the domain of moral truth. And here humanity reached the\nhighest degree of civilization of which it is capable under purely\n_natural_ conditions.\n\nAnd now, the question with which we are more immediately concerned is,\nwhat were the specific and valuable results attained by the Athenian\nmind in _religion_ and _philosophy_, the two momenta of the human mind?\nThis will be the subject of discussion in subsequent chapters.\n\nThe order in which the discussion shall proceed is determined for us by\nthe natural development of thought. The two fundamental momenta of\nthought and its development are spontaneity and reflection, and the two\nessential forms they assume are religion and philosophy. In the natural\norder of thought spontaneity is first, and reflection succeeds\nspontaneous thought. And so religion is first developed, and\nsubsequently comes philosophy. As religion supposes spontaneous\nintuition, so philosophy has religion for its basis, but upon this basis\nit is developed in an original manner. \"Turn your attention to history,\nthat living image of thought: everywhere you perceive religions and\nphilosophies: everywhere you see them produced in an invariable order.\nEverywhere religion appears with new societies, and everywhere, just so\nfar as societies advance, from religion springs philosophy.\"[40] This\nwas pre-eminently the case in Athens, and we shall therefore direct our\nattention first to the Religion of the Athenians.\n\n[Footnote 40: Cousin, \"Hist. of Philos.,\" vol. i. p. 302.]\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER II.\n\nTHE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.\n\n\n      All things which I behold bear witness to your carefulness\n      in religion deisidaimonesterois.--ST. PAUL.\n\nAs a prelude and preparation for the study of the religion of the\nAthenians, it may be well to consider religion in its more abstract and\nuniversal form; and inquire in what does religion essentially consist;\nhow far is it grounded in the nature of man; and especially, what is\nthere in the mental constitution of man, or in his exterior conditions,\nwhich determines him to a mode of life which may be denominated\n_religious?_ As a preliminary inquiry, this may materially aid us in\nunderstanding the nature, and estimating the value of the religious\nconceptions and sentiments which were developed by the Greek mind.\n\nReligion, in its most generic conception, may be defined as a form of\nthought, feeling, and action, which has the _Divine_ for its object,\nbasis, and end. Or, in other words, it is a mode of life determined by\nthe recognition of some relation to, and consciousness of dependence\nupon, a _Supreme Being_. This general conception of religion underlies\nall the specific forms of religion which have appeared in the world,\nwhether heathen, Jewish, Mohammedan, or Christian.\n\nThat a religious destination appertains to man as man, whether he has\nbeen raised to a full religious consciousness, or is simply considered\nas capable of being so raised, can not be denied. In all ages man has\nrevealed an instinctive tendency, or natural aptitude for religion, and\nhe has developed feelings and emotions which have always characterized\nhim as a religious being. Religious ideas and sentiments have prevailed\namong all nations, and have exerted a powerful influence on the entire\ncourse of human history. Religious worship, addressed to a Supreme Being\nbelieved to control the destiny of man, has been coeval and coextensive\nwith the race. Every nation has had its mythology, and each mythologic\nsystem has been simply an effort of humanity to realize and embody in\nsome visible form the relations in which it feels itself to be connected\nwith an external, overshadowing, and all-controlling Power and Presence.\nThe voice of all ancient, and all contemporaneous history, clearly\nattests that the _religious principle_ is deeply seated in the nature of\nman; and that it has occupied the thought, and stirred the feelings of\nevery rational man, in every age. It has interwoven itself with the\nentire framework of human society, and ramified into all the relations\nof human life. By its agency, nations have been revolutionized, and\nempires have been overthrown; and it has formed a mighty element in all\nthe changes which have marked the history of man.\n\nThis universality of religious sentiment and religious worship must be\nconceded as a fact of human nature, and, as a universal fact, it demands\nan explanation. Every event must have a cause. Every phenomenon must\nhave its ground, and reason, and law. The facts of religious history,\nthe past and present religious phenomena of the world can be no\nexception to this fundamental principle; they press their imperious\ndemand to be studied and explained, as much as the phenomena of the\nmaterial or the events of the moral world. The phenomena of religion,\nbeing universally revealed wherever man is found, must be grounded in\nsome universal principle, on some original law, which is connate with,\nand natural to man. At any rate, there must be something in the nature\nof man, or in the exterior conditions of humanity, which invariably\nleads man to worship, and which determines him, as by the force of an\noriginal instinct, or an outward, conditioning necessity, to recognize\nand bow down before a Superior Power. The full recognition and adequate\nexplanation of the facts of religious history will constitute a\n_philosophy of religion_.\n\nThe hypotheses which have been offered in explanation of the religious\nphenomena of the world are widely divergent, and most of them are, in\nour judgment, eminently inadequate and unsatisfactory. The following\nenumeration may be regarded as embracing all that are deemed worthy of\nconsideration.\n\nI. The phenomenon of religion had its origin in SUPERSTITION, that is,\nin a _fear_ of invisible and supernatural powers, generated by ignorance\nof nature.\n\nII. The phenomenon of religion is part of that PROCESS or EVOLUTION OF\nTHE ABSOLUTE (i.e., the Deity), which gradually unfolding itself in\nnature, mind, history, and _religion_, attains to perfect\nself-consciousness in philosophy.\n\nIII. The phenomenon of religion has its foundation in FEELING--_the\nfeeling of dependence and of obligation_; and that to which the mind, by\nspontaneous intuition or instinctive faith, traces this dependence and\nobligation we call God.\n\nIV. The phenomenon of religion had its outbirth in the spontaneous\napperceptions of REASON, that is, the necessary _a priori ideas of the\nInfinite, the Perfect, the Unconditioned Cause, the Eternal Being_,\nwhich are evoked into consciousness in presence of the changeful and\ncontingent phenomena of the world.\n\nV. The phenomenon of religion had its origin in EXTERNAL REVELATION, to\nwhich _reason_ is related as a purely passive organ, and _heathenism_ as\na feeble relic.\n\nAs a philosophy of religion--an attempt to supply the rationale of the\nreligious phenomena of the world, the first hypothesis is a skeptical\nphilosophy, which necessarily leads to _Atheism_. The second is an\nidealistic philosophy (absolute idealism), which inevitably lands in\n_Pantheism_. The third is an intuitional or \"faith-philosophy,\" which\nfinally ends in _Mysticism_. The fourth is a rationalistic or\n\"spiritualistic\" philosophy, which yields pure _Theism_. The last is an\nempirical philosophy, which derives all religion from instruction, and\nculminates in _Dogmatic Theology_.\n\nIn view of these diverse and conflicting theories, the question which\nnow presents itself for our consideration is,--does any one of these\nhypotheses meet and satisfy the demands of the problem? does it fully\naccount for and adequately explain all the facts of religious history?\nThe answer to this question must not be hastily or dogmatically given.\nThe arbitrary rejection of any theory that may be offered, without a\nfair and candid examination, will leave our minds in uncertainty and\ndoubt as to the validity of our own position. A blind faith is only one\nremove from a pusillanimous skepticism. We can not render our own\nposition secure except by comprehending, assaulting, and capturing the\nposition of our foe. It is, therefore, due to ourselves and to the cause\nof truth, that we shall examine the evidence upon which each separate\ntheory is based, and the arguments which are marshalled in its support,\nbefore we pronounce it inadequate and unphilosophical. Such a criticism\nof opposite theories will prepare the way for the presentation of a\nphilosophy of religion which we flatter ourselves will be found most in\nharmony with all the facts of the case.\n\nI. _It is affirmed that the religious phenomena of the world had their\norigin in_ SUPERSTITION, _that is, in a fear of unseen and supernatural\npowers, generated from ignorance of nature_.\n\nThis explanation was first offered by Epicurus. He felt that the\nuniversality of the religious sentiment is a fact which demands a cause;\nand he found it, or presumed he found it not in a spiritual God, which\nhe claims can not exist, nor in corporeal god which no one has seen, but\nin \"phantoms of the mind generated by fear.\" When man has been unable to\nexplain any natural phenomenon, to assign a cause within the sphere of\nnature, he has had recourse to supernatural powers, or living\npersonalities behind nature, which move and control nature in an\narbitrary and capricious manner. These imaginary powers are supposed to\nbe continually interfering in the affairs of individuals and nations.\nThey bestow blessings or inflict calamities. They reward virtue and\npunish vice. They are, therefore, the objects of \"sacred awe\" and\n\"superstitious fear.\"\n\n                           Whate'er in heaven,\n     In earth, man sees mysterious, shakes his mind\n     With sacred awe o'erwhelms him, and his soul\n     Bows to the dust; the cause of things conceal\n     Once from his vision, instant to the gods\n     All empire he transfers, all rule supreme,\n     And doubtful whence they spring, with headlong haste\n     Calls them the workmanship of power divine.\n     For he who, justly, deems the Immortals live\n     Safe, and at ease, yet fluctuates in his mind\n     How things are swayed; how, chiefly, those discerned\n     In heaven sublime--to SUPERSTITION back\n     Lapses, and fears a tyrant host, and then\n     Conceives, dull reasoner, they can all things do,\n     While yet himself nor knows what may be done,\n     Nor what may never, nature powers defined\n     Stamping on all, and bounds that none can pass:\n     Hence wide, and wider errs he as he walks.[41]\n\n[Footnote 41: Lucretius, \"De Natura Rerum,\" book vi. vs. 50-70.]\n\nIn order to rid men of all superstitious fear, and, consequently, of all\nreligion, Epicurus endeavors to show that \"nature\" alone is adequate to\nthe production of all things, and there is no need to drag in a \"divine\npower\" to explain the phenomena of the world.\n\nThis theory has been wrought into a somewhat plausible form by the\nbrilliant and imposing generalizations of Aug. Comte. The religious\nphenomena of the world are simply one stage in the necessary development\nof mind, whether in the individual or the race. He claims to have been\nthe first to discover the great law of the three successive stages or\nphases of human evolution. That law is thus enounced. Both in the\nindividual mind, and in the history of humanity, thought, in dealing\nwith its problems, passes, of necessity, through, first, a\n_Theological_, second, a _Metaphysical_, and finally reaches a third, or\n_Positive_ stage.\n\nIn attempting an explanation of the universe, human thought, in its\nearliest stages of development, resorts to the idea of living personal\nagents enshrined in and moving every object, whether organic or\ninorganic, natural or artificial. In an advanced stage, it conceives a\nnumber of personal beings distinct from, and superior to nature, which\npreside over the different provinces of nature--the sea, the air, the\nwinds, the rivers, the heavenly bodies, and assume the guardianship of\nindividuals, tribes, and nations. As a further, and still higher stage,\nit asserts the unity of the Supreme Power which moves and vitalizes the\nuniverse, and guides and governs in the affairs of men and nations. The\n_Theological_ stage is thus subdivided into three epochs, and\nrepresented as commencing in _Fetichism_, then advancing to\n_Polytheism_, and, finally, consummating in _Monotheism_.\n\nThe next stage, the _Metaphysical_, is a transitional stage, in which\nman substitutes abstract entities, as substance, force, Being _in se_,\nthe Infinite, the Absolute, in the place of theological conceptions.\nDuring this period all theological opinions undergo a process of\ndisintegration, and lose their hold on the mind of man. Metaphysical\nspeculation is a powerful solvent, which decomposes and dissipates\ntheology.\n\nIt is only in the last--the _Positive_ stage--that man becomes willing\nto relinquish all theological ideas and metaphysical notions, and\nconfine his attention to the study of phenomena in their relation to\ntime and space; discarding all inquiries as to causes, whether efficient\nor final, and denying the existence of all entities and powers beyond\nnature.\n\nThe first stage, in its religious phase, is _Theistic_, the second is\n_Pantheistic_, the last is _Atheistic_.\n\nThe proofs offered by Comte in support of this theory are derived:\n\nI. _From Cerebral Organization_. There are three grand divisions of the\nBrain, the Medulla Oblongata, the Cerebellum, and the Cerebrum; the\nfirst represents the merely animal instincts the second, the more\nelevated sentiments, the third, the intellectual powers. Human nature\nmust, therefore, both in the individual and in the race, be developed in\nthe following order: (1.) in animal instincts; (2.) in social affections\nand communal tendencies; (3.) in intellectual pursuits. Infant life is a\nmerely animal existence, shared in common with the brute; in childhood\nthe individual being realizes his relation to external nature and human\nsociety; in youth and manhood he compares, generalizes, and classifies\nthe objects of knowledge, and attains to science. And so the infancy of\nour race was a mere animal or savage state, the childhood of our race\nthe organization of society, the youth and manhood of our race the\ndevelopment of science.\n\nNow, without offering any opinion as to the merits of the phrenological\ntheories of Gall and Spurzheim, we may ask, what relation has this order\nto the law of development presented by Comte? Is there any imaginable\nconnection between animal propensities and theological ideas; between\nsocial affections and metaphysical speculations? Are not the\nintellectual powers as much concerned with theological ideas and\nmetaphysical speculations as with positive science? And is it not more\nprobable, more in accordance with facts, that all the powers of the\nmind, instinct, feeling, and thought, enter into action simultaneously,\nand condition each other? The very first act of perception, the first\ndistinct cognition of an object, involves _thought_ as much as the last\ngeneralization of science. We know nothing of _mind_ except as the\ndevelopment of thought, and the first unfolding, even of the infant\nmind, reveals an intellectual act, a discrimination between a self and\nan object which is not self, and a recognition of resemblance, or\ndifference between _this_ object and _that_. And what does Positive\nscience, in its most mature and perfect form, claim to do more than \"to\nstudy actual phenomena in their orders of resemblance, coexistence, and\nsuccession.\"\n\nCerebral organization may furnish plausible analogies in favor of some\ntheory of human development, but certainly not the one proposed by Aug.\nComte. The attempt, however, to construct a chart of human history on\nsuch an _a priori_ method,--to construct an ideal framework into which\nhuman nature must necessarily grow, is a violation of the first and most\nfundamental principle of the Positive science, which demands that we\nshall confine ourselves strictly to the study of actual phenomena in\ntheir orders of resemblance, coexistence, and succession. The history of\nthe human race must be based on facts, not on hypotheses, and the facts\nmust be ascertained by the study of ancient records and existing\nmonuments of the past. Mere plausible analogies and _a priori_ theories\nbased upon them, are only fitted to mislead the mind; they insert a\nprism between the perceiving mind and the course of events which\ndecomposes the pure white light of fact, and throws a false light over\nthe entire field of history.\n\n2. _The second order of proof is attempted to be drawn from the\nanalogies of individual experience_.\n\nIt is claimed that the history of the race is the same as that of each\nindividual mind; and it is affirmed that man is _religious_ in infancy,\n_metaphysical_ in youth, and _positive_, that is, scientific without\nbeing religious, in mature manhood; the history of the race must\ntherefore have followed the same order.\n\nWe are under no necessity of denying that there is some analogy between\nthe development of mind in the individual man, and in humanity as a\nwhole, in order to refute the theory of Comte. Still, it must not be\noverlooked that the development of mind, in all cases and in all ages,\nis materially affected by exterior conditions. The influence of\ngeographical and climatic conditions, of social and national\ninstitutions, and especially of education, however difficult to be\nestimated, can not be utterly disregarded. And whether all these\ninfluences have not been controlled, and collocated, and adjusted by a\nSupreme Mind in the education of humanity, is also a question which can\nnot be pushed aside as of no consequence. Now, unless it can be shown\nthat the same outward conditions which have accompanied the individual\nand modified his mental development, have been repealed in the history\nof the race, and repeated in the same order of succession, the argument\nhas no value.\n\nBut, even supposing it could be shown that the development of mind in\nhumanity has followed the same order as that of the individual, we\nconfidently affirm that Comte has not given the true history of the\ndevelopment of the individual mind. The account he has given may perhaps\nbe the history of his own mental progress, but it certainly is not the\nhistory of every individual mind, nor indeed, of a majority even, of\neducated minds that have arrived at maturity. It would be much more in\nharmony with facts to say childhood is the period of pure receptivity,\nyouth of doubt and skepticism, and maturity of well-grounded and\nrational belief. In the ripeness and maturity of the nineteenth century\nthe number of scientific men of the Comtean model is exceedingly small\ncompared with the number of religious men. There are minds in every part\nof Europe and America as thoroughly scientific as that of Comte, and as\ndeeply imbued with the spirit of the Inductive Philosophy, which are not\nconscious of any discordance between the facts of science and the\nfundamental principles of theology. It may be that, in his own immediate\ncircle at Paris there may be a tendency to Atheism, but certainly no\nsuch tendency exists in the most scientific minds of Europe and America.\nThe faith of Bacon, and Newton, and Boyle, of Descartes, Leibnitz, and\nPascal, in regard to the fundamental principles of theology, is still\nthe faith of Sedgwick, Whewell, Herschel, Brewster, Owen, Agassiz,\nSilliman, Mitchell, Hitchcock, Dana, and, indeed of the leading\nscientific minds of the world--the men who, as Comte would say, \"belong\nto the elite of humanity.\" The mature mind, whether of the individual or\nthe race, is not Atheistical.\n\n3. _The third proof is drawn from a survey of the history of certain\nportions of our race._\n\nComte is far from being assured that the progress of humanity, under the\noperation of his grand law of development, has been uniform and\ninvariable. The majority of the human race, the vast populations of\nIndia, China, and Japan, have remained stationary; they are still in the\nTheological stage, and consequently furnish no evidence in support of\nhis theory. For this reason he confines himself to the \"elite\" or\nadvance-guard of humanity, and in this way makes the history of humanity\na very \"abstract history\" indeed. Starting with Greece as the\nrepresentative of ancient civilization, passing thence to Roman\ncivilization, and onward to Western Europe, he attempts to show that the\nactual progress of humanity has been, on the whole, in conformity with\nhis law. To secure, however, even this semblance of harmony between the\nfacts of history and his hypothetical law, he has to treat the facts\nvery much as Procrustes treated his victims,--he must stretch some, and\nmutilate others, so as to make their forms fit the iron bed. The natural\norganization of European civilization is distorted and torn asunder. \"As\nthe third or positive stage had accomplished its advent in his own\nperson, it was necessary to find the metaphysical period just before;\nand so the whole life of the Reformed Christianity, in embryo and in\nmanifest existence, is stripped of its garb of _faith_, and turned out\nof view as a naked metaphysical phenomenon. But metaphysics, again, have\nto be ushered in by theology; and of the three stages of theology\nMonotheism is the last, necessarily following on Polytheism, as that,\nagain, on Fetichism. There is nothing for it, therefore, but to let the\nmediaeval Catholic Christianity stand as the world's first monotheism,\nand to treat it as the legitimate offspring and necessary development of\nthe Greek and Roman polytheism. This, accordingly, Comte actually does.\nProtestantism he illegitimates, and outlaws from religion altogether,\nand the genuine Christianity he fathers upon the faith of Homer and the\nScipios! Once or twice, indeed, it seems to cross him that there was\nsuch a people as the Hebrews, and that they were not the polytheists\nthey ought to have been. He sees the fact, but pushes it out of his way\nwith the remark that the Jewish monotheism was 'premature.'\"[42]\n\n[Footnote 42: Martineau's Essays, pp. 61, 62.]\n\nThe signal defect of Comte's historical survey, however, is, that it\nfurnishes no evidence of the general prevalence of Fetichism in\nprimitive times. The writings of Moses are certainly entitled to as much\nconsideration and credence as the writings of Berosus, Manetho, and\nHerodotus; and, it will not be denied, they teach that the faith of the\nearliest families and races of men was _monotheistic_. The early Vedas,\nthe Institutes of Menu, the writings of Confucius, the Zendavesta, all\nbear testimony that the ancient faith of India, China, and Persia, was,\nat any rate, pantheistic; and learned and trustworthy critics, Asiatic\nas well as European, confidently affirm that the ground of the\nBrahminical, Buddhist, and Parsist faith is _monotheistic_; and that\n_one_ Being is assumed, in the earliest books, to be the origin of all\nthings.[43] Without evidence, Comte assumes that the savage state is the\noriginal condition of man; and instead of going to Asia, the cradle of\nthe race, for some light as to the early condition and opinions of the\nremotest families of men, he turns to Africa, the _soudan_ of the earth,\nfor his illustration of the habit of man, in the infancy of our race, to\nendow every object in nature, whether organic or inorganic, with life\nand intelligence. The theory of a primitive state of ignorance and\nbarbarism is a mere assumption--an hypothesis in conflict with the\ntraditionary legends of all nations, the earliest records of our race,\nand the unanimous voice of antiquity, which attest the general belief in\na primitive state of light and innocence.\n\n[Footnote 43: \"The Religions of the World in their Relation to\nChristianity\" (Maurice, ch. ii., iii., iv.).]\n\nThe three stages of development which Comte describes as necessarily\nsuccessive, have, for centuries past, been simultaneous. The\ntheological, the metaphysical, and the scientific elements coexist now,\nand there is no real, radical, or necessary conflict between them.\nTheological and metaphysical ideas hold their ground as securely under\nthe influence of enlarged scientific discovery as before; and there is\nno reason to suppose they ever had more power over the mind of man than\nthey have to-day. The notion that God is dethroned by the wonderful\ndiscoveries of modern science, and theology is dead, is the dream of the\n\"_profond orage cerebral_\" which interrupted the course of Comte's\nlectures in 1826. As easily may the hand of Positivism arrest the course\nof the sun, as prevent the instinctive thought of human reason\nrecognizing and affirming the existence of a God. And so long as ever\nthe human mind is governed by necessary laws of thought, so long will it\nseek...\n\n[Transcriber's note: In the original document, page 64 is a duplication\nof page 63. The real page 64 seems to be missing.]\n\n....eur, and consequently to develop its true philosophy. Its\nfundamental error is the assumption that all our knowledge is confined\nto the observation and classification of sensible phenomena--that is, to\nchanges perceptible by the senses. Psychology, based, as it is, upon\nself-observation and self-reflection, is a \"mere illusion; and logic and\nethics, so far as they are built upon it as their foundation, are\naltogether baseless.\" Spiritual entities, forces, causes, efficient or\nfinal, are unknown and unknowable; all inquiry regarding them must be\ninhibited, \"for Theology is inevitable if we permit the inquiry into\ncauses at all.\"\n\nII. The second hypothesis offered in explanation of the facts of\nreligious history is, _that religion is part of that_ PROCESS OR\nEVOLUTION OF THE ABSOLUTE (_i.e._, the Deity) _which, gradually\nunfolding itself in nature, mind, history, and religion, attains to the\nfullest self-consciousness in philosophy_.\n\nThis is the theory of Hegel, in whose system of philosophy the\nsubjective idealism of Kant culminates in the doctrine of \"_Absolute\nIdentity_.\" Its fundamental position is that thought and being, subject\nand object, the perceiving mind and the thing perceived, are ultimately\nand essentially _one_, and that the only actual reality is that which\nresults from their mutual relation. The outward thing is nothing, the\ninward perception is nothing, for neither could exist alone; the only\nreality is the relation, or rather synthesis of the two; the essence or\nnature of being in itself accordingly consists in the coexistence of two\ncontrarieties. Ideas, arising from the union or synthesis of two\nopposites, are therefore the _concrete realities_ of Hegel; and the\n_process_ of the evolution of ideas, in the human mind, is the process\nof all existence--_the Absolute Idea_.\n\n_The Absolute_(die Idee) thus forms the beginning, middle, and end of\nthe system of Hegel. It is the one infinite existence or thought, of\nwhich nature, mind, history, religion, and philosophy, are the\nmanifestation. \"The absolute is, with him, not the infinite _substance_,\nas with Spinoza; nor the infinite _subject_, as with Fichte; nor the\ninfinite _mind_, as with Schelling; it is a perpetual _process_, an\neternal thinking, without beginning and without end.\"[44] This _living,\neternal process of absolute existence is the God of Hegel_.\n\nIt will thus be seen that the _Absolute_ is, with Hegel, the sum of all\nactual and possible existence; \"nothing is true and real except so far\nas it forms an element of the Absolute Spirit.\"[45] \"What kind of an\nAbsolute Being,\" he asks, \"is that which does not contain in itself all\nthat is actual, even evil included?\"[46] The Absolute, therefore, in\nHegel's conception, does not allow of any existence out of itself. It is\nthe _unity_ of the finite and the infinite, the eternal and the\ntemporal, the ideal and the real, the subject and the object. And it is\nnot only the unity of these opposites so as to exclude all difference,\nbut it contains in itself, all the differences and opposites as elements\nof its being; otherwise the distinctions would stand over against\nabsolute as a limit, and the absolute would cease to be absolute.\n\nGod is, therefore, according to Hegel, \"no motionless, eternally\nself-identical and unchangeable being, but a living, eternal _process_\nof absolute self-existence. This process consists in the eternal\nself-distinction, or antithesis, and equally self-reconciliation or\nsynthesis of those opposites which enter, as necessary elements, into\nthe constitution of the Divine Being. This _self-evolution_, whereby the\nabsolute enters into antithesis, and returns to itself again, is the\neternal _self-actualization_ of its being, and which at once constitutes\nthe beginning, middle, and end, as in the circle, where the beginning is\nat the same time the end, and the end the beginning.\"[47]\n\n[Footnote 44: Morell, \"Hist, of Philos., p. 461.\"]\n\n[Footnote 45: \"Philos. of Religion,\" p. 204.]\n\n[Footnote 46: Ibid., chap. xi. p. 24.]\n\n[Footnote 47: Herzog's _Real-Encyc._, art. \"Hegelian Philos.,\" by\nUlrici.]\n\nThe whole philosophy of Hegel consists in the development of this idea\nof God by means of his, so-called, dialectic method, which reflects the\nobjective life-process of the Absolute, and is, in fact, identical with\nit; for God, says he, \"is only the Absolute Intelligence in so far as he\nknows himself to be the Absolute Intelligence, _and this he knows only\nin science_ [dialectics], _and this knowledge alone constitutes his true\nexistence._\"[48] This life-process of the Absolute has three \"moments.\"\nIt may be considered as the idea _in itself_--bare, naked, undetermined,\nunconscious idea; as the idea _out of itself_, in its objective form, or\nin its differentiation; and, finally, as the idea _in itself_, and _for\nitself_, in its regressive or reflective form. This movement of thought\ngives, _first_, bare, naked, indeterminate thought, or thought in the\nmere antithesis of Being and non-Being; _secondly_, thought\nexternalizing itself in nature; and, _thirdly_, thought returning to\nitself, and knowing itself in mind, or consciousness. Philosophy has,\naccordingly, three corresponding divisions:--1. LOGIC, which here is\nidentical with metaphysics; 2. PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE; 3. PHILOSOPHY OF\nMIND.\n\n[Footnote 48: \"Hist, of Philos.,\" iii. p. 399.]\n\nIt is beyond our design to present an expanded view of the entire\nphilosophy of Hegel. But as he has given to the world a _new_ logic, it\nmay be needful to glance at its general features as a help to the\ncomprehension of his philosophy of religion. The fundamental law of his\nlogic is the _identity of contraries or contradictions_. All thought is\na synthesis of contraries or opposites. This antithesis not only exists\nin all ideas, but constitutes them. In every idea we form, there must be\n_two_ things opposed and distinguished, in order to afford a clear\nconception. Light can not be conceived but as the opposite of darkness;\ngood can not be thought except in opposition to evil. All life, all\nreality is thus, essentially, the union of two elements, which,\ntogether, are mutually opposed to, and yet imply each other.\n\nThe identity of Being and Nothing is one of the consequences of this\nlaw.\n\n1. _The Absolute is the Being_ (das Absolute ist das Seyn), and \"the\nBeing\" is here, according to Hegel, bare, naked, abstract,\nundistinguished, indeterminate, unconscious idea.\n\n2. _The Absolute is the Nothing_ (das Absolute ist das Nichts). \"Pure\nbeing is pure abstraction, and consequently the absolute-negative, which\nin like manner, directly taken, is _nothing_.\" Being and Nothing are the\npositive and negative poles of the Idea, that is, the Absolute. They\nboth alike exist, they are both pure abstractions, both absolutely\nunconditioned, without attributes, and without consciousness. Hence\nfollows the conclusion--\n\n3. _Being and Nothing are identical_ (das Seyn und das Nichts ist\ndasselbe), Being is non-Being. Non-Being _is_ Being--the\nAnders-seyn--which becomes _as_ Being to the Seyn. Nothing is, in some\nsense, an actual thing.\n\n_Being_ and _Nothing_ are thus the two elements which enter into the one\nAbsolute Idea as contradictories, and both together combine to form a\ncomplete notion of bare production, or the _becoming_ of something out\nof nothing,--the unfolding of real existence in its lowest form, that\nis, of _nature_.\n\nThe \"_Philosophy of Nature_\" exhibits a series of necessary movements\nwhich carry the idea forward in the ascending scale of sensible\nexistence. The laws of mechanics, chemistry, and physiology are resolved\ninto a series of oppositions. But the law which governs this development\nrequires the self-reconciliation of these opposites. The idea,\ntherefore, which in nature was unconscious and ignorant of itself,\nreturns upon itself, and becomes conscious of itself, that is, becomes\n_mind_. The science of the regression or self-reflection of the idea, is\nthe \"_Philosophy of Mind_.\"\n\nThe \"_Philosophy of Mind_\" is subdivided by Hegel into three parts.\nThere is, first, the subjective or individual mind (_psychology_); then\nthe objective or universal mind, as represented in society, the state,\nand in history (_ethics, political philosophy,_ or _jurisprudence_, and\n_philosophy of history_); and, finally, the union of the subjective and\nobjective mind, or _the absolute mind_. This last manifests itself again\nunder three forms, representing the three degrees of the\nself-consciousness of the Spirit, as the eternal truth. These are,\nfirst, _art_, or the representation of beauty (aesthetics); secondly,\n_religion_, in the general acceptation of the term (philosophy of\nreligion); and, thirdly, _philosophy_ itself, as the purest and most\nperfect form of the scientific knowledge of truth. All historical\nreligions, the Oriental, the Jewish, the Greek, the Roman, and the\nChristian, are _the successive stages in the development or\nself-actualization of God_.[49]\n\nIt is unnecessary to indicate to the reader that the philosophy of Hegel\nis essentially pantheistic. \"God is not a _person_, but personality\nitself, _i.e._, the universal personality, which realizes itself in\nevery human consciousness, as so many separate thoughts of one eternal\nmind. The idea we form of the absolute is, to Hegel, the absolute\nitself, its essential existence being identical with our conception of\nit. Apart from, and out of the world, there is no God; and so also,\napart from the universal consciousness of man, there is no Divine\nconsciousness or personality.\"[50]\n\n[Footnote 49: See art. \"Hegelian Philosophy,\" in Herzog's _Real-Encyc._,\nfrom whence our materials are chiefly drawn.]\n\n[Footnote 50: Morell, \"Hist. of Philos.,\" p. 473.]\n\nThis whole conception of religion, however, is false, and conflicts with\nthe actual facts of man's religious nature and religious history. If the\nword \"religion\" has any meaning at all, it is \"a mode of life determined\nby the consciousness of dependence upon, and obligation to God.\" It is\nreverence for, gratitude to, and worship of God as a being distinct from\nhumanity. But in the philosophy of Hegel religion is a part of God--a\nstage in the development or self-actualization of God. Viewed under one\naspect, religion is the self-adoration of God--the worship of God by\nGod; under another aspect it is the worship of humanity, since God only\nbecomes conscious of himself in humanity. The fundamental fallacy is\nthat upon which his entire method proceeds, viz., \"the identity of\nsubject and object, being and thought.\" Against this false position the\nconsciousness of each individual man, and the universal consciousness of\nour race, as revealed in history, alike protest. If thought and being\nare identical, then whatever is true of ideas is also true of objects,\nand then, as Kant had before remarked, there is no difference between\n_thinking_ we possess a hundred dollars, and actually _possessing_ them.\nSuch absurdities may be rendered plausible by a logic which asserts the\n\"identity of contradictions,\" but against such logic common sense\nrebels. \"The law of non-contradiction\" has been accepted by all\nlogicians, from the days of Aristotle, as a fundamental law of thought.\n\"Whatever is contradictory is unthinkable. A=not A=O, or A--A=O.\"[51]\nNon-existence can not exist. Being can not be nothing.\n\n[Footnote 51: Hamilton's Logic, p. 58.]\n\nIII. The third hypothesis affirms _that the phenomenon of religion has\nits foundation in_ FEELING--_the feeling of dependence and of\nobligation_; and that to which the mind, by spontaneous intuition of\ninstinctive faith, traces that dependence and obligation we call God.\n\nThis, with some slight modification in each case, consequent upon the\ndifferences in their philosophic systems, is the theory of Jacobi,\nSchleiermacher, Nitzsch, Mansel, and probably Hamilton. Its fundamental\nposition is, that we can not gain truth with absolute certainty either\nfrom sense or reason, and, consequently, the only valid source of real\nknowledge is _feeling--faith, intuition_, or, as it is called by some,\n_inspiration_.\n\nThere have been those, in all ages, who have made all knowledge of\ninvisible, supersensuous, divine things, to rest upon an internal\n_feeling_, or immediate, inward vision. The Oriental Mystics, the\nNeo-Platonists, the Mystics of the Greek and Latin Church, the German\nMystics of the 14th century, the Theosophists of the Reformation, the\nQuietists of France, the Quakers, have all appealed to some _special_\nfaculty, distinct from the understanding and reason, for the immediate\ncognition of invisible and spiritual existences. By some, that special\nfaculty was regarded as an \"interior eye\" which was illuminated by the\n\"Universal Light;\" by others, as a peculiar sensibility of the soul--a\n_feeling_ in whose perfect calm and utter quiescence the Divinity was\nmirrored; or which, in an ecstatic state, rose to a communion with, and\nfinal absorption in the Infinite.\n\nJacobi was the first, in modern times, to give the \"faith-philosophy,\"\nas it is now designated, a definite form. He assumes the position that\nall knowledge, of whatever kind, must ultimately rest upon intuition or\nfaith. As it regards sensible objects, the understanding finds the\nimpression from which all our knowledge of the external flows, ready\nformed. The process of sensation is a mystery; we know nothing of it\nuntil it is past, and the feeling it produces is present. Our knowledge\nof matter, therefore, rests upon faith in these intuitions. We can not\ndoubt that the feeling has an objective cause. In every act of\nperception there is something actual and present, which can not be\nreferred to a mere subjective law of thought. We are also conscious of\nanother class of feelings which correlate us with a supersensuous world,\nand these feelings, also, must have their cause in some objective\nreality. Just as sensation gives us an immediate knowledge of an\nexternal world, so there is an internal sense which gives us an\nimmediate knowledge of a spiritual world--God, the soul, freedom,\nimmortality. Our knowledge of the invisible world, like our knowledge of\nthe visible world, is grounded upon faith in our intuitions. All\nphilosophic knowledge is thus based upon _belief_, which Jacobi regards\nas a fact of our inward sensibility--a sort of knowledge produced by an\nimmediate _feeling_ of the soul--a direct apprehension, without proof,\nof the True, the Supersensuous, the Eternal.\n\nJacobi prepared the way for, and was soon eclipsed by the deservedly\ngreater name of Schleiermacher. His fundamental position was that truth\nin Theology could not be obtained by reason, but by a feeling,\n_insight_, or intuition, which in its lowest form he called\n_God-consciousness_, and in its highest form, _Christian-consciousness._\nThe God-consciousness, in its original form, is the _feeling of\ndependence_ on the Infinite. The Christian consciousness is the perfect\nunion of the human consciousness with the Divine, through the mediation\nof Christ, or what we would call a Christian experience of communion\nwith God.\n\nRightly to understand the position of Schleiermacher we must take\naccount of his doctrine of _self_-consciousness. \"In all\nself-consciousness,\" says he, \"there are two elements, a Being ein Seyn,\nand a Somehow-having-become (Irgendweigewordenseyn). The last, however,\npresupposes, for every self-consciousness, besides the ego, yet\nsomething else from whence the certainty of the same\n[self-consciousness] exists, and without which self-consciousness would\nnot be just this.\"[52] Every determinate mode of the sensibility\nsupposes an _object_, and a _relation_ between the subject and the\nobject, the subjective feeling deriving its determinations from the\nobject. External sensation, the feeling, say of extension and\nresistance, gives world-consciousness. Internal sensation, the _feeling\nof dependence_, gives God consciousness. And it is only by the presence\nof world consciousness and God-consciousness that self consciousness can\nbe what it is.\n\nWe have, then, in our self-consciousness a _feeling of direct\ndependence_, and that to which our minds instinctively trace that\ndependence we call God. \"By means of the religious feeling, the Primal\nCause is revealed in us, as in perception, the things external, are\nrevealed in us.\"[53] The _felt_, therefore, is not only the first\nreligious sense, but the ruling, abiding, and perfect form of the\nreligious spirit; whatever lays any claim to religion must maintain its\nground and principle in _feeling_, upon which it depends for its\ndevelopment; and the sum-total of the forces constituting religious\nlife, inasmuch as it is a _life_, is based upon immediate\nself-consciousness.[54]\n\n[Footnote 52: Glaubenslehre, ch. i. Sec. 4.]\n\n[Footnote 53: Dialectic, p. 430.]\n\n[Footnote 54: Nitzsch, \"System of Doctrine,\" p. 23.]\n\nThe doctrine of Schleiermacher is somewhat modified by Mansel, in his\n\"_Limits of Religious Thought_.\" He maintains, with Schleiermacher, that\nreligion is grounded in _feeling_, and that the _felt_ is the first\nintimation or presentiment of the Divine. Man \"_feels_ within him the\nconsciousness of a Supreme Being, and the instinct to worship, before he\ncan argue from effects to causes, or estimate the traces of wisdom and\nbenevolence scattered through the creation.\"[55] He also agrees with\nSchleiermacher in regarding the _feeling of dependence_ as _a_ state of\nthe sensibility, out of which reflection builds up the edifice of\nReligious Consciousness, but he does not, with Schleiermacher, regard it\nas pre-eminently _the_ basis of religious consciousness. \"The mere\nconsciousness of dependence does not, of itself, exhibit the character\nof the Being on whom we depend. It is as consistent with superstition as\nwith religion; with the belief in a malevolent, as in a benevolent\nDeity.\"[56] To the feeling of dependence he has added the _consciousness\nof moral obligation_, which he imagines supplies the deficiency. By this\nconsciousness of moral obligation \"we are compelled to assume the\nexistence of a moral Deity, and to regard the absolute standard of right\nand wrong as constituted by the nature of that Deity.\"[57] \"To these two\nfacts of the inner consciousness the feeling of dependence, and\nconsciousness of moral obligation may be traced, as to their sources,\nthe two great outward acts by which religion, in its various forms, has\nbeen manifested among men--_Prayer_, by which they seek to win God's\nblessing upon the future, and _Expiation_, by which they strive to atone\nfor the offenses of the past. The feeling of dependence is the instinct\nwhich urges us to pray. It is the feeling that our existence and welfare\nare in the hands of a superior power; not an inexorable fate, not an\nimmutable law; but a Being having at least so far the attribute of\npersonality that he can show favor or severity to those who are\ndependent upon Him, and can be regarded by them with feelings of hope\nand fear, and reverence and gratitude.\"[58] The feeling of moral\nobligation--\"the law written in the heart\"--leads man to recognize a\nLawgiver. \"Man can be a law unto himself only on the supposition that he\nreflects in himself the law of God.\"[59] The conclusion from the whole\nis, there must be an _object_ answering to this consciousness: there\nmust be a God to explain these facts of the soul.\n\n[Footnote 55: Mansel, \"Limits of Religious Thought,\" p. 115.]\n\n[Footnote 56: Id., ib., p. 120.]\n\n[Footnote 57: Id., ib., p. 122.]\n\n[Footnote 58: Id., ib., pp. 119, 120.]\n\n[Footnote 59: Id., ib., p. 122.]\n\nThis \"philosophy of feeling,\" or of faith generated by feeling, has an\ninterest and a significance which has not been adequately recognized by\nwriters on natural theology. Feeling, sentiment, enthusiasm, have always\nplayed an important part in the history of religion. Indeed it must be\nconceded that religion is a _right state of feeling towards\nGod_--religion is _piety_. A philosophy of the religious emotion is,\ntherefore, demanded in order to the full interpretation of the religious\nphenomena of the world.\n\nBut the notion that internal feeling, a peculiar determination of the\nsensibility, is the source of religious ideas:--that God can be known\nimmediately by feeling without the mediation of the truth that manifests\nGod; that he can be _felt_ as the qualities of matter can be felt; and\nthat this affection of the inward sense can reveal the character and\nperfections of God, is an unphilosophical and groundless assumption. To\nassert, with Nitzsch, that \"feeling has reason, and is reason, and that\nthe sensible and felt God-consciousness generates out of itself\nfundamental conceptions,\" is to confound the most fundamental\npsychological distinctions, and arbitrarily bend the recognized\nclassifications of mental science to the necessities of a theory.\nIndeed, we are informed that it is \"by means of an _independent_\npsychology, and conformably to it,\" that Schleiermacher illustrates his\n\"philosophy of feeling.\"[60] But all psychology must be based upon the\nobservation and classification of mental phenomena, as revealed in\nconsciousness, and not constructed in an \"independent\" and a priori\nmethod. The most careful psychological analysis has resolved the whole\ncomplex phenomena of mind into thought, feeling, and volition.[61] These\norders of phenomena are radically and essentially distinct. They differ\nnot simply in degree but in kind, and it is only by an utter disregard\nof the facts of consciousness that they can be confounded. Feeling is\nnot reason, nor can it by any logical dexterity be transformed into\nreason.\n\n[Footnote 60: Nitzsch, \"System of Doctrine,\" p. 21.]\n\n[Footnote 61: Kant, \"Critique of Judg.,\" ch. xxii.; Cousin, \"Hist, of\nPhilos.,\" vol. ii. p. 399; Hamilton, vol. i. p. 183, Eng. ed.]\n\nThe question as to the relative order of cognition and feeling, that is,\nas to whether feeling is the first or original form of the religious\nconsciousness, or whether feeling be not consequent upon some idea or\ncognition of God, is one which can not be determined on empirical\ngrounds. We are precluded from all scrutiny of the incipient stages of\nmental development in the individual mind and in collective humanity. If\nwe attempt to trace the early history of the soul, its beginnings are\nlost in a period of blank unconsciousness, beyond all scrutiny of memory\nor imagination. If we attempt the inquiry on the wider field of\nuniversal consciousness, the first unfoldings of mind in humanity are\nlost in the border-land of mystery, of which history furnishes no\nauthentic records. All dogmatic affirmation must, therefore, be\nunjustifiable. The assertion that religious feeling precedes all\ncognition,--that \"the consciousness of dependence on a Supreme Being,\nand the instinct of worship\" are developed _first_ in the mind, before\nthe reason is exercised, is utterly groundless. The more probable\ndoctrine is that all the primary faculties enter into spontaneous action\n_simultaneously_--the reason with the senses, the feelings with the\nreason, the judgment with both the senses and the reason, and that from\ntheir primary and simultaneous action arises the complex result, called\nconsciousness, or conjoint knowledge.[62] There can be no clear and\ndistinct consciousness without the cognition of a _self_ and a\n_not-self_ in mutual relation and opposition. Now the knowledge of the\nself--the personal ego--is an intuition of reason; the knowledge of the\nnot-self is an intuition of sense. All knowledge is possible only under\ncondition of plurality, difference, and relation.[63] Now the judgment\nis \"the Faculty of Relations,\" or of comparison; and the affirmation\n\"_this_ is not _that_\" is an act of judgment; to know is, consequently,\nto judge.[64] Self-consciousness must, therefore, be regarded as a\nsynthesis of sense, reason, and judgment, and not a mere self-feeling\n(coenaesthesis).\n\n[Footnote 62: Cousin, \"Hist. of Philos.,\" vol. i. p. 357; vol. ii. p.\n337.]\n\n[Footnote 63: Id., ib., vol. i. p. 88.]\n\n[Footnote 64: Hamilton, \"Metaphys.,\" p. 277]\n\nA profound analysis will further lead to the conclusion that if ideas of\nreason are not chronologically antecedent to sensation, they are, at\nleast, the logical antecedents of all cognition. The mere feeling of\nresistance can not give the notion of without the a priori idea of\nspace. The feeling of movement of change, can not give the cognition of\nevent without the rational idea of time or duration. Simple\nconsciousness can not generate the idea of personality, or selfhood,\nwithout the rational idea of identity or unity. And so the mere \"feeling\nof dependence,\" of finiteness and imperfection, can not give the idea of\nGod, without the rational a priori idea of the Infinite, the Perfect,\nthe Unconditioned Cause. Sensation is not knowledge, and never can\nbecome knowledge, without the intervention of reason, and a concentrated\nself feeling can not rise essentially above animal life until it has,\nthrough the mediation of reason, attained the idea of the existence of a\nSupreme Being ruling over nature and man.\n\nMere feeling is essentially blind. In its _pathological_ form, it may\nindicate a want, and even develop an unconscious appetency, but it can\nnot, itself, reveal an _object_, any more than the feeling of hunger can\nreveal the actual presence, or determine the character and fitness, of\nany food. An undefinable fear, a mysterious presentiment, an instinctive\nyearning, a hunger of the soul, these are all irrational emotions which\ncan never rise to the dignity of knowledge. An object must be conjured\nby the imagination, or conceived by the understanding, or intuitively\napprehended by the reason, before the feeling can have any significance.\n\nRegarded in its _moral_ form, as \"the feeling of obligation,\" it can\nhave no real meaning unless a \"law of duty\" be known and recognized.\nFeeling, alone, can not reveal what duty is. When that which is right,\nand just, and good is revealed to the mind, then the sense of obligation\nmay urge man to the performance of duty. But the right, the just, the\ngood, are ideas which are apprehended by the reason, and, consequently,\nour moral sentiments are the result of the harmonious and living\nrelation between the reason and the sensibilities.\n\nMr. Mansel asserts the inadequacy of Schleiermacher's \"feeling of\ndependence\" to reveal the character of the Being on whom we depend. He\nhas therefore supplemented his doctrine by the \"feeling of moral\nobligation,\" which he thinks \"compels us to _assume_ the existence of a\nmoral Deity.\" We think his \"fact of religious intuition\" is as\ninadequate as Schleiermacher's to explain the whole phenomena of\nreligion. In neither instance does feeling supply the actual knowledge\nof God. The feeling of dependence may indicate that there is a Power or\nBeing upon whom we depend for existence and well-being, and which Power\nor Being \"we call God.\" The feeling of obligation certainly indicates\nthe existence of a Being to whom we are accountable, and which Being Mr.\nMansel calls a \"moral Deity.\" But in both instances the character, and\neven the existence of God is \"_assumed_\" and we are entitled to ask on\nwhat ground it is assumed. It will not be asserted that feeling alone\ngenerates the idea, or that the feeling is transformed into idea without\nthe intervention of thought and reflection. Is there, then, a _logical_\nconnection between the feeling of dependence and of obligation, and the\nidea of the Uncreated Mind, the Infinite First Cause, the Righteous\nGovernor of the world. Or is there a fixed and changeless co-relation\nbetween _the feeling_ and the _idea_, so that when the feeling is\npresent, the idea also necessarily arises in the mind? This latter\nopinion seems to be the doctrine of Mansel. We accept it as the\nstatement of a fact of consciousness, but we can not regard it as an\naccount of the genesis of the idea of God in the human mind. The idea of\nGod as the First Cause, the Infinite Mind, the Perfect Being, the\npersonal Lord and Lawgiver, the creator, sustainer, and ruler of the\nworld, is not a simple, primitive intuition of the mind. It is\nmanifestly a complex, concrete idea, and, as such, can not be developed\nin consciousness, by the operation of a single faculty of the mind, in a\nsimple, undivided act. It originates in the spontaneous operation of the\nwhole mind. It is a necessary deduction from the facts of the universe,\nand the primitive intuitions of the reason,--a logical inference from\nthe facts of sense, consciousness, and reason. A philosophy of religion\nwhich regards the feelings as supreme, and which brands the decisions of\nreason as uncertain, and well-nigh valueless, necessarily degenerates\ninto mysticism--a mysticism \"which pretends to elevate man directly to\nGod, and does not see that, in depriving reason of its power, it really\ndeprives man of that which enables him to know God, and puts him in a\njust communication with God by the intermediary of eternal and infinite\ntruth.\"[65]\n\n[Footnote 65: Cousin, \"True, Beautiful, and Good,\" p. 110.]\n\nThe religious sentiments in all minds, and in all ages, have resulted\nfrom the union of _thought_ and _feeling_--the living and harmonious\nrelation of reason and sensibility; and a philosophy which disregards\neither is inadequate to the explanation of the phenomena.\n\nIV. The fourth hypothesis is, _that religion has had its outbirth in the\nspontaneous apperceptions of_ REASON; that is, in the necessary, a\npriori ideas of the infinite, the perfect, the unconditioned Cause, the\nEternal Being, which are evoked into consciousness in presence of the\nchangeful, contingent phenomena of the world.\n\nThis will at once be recognized by the intelligent reader as the\ndoctrine of Cousin, by whom _pure reason_ is regarded as the grand\nfaculty or organ of religion.\n\nReligion, in the estimation of Cousin, is grounded on _cognition_ rather\nthan upon feeling. It is the knowledge of God, and the knowledge of duty\nin its relation to God and to human happiness; and as reason is the\ngeneral faculty of all knowing, it must be the faculty of religion. \"In\nits most elevated point of view, religion is the relation of absolute\ntruth to absolute Being,\" and as absolute truth is apprehended by the\nreason alone, reason \"is the veridical and religious part of the nature\nof man.\"[66] By \"reason,\" however, as we shall see presently, Cousin\ndoes not mean the discursive or reflective reason, but the spontaneous\nor intuitive reason. That act of the mind by which we attain to\nreligious knowledge is not a _process of reasoning_, but a pure\nappreciation, an instinctive and involuntary movement of the soul.\n\n[Footnote 66: Henry's Cousin, p. 510.]\n\nThe especial function of reason, therefore, is to reveal to us the\ninvisible, the supersensuous, the Divine. \"It was bestowed upon us for\nthis very purpose of going, without any circuit of reasoning, from the\nvisible to the invisible, from the finite to the infinite, from the\nimperfect to the perfect, and from necessary and eternal truths, to the\neternal and necessary principle\" that is God.[67] Reason is thus, as it\nwere, the bridge between consciousness and being; it rests, at the same\ntime, on both; it descends from God, and approaches man; it makes its\nappearance in consciousness as a guest which brings intelligence of\nanother world of real Being which lies beyond the world of sense.\n\nReason does not, however, attain to the Absolute Being directly and\nimmediately, without any intervening medium. To assert this would be to\nfall into the error of Plotinus, and the Alexandrian Mystics. Reason is\nthe offspring of God, a ray of the Eternal Reason, but it is not to be\nidentified with God. Reason attains to the Absolute Being indirectly,\nand by the interposition of truth. Absolute truth is an attribute and a\nmanifestation of God. \"Truth is incomprehensible without God, and God is\nincomprehensible without truth. Truth is placed between human\nintelligence, and the supreme intelligence as a kind of mediator.\"[68]\nIncapable of contemplating God face to face, reason adores God in the\ntruth which represents and manifests Him.\n\n[Footnote 67: Cousin, \"True, Beautiful, and Good,\" p. 103.]\n\n[Footnote 68: Id., ib., p. 99.]\n\nAbsolute truth is thus a revelation of God, made by God to the reason of\nman, and as it is a light which illuminates every man, and is\nperpetually perceived by all men, it is a universal and perpetual\nrevelation of God to man. The mind of man is \"the offspring of God,\"\nand, as such, must have some resemblance to, and some correlation with\nGod. Now that which constitutes the image of God in man must be found in\nthe reason which is correlated with, and capable of perceiving the truth\nwhich manifests God, just as the eye is correlated to the light which\nmanifests the external world. Absolute truth is, therefore, the sole\nmedium of bringing the human mind into communion with God; and human\nreason, in becoming united to absolute truth, becomes united to God in\nhis manifestation in spirit and in truth. The supreme law, and highest\ndestination of man, is to become united to God by seeking a full\nconsciousness of, and loving and practising the Truth.[69]\n\n[Footnote 69: Henry's Cousin, p. 511, 512.]\n\nIt will at once be obvious that the grand crucial questions by which\nthis philosophy of religion is to be tested are--\n\n1st. _How will Cousin prove to us that human reason is in possession of\nuniversal and necessary principles or absolute truths?_ and,\n\n2d. _How are these principles shown to be absolute? how far do these\nprinciples of reason possess absolute authority?_\n\nThe answer of Cousin to the first question is that we prove reason to be\nin possession of universal and necessary principles by the analysis of\nthe contents of consciousness, that is, by psychological analysis. The\nphenomena of consciousness, in their primitive condition, are\nnecessarily complex, concrete, and particular. All our primary ideas are\ncomplex ideas, for the evident reason that all, or nearly all, our\nfaculties enter at once into exercise; their simultaneous action giving\nus, at the same time, a certain number of ideas connected with each\nother, and forming a whole. For example, the idea of the exterior world,\nwhich is given us so quickly, is a complex idea, which contains a number\nof ideas. There is the idea of the secondary qualities of exterior\nobjects; there is the idea of the primary qualities; there is the idea\nof the permanent reality of something to which you refer these\nqualities, to wit, matter; there is the idea of space which contains\nbodies; there is the idea of time in which movements are effected. All\nthese ideas are acquired simultaneously, or nearly simultaneously, and\ntogether form one complex idea.\n\nThe application of analysis to this complex phenomenon clearly reveals\nthat there are simple ideas, beliefs, principles in the mind which can\nnot have been derived from sense and experience, which sense and\nexperience do not account for, and which are the suggestions of reason\nalone: the idea of the _Infinite_, the _Perfect_, the _Eternal_; the\ntrue, the beautiful, the good; the principle of causality, of substance,\nof unity, of intentionality; the principle of duty, of obligation, of\naccountability, of retribution. These principles, in their natural and\nregular development, carry us beyond the limits of consciousness, and\nreveal to us a world of real being beyond the world of sense. They carry\nus up to an absolute Being, the fountain of all existence--a living,\npersonal, righteous God--the author, the sustainer, and ruler of the\nuniverse.\n\nThe proof that these principles are absolute, and possessed of absolute\nauthority, is drawn, first, from the _impersonality of reason_, or,\nrather, the impersonality of the ideas, principles, or truths of reason.\n\nIt is not we who create these ideas, neither can we change them at our\npleasure. We are conscious that the will, in all its various efforts, is\nenstamped with the impress of our personality. Our volitions are our\nown. So, also, our desires are our own, our emotions are our own. But\nthis is not the same with our rational ideas or principles. The ideas of\nsubstance, of cause, of unity, of intentionality do not belong to one\nperson any more than to another; they belong to mind as mind, they are\nrevealed in the universal intelligence of the race. Absolute truth has\nno element of personality about it. Man may say \"my reason,\" but give\nhim credit for never having dared to say \"_my_ truth.\" So far from\nrational ideas being individual, their peculiar characteristic is that\nthey are opposed to individuality, that is, they are universal and\nnecessary. Instead of being circumscribed within the limits of\nexperience, they surpass and govern it; they are universal in the midst\nof particular phenomena; necessary, although mingled with things\ncontingent; and absolute, even when appearing within us the relative and\nfinite beings that we are.[70] Necessary, universal, absolute truth is a\ndirect emanation from God. \"Such being the case, the decision of reason\nwithin its own peculiar province possesses an authority almost divine.\nIf we are led astray by it, we must be led astray by a light from\nheaven.\"[71]\n\n[Footnote 70: Cousin, \"True, Beautiful, and Good,\" p. 40.]\n\n[Footnote 71: Id., \"Lectures,\" vol. ii. p. 32.]\n\nThe second proof is derived from _the distinction between the\nspontaneous and reflective movements of reason_.\n\nReflection is voluntary, spontaneity is involuntary; reflection is\npersonal, spontaneity is impersonal; reflection is analytic, spontaneity\nis synthetic; reflection begins with doubt, spontaneity with\naffirmation; reflection belongs to certain ones, spontaneity belongs to\nall; reflection produces science, spontaneity gives truth. Reflection is\na process, more or less tardy, in the individual and in the race. It\nsometimes engenders error and skepticism, sometimes convictions that,\nfrom being rational, are only the more profound. It constructs systems,\nit creates artificial logic, and all those formulas which we now use by\nthe force of habit, as if they were natural to us. But spontaneous\nintuition is the true logic of nature,--instant, direct, and infallible.\nIt is a primitive affirmation which implies no negation, and therefore\nyields positive knowledge. To reflect is to return to that which was. It\nis, by the aid of memory, to return to the past, and to render it\npresent to the eye of consciousness. Reflection, therefore, creates\nnothing; it supposes an anterior operation of the mind in which there\nnecessarily must be as many terms as are discovered by reflection.\nBefore all reflection there comes spontaneity--a spontaneity of the\nintellect, which seizes truth at once, without traversing doubt and\nerror. \"We thus attain to a judgment free from all reflection, to an\naffirmation without any mixture of negation, to an immediate intuition,\nthe legitimate daughter of the natural energy of thought, like the\ninspiration of the poet, the instinct of the hero, the enthusiasm of the\nprophet.\" Such is the first act of knowing, and in this first act the\nmind passes from _idea to being_ without ever suspecting the depth of\nthe chasm it has passed. It passes by means of the power which is in it,\nand is not astonished at what it has done. It is subsequently astonished\nwhen by reflection it returns to the analysis of the results, and, by\nthe aid of the liberty with which it is endowed, to do the opposite of\nwhat it has done, to deny what it has affirmed. \"Hence comes the strife\nbetween sophism and common sense, between false science and natural\ntruth, between good and bad philosophy, both of which come from free\nreflection.\"[72]\n\nIt is this spontaneity of thought which gives birth to _religion._ The\ninstinctive thought which darts through the world, even to God, is\nnatural religion. \"All thought implies a spontaneous faith in God, and\nthere is no such thing as natural atheism. Doubt and skepticism may\nmingle with reflective thought, but beneath reflection there is still\nspontaneity. When the scholar has denied the existence of God, listen to\nthe man, interrogate him, take him unawares, and you will see that all\nhis words envelop the idea of God, and that faith in God is, without his\nrecognition, at the bottom, in his heart.\"[73]\n\nReligion, then, in the system of Cousin, does not begin with reflection,\nwith science, but with _faith_. There is, however, this difference to be\nnoted between the theory of the \"faith-philosophers\" (Jacobi,\nSchleiermacher, etc.) and the theory of Cousin. With them, faith is\ngrounded on sensation or _feeling_; with him, it is grounded on\n_reason_. \"Faith, whatever may be its form, whatever may be its object,\ncommon or sublime, can be nothing else than the _consent of reason_.\nThat is the foundation of faith.\"[74]\n\n[Footnote 72: Cousin, \"True, Beautiful, and Good,\" p. 106.]\n\n[Footnote 73: \"Hist. of Philos.,\" vol. i. p. 137.]\n\n[Footnote 74: Ibid., vol. i. p. 90.]\n\nReligion is, therefore, with Cousin, at bottom, pure Theism. He thinks,\nhowever, that \"true theism is not a dead religion that forgets precisely\nthe fundamental attributes of God.\" It recognizes God as creator,\npreserver, and governor; it celebrates a providence; it adores a\nperfect, holy, righteous, benevolent God. It holds the principle of\nduty, of obligation, of moral desert. It not only perceives the divine\ncharacter, but feels its relation to God. The revelation of the\nInfinite, by reason, moves the feelings, and passes into sentiment,\nproducing reverence, and love, and gratitude. And it creates worship,\nwhich recalls man to God a thousand times more forcibly than the order,\nharmony, and beauty of the universe can do.\n\nThe spontaneous action of reason, in its greatest energy, is\n_inspiration_. \"Inspiration, daughter of the soul and heaven, speaks\nfrom on high with an absolute authority. It commands faith; so all its\nwords are hymns, and its natural language is poetry.\" \"Thus, in the\ncradle of civilization, he who possessed in a higher degree than his\nfellows the gift of inspiration, passed for the confidant and the\ninterpreter of God. He is so for others, because he is so for himself;\nand he is so, in fact, in a philosophic sense. Behold the sacred origin\nof prophecies, of pontificates, and of modes of worship.\"[75]\n\n[Footnote 75: \"Hist. of Philos.,\" vol. i. p. 129.]\n\nAs an account of the genesis of the idea of God in the human\nintelligence, the doctrine of Cousin must be regarded as eminently\nlogical, adequate, and satisfactory. As a theory of the origin of\nreligion, as a philosophy which shall explain all the phenomena of\nreligion, it must be pronounced defective, and, in some of its aspects,\nerroneous.\n\nFirst, it does not take proper account of that _living force_ which has\nin all ages developed so much energy, and wrought such vast results in\nthe history of religion, viz., the _power of the heart_. Cousin\ndiscourses eloquently on the spontaneous, instinctive movements of the\nreason, but he overlooks, in a great measure, the instinctive movements\nof the heart. He does not duly estimate the feeling of reverence and awe\nwhich rises spontaneously in presence of the vastness and grandeur of\nthe universe, and of the power and glory of which the created universe\nis a symbol and shadow. He disregards that sense of an overshadowing\nPresence which, at least in seasons of tenderness and deep sensibility,\nseems to compass us about, and lay its hand upon us. He scarcely\nrecognizes the deep consciousness of imperfection and weakness, and\nutter dependence, which prompts man to seek for and implore the aid of a\nSuperior Being; and, above all, he takes no proper account of the sense\nof guilt and the conscious need of expiation. His theory, therefore, can\nnot adequately explain the universal prevalence of sacrifices, penances,\nand prayers. In short, it does not meet and answer to the deep longings\nof the human heart, the wants, sufferings, fears, and hopes of man.\n\nCousin claims that the universal reason of man is illuminated by the\nlight of God. It is quite pertinent to ask, Why may not the universal\nheart of humanity be touched and moved by the spirit of God? If the\nideas of reason be a revelation from God, may not the instinctive\nfeelings of the heart be an inspiration of God? May not God come near to\nthe heart of man and awaken a mysterious presentiment of an invisible\nPresence, and an instinctive longing to come nearer to Him? May he not\ndraw men towards himself by sweet, persuasive influences, and raise man\nto a conscious fellowship? Is not God indeed the _great want_ of the\nhuman heart?\n\nSecondly, Cousin does not give due importance to the influence of\nrevealed truth as given in the sacred Scriptures, and of the positive\ninstitutions of religion, as a divine economy, supernaturally originated\nin the world. He grants, indeed, that \"a primitive revelation throws\nlight upon the cradle of human civilization,\" and that \"all antique\ntraditions refer to an age in which man, at his departure from the hand\nof God, received from him immediately all lights, and all truths.\"[76]\nHe also believes that \"the Mosaic religion, by its developments, is\nmingled with the history of all the surrounding people of Egypt, of\nAssyria, of Persia, and of Greece and Rome.\"[77] Christianity, however,\nis regarded as \"the summing and crown of the two great religious systems\nwhich reigned by turn in the East and in Greece\"--the maturity of\nEthnicism and Judaism; a development rather than a new creation. The\nexplanation which he offers of the phenomena of inspiration opens the\ndoor to religious skepticism. Those who were termed seers, prophets,\ninspired teachers of ancient times, were simply men who resigned\nthemselves wholly to their intellectual instincts, and thus gazed upon\ntruth in its pure and perfect form. They did not reason, they did not\nreflect, they made no pretensions to philosophy they received truth\nspontaneously as it flowed in upon them from heaven.[78] This immediate\nreception of Divine light was nothing more than the _natural_ play of\nspontaneous reason nothing more than what has existed to a greater or\nless degree in every man of great genius; nothing more than may now\nexist in any mind which resigns itself to its own unreflective\napperceptions. Thus revelation, in its proper sense, loses all its\npeculiar value, and Christianity is robbed of its pre-eminent authority.\nThe extremes of Mysticism and Rationalism here meet on the same ground,\nand Plotinus and Cousin are at one.\n\n[Footnote 76: \"Hist. of Philos.,\" vol. i. p. 148.]\n\n[Footnote 77: Ibid., vol. i. p. 216.]\n\n[Footnote 78: Morell, \"Hist. of Philos.,\" p. 661.]\n\nV. The fifth hypothesis offered in explanation of the religious\nphenomena of the world is that they had their origin _in_ EXTERNAL\nREVELATION, _to which reason is related as a purely passive organ, and\nEthnicism as a feeble relic_.\n\nThis is the theory of the school of \"dogmatic theologians,\" of which the\nablest and most familiar presentation is found in the \"Theological\nInstitutes\" of R. Watson.[79] He claims that all our religious knowledge\nis derived from _oral revelation alone_, and that all the forms of\nreligion and modes of worship which have prevailed in the heathen world\nhave been perversions and corruptions of the one true religion first\ntaught to the earliest families of men by God himself. All the ideas of\nGod, duty, immortality, and future retribution which are now possessed,\nor have ever been possessed by the heathen nations, are only broken and\nscattered rays of the primitive traditions descending from the family of\nNoah, and revived by subsequent intercourses with the Hebrew race; and\nall the modes of religious worship--prayers, lustrations,\nsacrifices--that have obtained in the world, are but feeble relics,\nfaint reminiscences of the primitive worship divinely instituted among\nthe first families of men. \"The first man received the knowledge of God\nby sensible converse with him, and that doctrine was transmitted, with\nthe confirmation of successive manifestations, to the early ancestors of\nall nations.\"[80] This belief in the existence of a Supreme Being was\npreserved among the Jews by continual manifestations of the presence of\nJehovah. \"The intercourses between the Jews and the states of Syria and\nBabylon, on the one hand, and Egypt on the other, powers which rose to\ngreat eminence and influence in the ancient world, was maintained for\nages. Their frequent dispersions and captivities would tend to preserve\nin part, and in part to revive, the knowledge of the once common and\nuniversal faith.\"[81] And the Greek sages who resorted for instruction\nto the Chaldean philosophic schools derived from thence their knowledge\nof the theological system of the Jews.[82] Among the heathen nations\nthis primitive revelation was corrupted by philosophic speculation, as\nin India and China, Greece and Rome; and in some cases it was entirely\nobliterated by ignorance, superstition, and vice, as among the\nHottentots of Africa and the aboriginal tribes of New South Wales, who\n\"have no idea of one Supreme Creator.\"[83]\n\n[Footnote 79: We might have referred the reader to Ellis's \"Knowledge of\nDivine Things from Revelation, not from Reason or Nature;\" Leland's\n\"Necessity of Revelation;\" and Horsley's \"Dissertations,\" etc.; but as\nwe are not aware of their having been reprinted in this country, we\nselect the \"Institutes\" of Watson as the best presentation of the views\nof \"the dogmatic theologians\" accessible to American readers.]\n\n[Footnote 80: Watson, \"Theol. Inst,\" vol. i. p. 270.]\n\n[Footnote 81: Id. ib., vol. i. p. 31.]\n\n[Footnote 82: See ch. v. and vi., \"On the Origin of those Truths which\nare found in the Writings and Religious Systems of the Heathen.\"]\n\n[Footnote 83: Ibid., vol. i. p. 274.]\n\nThe same course of reasoning is pursued in regard to the idea of duty,\nand the knowledge of right and wrong. \"A direct communication of the\nDivine Will was made to the primogenitors of our race,\" and to this\nsource _alone_ we are indebted for all correct ideas of right and wrong.\n\"Whatever is found pure in morals, in ancient or modern writers, may be\ntraced to _indirect_ revelation.\"[84] Verbal instruction--tradition or\nscripture--thus becomes the source of all our moral ideas. The doctrine\nof immortality, and of a future retribution,[85] the practice of\nsacrifice--precatory and expiatory, are also ascribed to the same\nsource.[86] Thus the only medium by which religious truth can possibly\nbecome known to the masses of mankind is _tradition_. The ultimate\nfoundation on which the religious faith and the religious practices of\nuniversal humanity have rested, with the exception of the Jews, and the\nfavored few to whom the Gospel has come, is uncertain, precarious, and\neasily corrupted tradition.\n\n[Footnote 84: Watson, \"Theol. Inst.,\" vol. ii. p. 470.]\n\n[Footnote 85: Id. ib., vol. i. p. 11.]\n\n[Footnote 86: Id. ib., vol. i. p. 26.]\n\nThe improbability, inadequacy, and incompleteness of this theory will be\nobvious from the following considerations:\n\n1. It is highly improbable that truths so important and vital to man, so\nessential to the well-being of the human race, so necessary to the\nperfect development of humanity as are the ideas of God, duty, and\nimmortality, should rest on so precarious and uncertain a basis as\ntradition is admitted, even by Mr. Watson, to be.\n\nThe human mind needs the idea of God to satisfy its deep moral\nnecessities, and to harmonize all its powers. The perfection of humanity\ncan never be secured, the destination of humanity can never be achieved,\nthe purpose of God in the existence of humanity can never be\naccomplished, without the idea of God, and of the relation of man to\nGod, being present to the human mind. Society needs the idea of a\nSupreme Ruler as the foundation of law and government, and as the basis\nof social order. Without it, these can not be, or be conserved.\nIntellectual creatureship, social order, human progress, are\ninconceivable and impossible without the idea of God, and of\naccountability to God. Now that truths so fundamental should, to the\nmasses of men, rest on tradition _alone_, is incredible. Is there no\nknown and accessible God to the outlying millions of our race who, in\nconsequence of the circumstances of birth and education, which are\nbeyond their control, have had no access to an oral revelation, and\namong whom the dim shadowy rays of an ancient tradition have long ago\nexpired? Are the eight hundred millions of our race upon whom the light\nof Christianity has not shone unvisited by the common Father of our\nrace? Has the universal Father left his \"own offspring\" without a single\nnative power of recognizing the existence of the Divine Parent, and\nabandoned them to solitary and dreary orphanage? Could not he who gave\nto matter its properties and laws,--the properties and laws through\nwhose operation he is working out his own purposes in the realm of\nnature,--could not he have also given to mind ideas and principles\nwhich, logically developed, would lead to recognition of a God, and of\nour duty to God, and, by these ideas and principles, have wrought out\nhis sublime purposes in the realm of mind? Could not he who gave to man\nthe appetency for food, and implanted in his nature the social instincts\nto preserve his physical being, have implanted in his heart a \"feeling\nafter God,\" and an instinct to worship God in order to the conservation\nof his spiritual being? How otherwise can we affirm the responsibility\nand accountability of all the race before God? Those theologians who are\nso earnest in the assertion that God has not endowed man with the native\npower of attaining the knowledge of God can not, on any principle of\nequity, show how the heathen are \"without excuse\" when, in involuntary\nignorance of God, they \"worship the creature instead of the Creator,\"\nand violate a law of duty of which they have no possible means to attain\nthe barest knowledge.\n\n2. This theory is utterly inadequate to the explanation of the\n_universality_ of religious rites, and especially of religious ideas.\n\nTake, for example, the idea of God. As a matter of fact we affirm, in\nopposition to Watson, the universality of this idea. The idea of God is\nconnatural to the human mind. Wherever human reason has had its normal\nand healthy development[87], this idea has arisen spontaneously and\nnecessarily. There has not been found a race of men who were utterly\ndestitute of some knowledge of a Supreme Being. All the instances\nalleged have, on further and more accurate inquiry, been found\nincorrect. The tendency of the last century, arbitrarily to quadrate all\nthe facts of religious history with the prevalent sensational\nphilosophy, had its influence upon the minds of the first missionaries\nto India, China, Africa, Australia, and the islands of the Pacific. They\n_expected_ to find that the heathen had no knowledge of a Supreme Being,\nand before they had mastered the idioms of their language, or become\nfamiliar with their mythological and cosmological systems, they reported\nthem as _utterly ignorant of God_, destitute of the idea and even the\nname of a Supreme Being. These mistaken and hasty conclusions have,\nhowever, been corrected by a more intimate acquaintance with the people,\ntheir languages and religions. Even in the absence of any better\ninformation, we should be constrained to doubt the accuracy of the\nauthorities quoted by Mr. Watson in relation to Hindooism, when by one\n(Ward) we are told that the Hindoo \"believes in a God destitute of\n_intelligence_\" and by another (Moore) that \"Brahm is the one eternal\n_Mind_, the self-existent, incomprehensible Spirit\". Learned and\ntrustworthy critics, Asiatic as well as European, however, confidently\naffirm that \"the ground of the Brahminical faith is Monotheistic;\" it\nrecognizes \"an Absolute and Supreme Being\" as the source of all that\nexists.[88] Eugene Burnouf, M. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, Koeppen, and\nindeed nearly all who have written on the subject of Buddhism, have\nshown that the metaphysical doctrines of Buddha were borrowed from the\nearlier systems of the Brahminic philosophy. \"Buddha.\" we are told, is\n\"_pure intelligence_\" \"_clear light_\", \"_perfect wisdom_;\" the same as\nBrahm. This is surely Theism in its highest conception.[89] In regard to\nthe peoples of South Africa, Dr. Livingstone assures us \"there is no\nneed for beginning to tell even the most degraded of these people of the\nexistence of a God, or of a future state--the facts being universally\nadmitted.... On questioning intelligent men among the Backwains as to\ntheir former knowledge of good and evil, of God, and of a future state,\nthey have scouted the idea of any of them ever having been without a\ntolerably clear conception on all these subjects.\"[90] And so far from\nthe New Hollanders having no idea of a Supreme Being, we are assured by\nE. Stone Parker, the protector of the aborigines of New Holland, they\nhave a clear and well-defined idea of a \"_Great Spirit_,\" the maker of\nall things.\n\n[Footnote 87: Watson, \"Theol. Inst.,\" vol. i. p. 46.]\n\n[Footnote 88: Maurice, \"Religions of the World,\" p. 59: _Edin.\nReview_,1862, art \"Recent Researches on Buddhism.\" See also Mueller's\n\"Chips from a German Workshop,\" vol. i. ch. i. to vi.]\n\n[Footnote 89: \"It has been said that Buddha and Kapila were both\natheists, and that Buddha borrowed his atheism from Kapila. But atheism\nis an indefinite term, and may mean very different things. In one sense\nevery Indian philosopher was an atheist, for they all perceived that the\ngods of the populace could not claim the attributes that belong to a\nSupreme Being. But all the important philosophical systems of the\nBrahmans admit, in some form or another, the existence of an Absolute\nand Supreme Being, the source of all that exists, or seems to\nexist.\"--Mueller, \"Chips from a German Workshop,\" vol. i. pp. 224,5.\n\nBuddha, which means \"intelligence,\" \"clear light,\" \"perfect wisdom,\" was\nnot only the name of the founder of the religion of Eastern Asia, but\nAdi Buddha was the name of the Absolute, Eternal Intelligence.--Maurice,\n\"Religions of the World,\" p. 102.]\n\n[Footnote 90: \"Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa,\" p.\n158.]\n\nNow had the idea of God rested _solely_ on tradition, it were the most\nnatural probability that it might be lost, nay, _must_ be lost, amongst\nthose races of men who were geographically and chronologically far\nremoved from the primitive cradle of humanity in the East. The people\nwho, in their migrations, had wandered to the remotest parts of the\nearth, and had become isolated from the rest of mankind, might, after\nthe lapse of ages, be expected to lose the idea of God, if it were not a\nspontaneous and native intuition of the mind,--a necessity of thought. A\nfact of history must be presumed to stick to the mind with much greater\ntenacity than a purely rational idea which has no visible symbol in the\nsensible world, and yet, even in regard to the events of history, the\npersistence and pertinacity of tradition is exceedingly feeble. The\nSouth Sea Islanders know not from whence, or at what time, their\nancestors came. There are monuments in Tonga and Fiji of which the\npresent inhabitants can give no account. How, then, can a pure, abstract\nidea which can have no sensible representation, no visible image, retain\nits hold upon the memory of humanity for thousands of years? The Fijian\nmay not remember whence his immediate ancestors came, but he knows that\nthe race came originally from the hands of the Creator. He can not tell\nwho built the monuments of solid masonry which are found in his\nisland-home, but he can tell who reared the everlasting hills and built\nthe universe. He may not know who reigned in Vewa a hundred years ago,\nbut he knows who now reigns, and has always reigned, over the whole\nearth. \"The idea of a God is familiar to the Fijian, and the existence\nof an invisible superhuman power controlling and influencing nature, and\nall earthly things, is fully recognized by him.\"[91] The idea of God is\na common fact of human consciousness, and tradition alone is manifestly\ninadequate to account for its _universality_.\n\n[Footnote 91: \"Fiji and the Fijians,\" p. 215.]\n\n3. A verbal revelation would be inadequate to convey the knowledge of\nGod to an intelligence \"_purely passive_\" and utterly unfurnished with\nany _a priori_ ideas or necessary laws of cognition and thought.\n\nOf course it is not denied that important verbal communications relating\nto the character of God, and the duties we owe to God, were given to the\nfirst human pair, more clear and definite, it may be, than any knowledge\nattained by Socrates and Plato through their dialectic processes, and\nthat these oral revelations were successively repeated and enlarged to\nthe patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament church. And\nfurthermore, that some rays of light proceeding from this pure fountain\nof truth were diffused, and are still lingering among the heathen\nnations, we have no desire, and no need to deny.\n\nAll this, however, supposes, at least, a natural power and aptitude for\nthe knowledge of God, and some configuration and correlation of the\nhuman intelligence to the Divine. \"We have no knowledge of a dynamic\ninfluence, spiritual or natural, without a dynamic reaction.\" Matter can\nnot be moved and controlled by forces and laws, unless it have\nproperties which correlate it with those forces and laws. And mind can\nnot be determined from without to any specific form of cognition, unless\nit have active powers of apprehension and conception which are governed\nby uniform laws. The \"material\" of thought may be supplied from without,\nbut the \"form\" is determined by the necessary laws of our inward being.\nAll our cognition of the external world is conditioned by the _a priori_\nideas of time and space, and all our thinking is governed by the\nprinciples of causality and substance, and the law of \"sufficient\nreason.\" The mind itself supplies an element of knowledge in all our\ncognitions. Man can not be taught the knowledge of God if he be not\nnaturally possessed of a presentiment, or an apperception of a God, as\nthe cause and reason of the universe. \"If education be not already\npreceded by an innate consciousness of God, as an operative\npredisposition, there would be nothing for education and culture to act\nupon.\"[92] A mere verbal revelation can not communicate the knowledge of\nGod, if man have not already the idea of a God in his mind. A name is a\nmere empty sign, a meaningless symbol, without a mental image of the\nobject which it represents, or an innate perception, or an abstract\nconception of the mind, of which the word is the sign. The mental image\nor the abstract conception must, therefore, precede the name; cognition\nmust be anterior to, and give the meaning of language.[93] The child\nknows a thing even before it can speak its name. And, universally, we\nmust know the _thing_ in itself, or image it by analogies and\nresemblances to some other thing we do know, before the name can have\nany meaning for us. As to purely rational ideas and abstract\nconceptions,--as space, cause, the infinite, the perfect,--language can\nnever convey these to the mind, nor can the mind ever attain them by\nexperience if they are not an original, connate part of our mental\nequipment and furniture. The mere verbal affirmation \"there is a God\"\nmade to one who has no idea of a God, would be meaningless and\nunintelligible. What notion can a man form of \"the First Cause\" if the\nprinciple of causality is not inherent in his mind? What conception can\nhe form of \"the Infinite Mind\" if the infinite be not a primitive\nintuition? How can he conceive of \"a Righteous Governor\" if he have no\nidea of right, no sense of obligation, no apprehension of a retribution?\nWords are empty sounds without ideas, and God is a mere name if the mind\nhas no apperception of a God.\n\n[Footnote 92: Nitzsch, \"System of Christian Doctrine,\" p. 10.]\n\n[Footnote 93: \"Ideas must pre-exist their sensible signs.\" See De\nBoismont on \"Hallucination,\" etc., p. iii.]\n\nIt may be affirmed that, preceding or accompanying the announcement of\nthe Divine Name, there was given to the first human pair, and to the\nearly fathers of our race, some visible manifestation of the presence of\nGod, and some supernatural display of divine power. What, then, was the\ncharacter of these early manifestations, and were they adequate to\nconvey the proper idea of God? Did God first reveal himself in human\nform, and if so, how could their conception of God advance beyond a rude\nanthropomorphism? Did he reveal his presence in a vast columnar cloud or\na pillar of fire? How could such an image convey any conception of the\nintelligence, the omnipresence, the eternity of God? Nay, can the\ninfinite and eternal Mind be represented by any visible manifestation?\nCan the human mind conceive an image of God? The knowledge of God, it is\nclear, can not be conveyed by any sensible sign or symbol if man has no\nprior rational idea of God as the Infinite and the Perfect Being.\n\nIf the facts of order, and design, and special adaptation which crowd\nthe universe, and the _a priori_ ideas of an unconditioned Cause and an\ninfinite Intelligence which arise in the mind in presence of these\nfacts, are inadequate to produce the logical conviction that it is the\nwork of an intelligent mind, how can any preternatural display of\n_power_ produce a rational conviction that God exists? \"If the universe\ncould come by chance or fate, surely all the lesser phenomena, termed\nmiraculous, might occur so too.\"[94] If we find ourselves standing amid\nan eternal series of events, may not miracles be a part of that series?\nOr if all things are the result of necessary and unchangeable laws, may\nnot miracles also result from some natural or psychological law of which\nwe are yet in ignorance? Let it be granted that man is _not_ so\nconstituted that, by the necessary laws of his intelligence, he must\naffirm that facts of order having a commencement in time prove mind; let\nit be granted that man has _no_ intuitive belief in the Infinite and\nPerfect--in short, no idea of God; how, then, could a marvellous display\nof _power_, a new, peculiar, and startling phenomenon which even seemed\nto transcend nature, prove to him the existence of an infinite\n_intelligence_--a personal God? The proof would be simply inadequate,\nbecause not the right kind of proof. Power does not indicate\nintelligence, force does not imply personality.\n\n[Footnote 94: Morell, \"Hist. of Philos.\" p. 737.]\n\nMiracles, in short, were never intended to prove the existence of God.\nThe foundation of this truth had already been laid in the constitution\nand laws of the human mind, and miracles were designed to convince us\nthat He of whose existence we had a prior certainty, spoke to us by His\nMessenger, and in this way attested his credentials. To the man who has\na rational belief in the existence of God this evidence of a divine\nmission is at once appropriate and conclusive. \"Master, we know thou art\na teacher sent from God; for no man can do the works which thou doest,\nexcept God be with him.\" The Christian missionary does not commence his\ninstruction to the heathen, who have an imperfect, or even erroneous\nconception of \"the Great Spirit,\" by narrating the miracles of Christ,\nor quoting the testimony of the Divine Book he carries along with him.\nHe points to the heavens and the earth, and says, \"There is a Being who\nmade all these things, and Jehovah is his name; I have come to you with\na message from Him!\" Or he need scarce do even so much; for already the\nheathen, in view of the order and beauty which pervades the universe,\nhas been constrained, by the laws of his own intelligence, to believe in\nand offer worship to the \"Agnostos Theos\"--the unseen and\nincomprehensible God; and pointing to their altars, he may announce with\nPaul, \"this God _whom ye worship_, though ignorantly, him declare I unto\nyou!\"\n\nThe results of our study of the various hypotheses which have been\noffered in explanation of the religious phenomena of the world may be\nsummed up as follows: The first and second theories we have rejected as\nutterly false. Instead of being faithful to and adequately explaining\nthe facts, they pervert, and maltreat, and distort the facts of\nreligious history. The last three each contain a precious element of\ntruth which must not be undervalued, and which can not be omitted in an\nexplanation which can be pronounced complete. Each theory, taken by\nitself, is incomplete and inadequate. The third hypothesis overrates\n_feeling_; the fourth, _reason_; the fifth, _verbal instruction_. The\nfirst extreme is Mysticism, the second is Rationalism, the last is\nDogmatism. Reason, feeling, and faith in testimony must be combined, and\nmutually condition each other. No purely rationalistic hypothesis will\nmeet and satisfy the wants and yearnings of the heart. No theory based\non feeling alone can satisfy the demands of the human intellect. And,\nfinally, an hypothesis which bases all religion upon historical\ntestimony and outward fact, and despises and tramples upon the\nintuitions of the reason and the instincts of the heart can never\ncommand the general faith of mankind. Religion embraces and\nconditionates the whole sphere of life--thought, feeling, faith, and\naction; it must therefore be grounded in the entire spiritual nature of\nman.\n\nOur criticism of opposite theories has thus prepared the way for, and\nobviated the necessity of an extended discussion of the hypothesis we\nnow advance.\n\n_The universal phenomenon of religion has originated in the a priori\napperceptions of reason, and the natural instinctive feelings of the\nheart, which, from age to age, have been vitalized, unfolded, and\nperfected by supernatural communications and testamentary revelations_.\n\nThere are universal facts of religious history which can only be\nexplained on the first principle of this hypothesis; there are special\nfacts which can only be explained on the latter principle. The universal\nprevalence of the idea of God, and the feeling of obligation to obey and\nworship God, belong to the first order of facts; the general prevalence\nof expiatory sacrifices, of the rite of circumcision, and the observance\nof sacred and holy days, belong to the latter. To the last class of\nfacts the observance of the Christian Sabbath, and the rites of Baptism\nand the Lord's Supper may be added.\n\nThe history of all religions clearly attests that there are two orders\nof principles--the _natural_ and the _positive_, and, in some measure,\ntwo authorities of religious life which are intimately related without\nnegativing each other. The characteristic of the natural is that it is\n_intrinsic_, of the positive, that it is _extrinsic_. In all ages men\nhave sought the authority of the positive in that which is immediately\n_beyond_ and above man--in some \"voice of the Divinity\" toning down the\nstream of ages, or speaking through a prophet or oracle, or written in\nsome inspired and sacred book. They have sought for the authority of the\nnatural in that which is immediately _within_ man--the voice of the\nDivinity speaking in the conscience and heart of man. A careful study of\nthe history of religion will show a reciprocal relation between the two,\nand indicate their common source.\n\nWe expect to find that our hypothesis will be abundantly sustained by\nthe study of the _Religion of the Athenians_.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER III.\n\nTHE RELIGION OF THE ATHENIANS.\n\n\n\"All things which I behold bear witness to your carefulness in religion\n(deisidaimonesterous). For as I passed through your city, and beheld the\nobjects of your worship, I found amongst them an altar with this\ninscription--'TO THE UNKNOWN GOD.' Whom therefore ye worship....\"--ST.\nPAUL.\n\nThrough one of those remarkable counter-strokes of Divine Providence by\nwhich the evil designs of men are overruled, and made to subserve the\npurposes of God, the Apostle Paul was brought to Athens. He walked\nbeneath its stately porticoes, he entered its solemn temples, he stood\nbefore its glorious statuary, he viewed its beautiful altars--all\ndevoted to pagan worship. And \"his spirit was stirred within him,\" he\nwas moved with indignation \"when he saw the city full of images of the\ngods.\"[95] At the very entrance of the city he met the evidence of this\npeculiar tendency of the Athenians to multiply the objects of their\ndevotion; for here at the gateway stands an image of Neptune, seated on\nhorseback, and brandishing the trident. Passing through the gate, his\nattention would be immediately arrested by the sculptured forms of\nMinerva, Jupiter, Apollo, Mercury, and the Muses, standing near a\nsanctuary of Bacchus. A long street is now before him, with temples,\nstatues, and altars crowded on either hand. Walking to the end of this\nstreet, and turning to the right, he entered the Agora, a public square\nsurrounded with porticoes and temples, which were adorned with statuary\nand paintings in honor of the gods of Grecian mythology. Amid the\nplane-trees planted by the hand of Cimon are the statues of the deified\nheroes of Athens, Hercules and Theseus, and the whole series of the\nEponymi, together with the memorials of the older divinities; Mercuries\nwhich gave the name to the streets on which they were placed; statues\ndedicated to Apollo as patron of the city and her deliverer from the\nplague; and in the centre of all the altar of the Twelve Gods.\n\n[Footnote 95: Lange's Commentary, Acts xvii. 16.]\n\nStanding in the market-place, and looking up to the Areopagus, Paul\nwould see the temple of Mars, from whom the hill derived its name. And\nturning toward the Acropolis, he would behold, closing the long\nperspective, a series of little sanctuaries on the very ledges of the\nrocks, shrines of Bacchus and AEsculapius, Venus, Earth, and Ceres,\nending with the lovely form of the Temple of Unwinged Victory, which\nglittered in front of the Propylaea.\n\nIf the apostle entered the \"fivefold gates,\" and ascended the flight of\nstone steps to the platform of the Acropolis, he would find the whole\narea one grand composition of architecture and statuary dedicated to the\nworship of the gods. Here stood the Parthenon, the Virgin House, the\nglorious temple which was erected during the proudest days of Athenian\nglory, an entire offering to Minerva, the tutelary divinity of Athens.\nWithin was the colossal statue of the goddess wrought in ivory and gold.\nOutside the temple there stood another statue of Minerva, cast from the\nbrazen spoils of Marathon; and near by yet another brazen Pallas, which\nwas called by pre-eminence \"the Beautiful.\"\n\nIndeed, to whatever part of Athens the apostle wandered, he would meet\nthe evidences of their \"carefulness in religion,\" for every public place\nand every public building was a sanctuary of some god. The Metroum, or\nrecord-house, was a temple to the mother of the gods. The council-house\nheld statues of Apollo and Jupiter, with an altar to Vesta. The theatre\nat the base of the Acropolis was consecrated to Bacchus. The Pnyx was\ndedicated to Jupiter on high. And as if, in this direction, the Attic\nimagination knew no bounds, abstractions were deified; altars were\nerected to Fame, to Energy, to Modesty, and even to Pity, and these\nabstractions were honored and worshipped as gods.\n\nThe impression made upon the mind of Paul was, that the city was\nliterally \"full of idols,\" or images of the gods. This impression is\nsustained by the testimony of numerous Greek and Roman writers.\nPausanias declares that Athens \"had more images than all the rest of\nGreece;\" and Petronius, the Roman satirist, says, \"it was easier to find\na god in Athens than a man.\"[96]\n\n[Footnote 96: See Conybeare and Howson's \"Life and Epistles of St.\nPaul;\" also, art. \"Athens,\" in _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, whence our\naccount of the \"sacred objects\" in Athens is chiefly gathered.]\n\nNo wonder, then, that as Paul wandered amid these scenes \"his spirit was\nstirred in him.\" He burned with holy zeal to maintain the honor of the\ntrue and only God, whom now he saw dishonored on every side. He was\nfilled with compassion for those Athenians who, notwithstanding their\nintellectual greatness, had changed the glory of God into an image made\nin the likeness of corruptible man, and who really worshipped the\ncreature _more_ than the Creator. The images intended to symbolize the\ninvisible perfections of God were usurping the place of God, and\nreceiving the worship due alone to him. We may presume the apostle was\nnot insensible to the beauties of Grecian art. The sublime architecture\nof the Propylaea and the Parthenon, the magnificent sculpture of Phidias\nand Praxiteles, could not fail to excite his wonder. But he remembered\nthat those superb temples and this glorious statuary were the creation\nof the pagan spirit, and devoted to polytheistic worship. The glory of\nthe supreme God was obscured by all this symbolism. The creatures formed\nby God, the symbols of his power and presence in nature, the ministers\nof his providence and moral government, were receiving the honor due to\nhim. Over all this scene of material beauty and aesthetic perfection\nthere rose in dark and hideous proportions the errors and delusions and\nsins against the living God which Polytheism nurtured, and unable any\nlonger to restrain himself, he commenced to \"reason\" with the crowds of\nAthenians who stood beneath the shadows of the plane-trees, or lounged\nbeneath the porticoes that surrounded the Agora. Among these groups of\nidlers were mingled the disciples of Zeno and Epicurus, who\n\"encountered\" Paul. The nature of these \"disputations\" may be easily\nconjectured, The opinions of these philosophers are even now familiarly\nknown: they are, in one form or another, current in the literature of\nmodern times. Materialism and Pantheism still \"encounter\" Christianity.\nThe apostle asserted the personal being and spirituality of one supreme\nand only God, who has in divers ways revealed himself to man, and\ntherefore may be \"known.\" He proclaimed that Jesus is the fullest and\nmost perfect revelation of God--the _only_ \"manifestation of God in the\nflesh.\" He pointed to his \"resurrection\" as the proof of his superhuman\ncharacter and mission to the world. Some of his hearers were disposed to\ntreat him with contempt; they represented him as an ignorant \"babbler,\"\nwho had picked up a few scraps of learning, and who now sought to palm\nthem off as a \"new\" philosophy. But most of them regarded him with that\npeculiar Attic curiosity which was always anxious to be hearing some\n\"new thing.\" So they led him away from the tumult of the market-place to\nthe top of Mars' Hill, where, in its serene atmosphere, they might hear\nhim more carefully, and said, \"May we hear what this new doctrine is\nwhereof thou speakest?\"\n\nSurrounded by these men of thoughtful, philosophic mind--men who had\ndeeply pondered the great problem of existence, who had earnestly\ninquired after the \"first principles of things;\" men who had reasoned\nhigh of creation, fate, and providence; of right and wrong; of\nconscience, law, and retribution; and had formed strong and decided\nopinions on all these questions--he delivered his discourse on the\n_being_, the _providence_, the _spirituality_, and the _moral\ngovernment_ of God.\n\nThis grand theme was suggested by an inscription he had observed on one\nof the altars of the city, which was dedicated \"To the Unknown God.\" \"Ye\nmen of Athens! every thing which I behold bears witness to your\n_carefulness in religion_. For as I passed by and beheld your sacred\nobjects I found an altar with this inscription, 'To the Unknown God;'\nwhom, therefore, ye worship, though ye know him not [adequately], Him\ndeclare I unto you.\" Starting from this point, the manifest carefulness\nof the Athenians in religion, and accepting this inscription as the\nevidence that they had some presentiment, some native intuition, some\ndim conception of the one true and living God, he strives to lead them\nto a deeper knowledge of Him. It is here conceded by the apostle that\nthe Athenians were a _religious people_. The observations he had made\nduring his short stay in Athens enabled him to bear witness that the\nAthenians were \"a God-fearing people,\"[97] and he felt that fairness and\ncandor demanded that this trait should receive from him an ample\nrecognition and a full acknowledgment. Accordingly he commences by\nsaying in gentle terms, well fitted to conciliate his audience, \"All\nthings which I behold bear witness to your carefulness in religion.\" I\nrecognize you as most devout; ye appear to me to be a God-fearing\npeople,[98] for as I passed by and beheld your sacred objects I found an\naltar with this inscription, \"To the Unknown God,\" whom therefore ye\nworship.\n\n[Footnote 97: Lange's Commentary, _in loco_.]\n\n[Footnote 98: \"Os before deisid.--so imports. I recognize you as\nsuch.\"--Lange's Commentary.]\n\nThe assertion that the Athenians were \"a religious people\" will, to many\nof our readers, appear a strange and startling utterance, which has in\nit more of novelty than truth. Nay, some will be shocked to hear the\nApostle Paul described as complimenting these Athenians--these pagan\nworshippers--on their \"carefulness in religion.\" We have been so long\naccustomed to use the word \"heathen\" as an opprobrious\nepithet--expressing, indeed, the utmost extremes of ignorance, and\nbarbarism, and cruelty, that it has become difficult for us to believe\nthat in a heathen there can be any good.\n\nFrom our childhood we have read in our English Bibles, Ye men of Athens,\nI perceive in all things ye are _too superstitious_ and we can scarcely\ntolerate another version, even if it can be shown that it approaches\nnearer to the actual language employed by Paul. We must, therefore, ask\nthe patience and candor of the reader, while we endeavor to show, on the\nauthority of Paul's words, that the Athenians were a \"religious people,\"\nand that all our notions to the contrary are founded on prejudice and\nmisapprehension.\n\nFirst, then, let us commence even with our English version: \"Ye men of\nAthens, I perceive that in all things ye are _too superstitious_.\" And\nwhat now is the meaning of the word \"superstition?\" It is true, we now\nuse it only in an evil sense, to express a belief in the agency of\ninvisible, capricious, malignant powers, which fills the mind with fear\nand terror, and sees in every unexplained phenomenon of nature an omen,\nor prognostic, of some future evil. But this is not its proper and\noriginal meaning. Superstition is from the Latin _superstitio_, which\nmeans a superabundance of religion,[99] an extreme exactitude in\nreligious observance. And this is precisely the sense in which the\ncorresponding Greek term is used by the Apostle Paul. Deisidaimonia\nproperly means \"reverence for the gods.\" \"It is used,\" says Barnes, \"in\nthe classic writers, in a good sense, to denote piety towards the gods,\nor suitable fear and reverence for them.\" \"The word,\" says Lechler, \"is,\nwithout doubt, to be understood here in a good sense; although it seems\nto have been intentionally chosen, in order to indicate the conception\nof _fear_(deido), which predominated in the religion of the apostle's\nhearers.\"[100] This reading is sustained by the ablest critics and\nscholars of modern times. Bengel reads the sentence, \"I perceive that ye\nare _very religious_\"[101] Cudworth translates it thus: \"Ye are every\nway _more than ordinarily religious.\"[102]_ Conybeare and Howson read\nthe text as we have already given it, \"All things which I behold bear\nwitness to your _carefulness in religion_.\"[103] Lechler reads \"very\ndevout;\"[104] Alford, \"carrying your _religious reverence very\nfar_;\"[105] and Albert Barnes,[106] \"I perceive ye are greatly devoted\nto _reverence for religion_.\"[107] Whoever, therefore, will give\nattention to the actual words of the apostle, and search for their real\nmeaning, must be convinced he opens his address by complimenting the\nAthenians on their being more than ordinarily religious.\n\n[Footnote 99: Nitzsch, \"System of Christ. Doctrine,\" p. 33.]\n\n[Footnote 100: Lange's Commentary, _in loco_.]\n\n[Footnote 101: \"Gnomon of the New Testament.\"]\n\n[Footnote 102: \"Intellectual System,\" vol. i. p. 626.]\n\n[Footnote 103: \"Life and Epistles of St. Paul,\" vol. i. p. 378.]\n\n[Footnote 104: Lange's Commentary.]\n\n[Footnote 105: Greek Test.]\n\n[Footnote 106: Notes on Acts.]\n\n[Footnote 107: Also Clarke's Comment., _in loco_.]\n\nNor are we for a moment to suppose the apostle is here dealing in hollow\ncompliments, or having recourse to a \"pious fraud.\" Such a course would\nhave been altogether out of character with Paul, and to suppose him\ncapable of pursuing such a course is to do him great injustice. If \"to\nthe Jews he became as a Jew,\" it was because he recognized in Judaism\nthe same fundamental truths which underlie the Christian system. And if\nhere he seems to become, in any sense, at one with \"heathenism,\" that he\nmight gain the heathen to the faith of Christ, it was because he found\nin heathenism some elements of truth akin to Christianity, and a state\nof feeling favorable to an inquiry into the truths he had to present. He\nbeheld in Athens an altar reared to the God _he_ worshipped, and it\nafforded him some pleasure to find that God was not totally forgotten,\nand his worship totally neglected, by the Athenians. The God whom they\nknew imperfectly, \"_Him_\" said he, \"I declare unto you;\" I now desire to\nmake him more fully known. The worship of \"the Unknown God\" was a\nrecognition of the being of a God whose nature transcends all human\nthought, a God who is ineffable; who, as Plato said, \"is hard to be\ndiscovered, and having discovered him, to make him known to all,\nimpossible.\"[108] It is the confession of a _want_ of knowledge, the\nexpression of a _desire_ to know, the acknowledgment of the _duty_ of\nworshipping him. Underlying all the forms of idol-worship the eye of\nPaul recognized an influential Theism. Deep down in the pagan heart he\ndiscovered a \"feeling after God\"--a yearning for a deeper knowledge of\nthe \"unknown,\" the invisible, the incomprehensible, which he could not\ndespise or disregard. The mysterious _sentiments_ of fear, of reverence,\nof conscious dependence on a supernatural power and presence\novershadowing man, which were expressed in the symbolism of the \"sacred\nobjects\" which Paul saw everywhere in Athens, commanded his respect. And\nhe alludes to their \"devotions,\" not in the language of reproach or\ncensure, but as furnishing to his own mind the evidence of the strength\nof their _religious instincts_, and the proof of the existence in their\nhearts of that _native apprehension_ of the supernatural, the divine,\nwhich dwells alike in all human souls.\n\n[Footnote 108: Timaeus, ch. ix.]\n\nThe case of the Athenians has, therefore, a peculiar interest to every\nthoughtful mind. It confirms the belief that religion is a necessity to\nevery human mind, a want of every human heart.[109] Without religion,\nthe nature of man can never be properly developed; the noblest part of\nman--the divine, the spiritual element which dwells in man, as \"the\noffspring of God\"--must remain utterly dwarfed. The spirit, the personal\nbeing, the rational nature, is religious, and Atheism is the vain and\nthe wicked attempt to be something less than man. If the spiritual\nnature of man has its normal and healthy development, he must become a\nworshipper. This is attested by the universal history of man. We look\ndown the long-drawn aisles of antiquity, and everywhere we behold the\nsmoking altar, the ascending incense, the prostrate form, the attitude\nof devotion. Athens, with her four thousand deities--Rome, with her\ncrowded Pantheon of gods--Egypt, with her degrading\nsuperstitions--Hindostan, with her horrid and revolting rites--all\nattest that the religious principle is deeply seated in the nature of\nman. And we are sure religion can never be robbed of her supremacy, she\ncan never be dethroned in the hearts of men. It were easier to satisfy\nthe cravings of hunger by logical syllogisms, than to satisfy the\nyearnings of the human heart without religion. The attempt of Xerxes to\nbind the rushing floods of the Hellespont in chains was not more futile\nnor more impotent than the attempt of skepticism to repress the\nuniversal tendency to worship, so peculiar and so natural to man in\nevery age and clime.\n\n[Footnote 109: The indispensable necessity for a religion of some kind\nto satisfy the emotional nature of man is tacitly confessed by the\natheist Comte in the publication of his \"Catechism of Positive\nReligion.\"]\n\nThe unwillingness of many to recognize a religious element in the\nAthenian mind is further accounted for by their misconception of the\nmeaning of the word \"religion.\" We are all too much accustomed to regard\nreligion as a mere system of dogmatic teaching. We use the terms\n\"Christian religion,\" \"Jewish religion,\" \"Mohammedan religion,\" as\ncomprehending simply the characteristic doctrines by which each is\ndistinguished; whereas religion is a mode of thought, and feeling, and\naction, determined by the consciousness of our relation to and our\ndependence upon God. It does not appropriate to itself any specific\ndepartment of our mental powers and susceptibilities, but it conditions\nthe entire functions and circle of our spiritual life. It is not simply\na mode of conceiving God in thought, nor simply a mode of venerating God\nin the affections, nor yet simply a mode of worshipping God in outward\nand formal acts, but it comprehends the whole. Religion (_religere_,\nrespect, awe, reverence) regulates our thoughts, feelings, and acts\ntowards God. \"It is a reference and a relationship of our finite\nconsciousness to the Creator and Sustainer and Governor of the\nuniverse.\" It is such a consciousness of the Divine as shall awaken in\nthe heart of man the sentiments of reverence, fear, and gratitude\ntowards God; such a sense of dependence as shall prompt man to pray, and\nlead him to perform external acts of worship.\n\nReligion does not, therefore, consist exclusively in knowledge, however\ncorrect; and yet it must be preceded and accompanied by some intuitive\ncognition of a Supreme Being, and some conception of him as a free moral\npersonality. But the religious sentiments, which belong rather to the\nheart than to the understanding of man--the consciousness of dependence,\nthe sense of obligation, the feeling of reverence, the instinct to pray,\nthe appetency to worship--these may all exist and be largely developed\nin a human mind even when, as in the case of the Athenians, there is a\nvery imperfect knowledge of the real character of God.\n\nRegarding this, then, as the generic conception of religion, namely,\n_that it is a mode of thought and feeling and action determined by our\nconsciousness of dependence on a Supreme Being_, we claim that the\napostle was perfectly right in complimenting the Athenians on their\n\"more than ordinary religiousness,\" for,\n\n1. They had, in some degree at least, that faith in the being and\nprovidence of God which precedes and accompanies all religion.\n\nThey had erected an altar to the unseen, the unsearchable, the\nincomprehensible, the unknown God. And this \"unknown God\" whom the\nAthenians \"worshipped\" was the true God, the God whom Paul worshipped,\nand whom he desired more fully to reveal to them; \"_Him_ declare I unto\nyou.\" The Athenians had, therefore, some knowledge of the true God, some\ndim recognition, at least, of his being, and some conception, however\nimperfect, of his character. The Deity to whom the Athenians reared this\naltar is called \"the unknown God,\" because he is unseen by all human\neyes and incomprehensible to human thought. There is a sense in which to\nPaul, as well as to the Athenians--to the Christian as well as to the\npagan--to the philosopher as well as to the peasant--God is \"_the\nunknown_,\" and in which he must forever remain the incomprehensible.\nThis has been confessed by all thoughtful minds in every age. It was\nconfessed by Plato. To his mind God is \"the ineffable,\" the unspeakable.\nZophar, the friend of Job, asks, \"Canst thou by searching find out God?\nCanst thou find out the Almighty to perfection?\" This knowledge is \"high\nas heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know?\"\nDoes not Wesley teach us to sing,\n\n                 \"Hail, Father, whose creating call\n                    Unnumbered worlds attend;\n                  Jehovah, comprehending all,\n                    Whom none can comprehend?\"\n\nTo his mind, as well as to the mind of the Athenian, God was \"the great\nunseen, unknown.\" \"Beyond the universe and man,\" says Cousin, \"there\nremains in God something unknown, impenetrable, incomprehensible. Hence,\nin the immeasurable spaces of the universe, and beneath all the\nprofundities of the human soul, God escapes us in this inexhaustible\ninfinitude, whence he is able to draw without limit new worlds, new\nbeings, new manifestations. God is therefore to us\n_incomprehensible_.\"[110] And without making ourselves in the least\nresponsible for Hamilton's \"negative\" doctrine of the Infinite, or even\nresponsible for the full import of his words, we may quote his\nremarkable utterances on this subject: \"The Divinity is in part\nconcealed and in part revealed. He is at once known and unknown. But the\nlast and highest consecration of all true religion must be an altar 'to\nthe unknown God.' In this consummation nature and religion, Paganism and\nChristianity, are at one.\"[111]\n\n[Footnote 110: \"Lectures,\" vol. i. p. 104.]\n\n[Footnote 111: \"Discussions on Philosophy,\" p. 23.]\n\nWhen, therefore, the apostle affirms that while the Athenians worshipped\nthe God whom he proclaimed they \"knew him not,\" we can not understand\nhim as saying they were destitute of all faith in the being of God, and\nof all ideas of his real character. Because for him to have asserted\nthey had _no_ knowledge of God would not only have been contrary to all\nthe facts of the case, but also an utter contradiction of all his\nsettled convictions and his recorded opinions. There is not in modern\ntimes a more earnest asserter of the doctrine that the human mind has an\nintuitive cognition of God, and that the external world reveals God to\nman. There is a passage in his letter to the Romans which is justly\nentitled to stand at the head of all discourses on \"natural theology,\"\nRom. i. 19-21. Speaking of the heathen world, who had not been favored,\nas the Jews, with a verbal revelation, he says, \"That which may be known\nof God is manifest _in_ them,\" that is, in the constitution and laws of\ntheir spiritual nature, \"for God hath showed it unto them\" in the voice\nof reason and of conscience, so that in the instincts of our hearts, in\nthe elements of our moral nature, in the ideas and laws of our reason,\nwe are taught the being of a God. These are the subjective teachings of\nthe human soul.\n\nNot only is the being of God revealed to man in the constitution and\nlaws of his rational and moral nature, but God is also manifested to us\nobjectively in the realm of things around us; therefore Paul adds, \"The\ninvisible things of him, even his eternal power and Godhead, from the\ncreation are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are\nmade.\" The world of sense, therefore, discloses the being and\nperfections of God. The invisible attributes of God are made apparent by\nthe things that are visible. Forth out of nature, as the product of the\nDivine Mind, the supernatural shines. The forces, laws, and harmonies of\nthe universe are indices of the presence of a presiding and informing\nIntelligence. The creation itself is an example of God's coming forth\nout of the mysterious depths of his own eternal and invisible being, and\nmaking himself apparent to man. There, on the pages of the volume of\nnature, we may read, in the marvellous language of symbol, the grand\nconceptions, the glorious thoughts, the ideals of beauty which dwell in\nthe uncreated Mind, These two sources of knowledge--the subjective\nteachings of God in the human soul, and the objective manifestations of\nGod in the visible universe--harmonize, and, together, fill up the\ncomplement of our natural idea of God. They are two hemispheres of\nthought, which together form one full-orbed fountain of light, and ought\nnever to be separated in our philosophy. And, inasmuch as this divine\nlight shines on all human minds, and these works of God are seen by all\nhuman eyes, the apostle argues that the heathen world \"is without\nexcuse, because, knowing God (gnontes ton Theon) they did not glorify\nhim as God, neither were thankful; but in their reasonings they went\nastray after vanities, and their hearts, being void of wisdom, were\nfilled with darkness. Calling themselves wise, they were turned into\nfools, and changed the glory of the imperishable God for idols graven in\nthe likeness of perishable man, or of birds, and beasts, and creeping\nthings,...and they bartered the truth of God for lies, and reverenced\nand worshipped the things made rather than the Maker, who is blessed\nforever. Amen.\"[112]\n\n[Footnote 112: Rom. i. 21-25, Conybeare and Howson's translation.]\n\nThe brief and elliptical report of Paul's address on Mars' Hill must\ntherefore, in all fairness, be interpreted in the light of his more\ncarefully elaborated statements in the Epistle to the Romans. And when\nPaul intimates that the Athenians \"knew not God,\" we can not understand\nhim as saying they had _no_ knowledge, but that their knowledge was\nimperfect. They did not know God as Creator, Father, and Ruler; above\nall, they did not know him as a pardoning God and a sanctifying Spirit.\nThey had not that knowledge of God which purifies the heart, and changes\nthe character, and gives its possessor eternal life.\n\nThe apostle clearly and unequivocally recognizes this truth, that the\nidea of God is connatural to the human mind; that in fact there is not\nto be found a race of men upon the face of the globe utterly destitute\nof some idea of a Supreme Being. Wherever human reason has had its\nnormal and healthful development, it has spontaneously and necessarily\nled the human mind to the recognition of a God. The Athenians were no\nexception to this general law. They believed in the existence of one\nsupreme and eternal Mind, invisible, incomprehensible, infeffable--\"the\nunknown God.\"\n\n2. The Athenians had also that consciousness of dependence upon God\nwhich is the foundation of all the primary religious emotions.\n\nWhen the apostle affirmed that \"in God we live, and move, and have our\nbeing,\" he uttered the sentiments of many, if not all, of his hearers,\nand in support of that affirmation he could quote the words of their own\npoets, for we are also his offspring; [113] and, as his offspring, we\nhave a derived and a dependent being. Indeed, this consciousness of\ndependence is analogous to the feeling which is awakened in the heart of\na child when its parent is first manifested to its opening mind as the\ngiver of those things which it immediately needs, as its continual\nprotector, and as the preserver of its life. The moment a man becomes\nconscious of his own personality, that moment he becomes conscious of\nsome relation to another personality, to which he is subject, and on\nwhich he depends.[114]\n\n[Footnote 113:\n\n           \"Jove's presence fills all space, upholds this ball;\n            All need his aid; his power sustains us all,\n              _For we his offspring are_.\"\n                            Aratus, \"The Phaenomena,\" book v. p. 5.\n\nAratus was a poet of Cilicia, Paul's native province. He flourished B.C.\n277.\n\n       \"Great and divine Father, whose names are many,\n        But who art one and the same unchangeable, almighty power;\n        O thou supreme Author of nature!\n        That governest by a single unerring law!\n                      Hail King!\n        For thou art able, to enforce obedience from all frail mortals,\n        _Because we are all thine offspring,_\n        The image and the echo only of thy eternal voice.\"\n                                        Cleanthes, \"Hymn to Jupiter.\"\n\nCleanthes was the pupil of Zeno, and his successor as chief of the Stoic\nphilosophers.]\n\n[Footnote 114: \"As soon as a man becomes conscious of himself, as soon\nas he perceives himself as distinct from other persons and things, he at\nthe same moment becomes conscious of a higher self, a higher power,\nwithout which he feels that neither he nor any thing else would have any\nlife or reality. We are so fashioned that as soon as we awake we feel on\nall sides our dependence on something else; and all nations join in some\nway or another in the words of the Psalmist, 'It is He that made us, not\nwe ourselves.' This is the first _sense_ of the Godhead, the _sensus\nnuminis_, as it has well been called; for it is a _sensus_, an immediate\nperception, not the result of reasoning or generalization, but an\nintuition as irresistible as the impressions of our senses.... This\n_sensus numinis_, or, as we may call it in more homely language,\n_faith_, is the source of all religion; it is that without which no\nreligion, whether true or false, is possible.\"--Max Mueller, \"Science of\nLanguage,\" Second Series, p. 455.]\n\nA little reflection will convince us that this is the necessary order in\nwhich human consciousness is developed.\n\nThere are at least two fundamental and radical tendencies in human\npersonality, namely, to _know_ and to _act_. If we would conceive of\nthem as they exist in the innermost sphere of selfhood, we must\ndistinguish the first as _self-consciousness_, and the second as\n_self-determination_. These are unquestionably the two factors of human\npersonality.\n\nIf we consider the first of these factors more closely, we shall\ndiscover that self-consciousness exists under limitations and\nconditions. Man can not become clearly conscious of _self_ without\ndistinguishing himself from the outer world of sensation, nor without\ndistinguishing self and the world from another being upon whom they\ndepend as the ultimate substance and cause. Mere _coenoeesthesis_ is not\nconsciousness. Common feeling is unquestionably found among the lowest\nforms of animal life, the protozoa; but it can never rise to a clear\nconsciousness of personality until it can distinguish itself from\nsensation, and acquire a presentiment of a divine power, on which self\nand the outer world depend. The _Ego_ does not exist for itself, can not\nperceive itself, but by distinguishing itself from the ceaseless flow\nand change of sensation, and by this act of distinguishing, the _Ego_\ntakes place in consciousness. And the _Ego_ can not perceive itself, nor\ncognize sensation as a state or affection of the _Ego_ except by the\nintervention of the reason, which supplies the two great fundamental\nlaws of causality and substance. The facts of consciousness thus\ncomprehend three elements--self, nature, and God. The determinate being,\nthe _Ego_, is never an absolutely independent being, but is always in\nsome way or other codetermined by another; it can not, therefore, be an\nabsolutely original and independent, but must in some way or another be\na _derived_ and _conditioned_ existence.\n\nNow that which limits and conditions human self-consciousness can not be\nmere _nature_, because nature can not give what it does not possess; it\ncan not produce what is _toto genere_ different from itself.\nSelf-consciousness can not arise out of unconsciousness. This new\nbeginning is beyond the power of nature. Personal power, the creative\nprinciple of all new beginnings, is alone adequate to its production.\nIf, then, self-consciousness exists in man, it necessarily presupposes\nan absolutely _original_, therefore _unconditioned, self-consciousness_.\nHuman self-consciousness, in its temporal actualization, of course\npresupposes a nature-basis upon which it elevates itself; but it is only\npossible on the ground that an eternal self-conscious Mind ordained and\nrules over all the processes of nature, and implants the divine spark of\nthe personal spirit with the corporeal frame, to realize itself in the\nlight-flame of human self-consciousness. The original light of the\ndivine self-consciousness is eternally and absolutely first and before\nall. \"Thus, in the depths of our own self-consciousness, as its\nconcealed background, the God-consciousness reveals itself to us. This\ndescent into our inmost being is at the same time an ascent to God.\nEvery deep reflection on ourselves breaks through the mere crust of\nworld-consciousness, which separates us from the inmost truth of our\nexistence, and leads us up to Him in whom we live and move and\nare.\"[115]\n\n[Footnote 115: Mueller, \"Christian Doctrine of Sin,\" vol. i. p. 81.]\n\nSelf-determination, equally with self-consciousness, exists in us under\nmanifold _limitations_. Self-determination is limited by physical,\ncorporeal, and mental conditions, so that there is \"an impassable\nboundary line drawn around the area of volitional freedom.\" But the most\nfundamental and original limitation is that of _duty_. The\nself-determining power of man is not only circumscribed by necessary\nconditions, but also by the _moral law_ in the consciousness of man.\nSelf-determination alone does not suffice for the full conception of\nresponsible freedom; it only becomes, _will_, properly by its being an\nintelligent and conscious determination; that is, the rational subject\nis able previously to recognize \"the right,\" and present before his mind\nthat which he _ought_ to do, that which he is morally bound to realize\nand actualize by his own self-determination and choice. Accordingly we\nfind in our inmost being a _sense of obligation_ to obey the moral law\nas revealed in the conscience. As we can not become conscious of self\nwithout also becoming conscious of God, so we can not become properly\nconscious of self-determination until we have recognized in the\nconscience a law for the movements of the will.\n\nNow this moral law, as revealed in the conscience, is not a mere\nautonomy--a simple subjective law having no relation to a personal\nlawgiver out of and above man. Every admonition of conscience directly\nexcites the consciousness of a God to whom man is accountable. The\nuniversal consciousness of our race, as revealed in history, has always\nassociated the phenomena of conscience with the idea of a personal Power\nabove man, to whom he is subject and upon whom he depends. In every age,\nthe voice of conscience has been regarded as the voice of God, so that\nwhen it has filled man with guilty apprehensions, he has had recourse to\nsacrifices, and penances, and prayers to expatiate his wrath.\n\nIt is clear, then, that if man has _duties_ there must he a\nself-conscious Will by whom these duties are imposed, for only a real\nwill can be legislative. If man has a _sense of obligation_, there must\nbe a supreme authority by which he is obliged. If he is _responsible_,\nthere must be a being to whom he is accountable.[116] It can not be said\nthat he is accountable to himself, for by that supposition the idea of\nduty is obliterated, and \"right\" becomes identical with mere interest or\npleasure. It can not be said that he is simply responsible to\nsociety--to mere conventions of human opinions and human\ngovernments--for then \"_right_\" becomes a mere creature of human\nlegislation, and \"_justice_\" is nothing but the arbitrary will of the\nstrong who tyrannize over the weak. Might constitutes right. Against\nsuch hypotheses the human mind, however, instinctively revolts. Mankind\nfeel, universally, that there is an authority beyond all human\ngovernments, and a higher law above all human laws, from whence all\ntheir powers are derived. That higher law is the Law of God, that\nsupreme authority is the God of Justice. To this eternally just God,\ninnocence, under oppression and wrong, has made its proud appeal, like\nthat of Prometheus to the elements, to the witnessing clouds, to coming\nages, and has been sustained and comforted. And to that higher law the\nweak have confidently appealed against the unrighteous enactments of the\nstrong, and have finally conquered. The last and inmost ground of all\nobligation is thus the conscious relation of the moral creature to God.\nThe sense of absolute dependence upon a Supreme Being compels man, even\nwhile conscious of subjective freedom, to recognize at the same time his\nobligation to determine himself in harmony with the will of Him \"in whom\nwe live, and move, and are.\"\n\n[Footnote 116: \"The thought of God will wake up a terrible monitor whose\nname is Judge.\"--Kant.]\n\nThis feeling of dependence, and this consequent sense of obligation, lie\nat the very foundation of all religion. They lead the mind towards God,\nand anchor it in the Divine. They prompt man to pray, and inspire him\nwith an instinctive confidence in the efficacy of prayer. So that prayer\nis natural to man, and necessary to man. Never yet has the traveller\nfound a people on earth without prayer. Races of men have been found\nwithout houses, without raiment, without arts and sciences, but never\nwithout prayer any more than without speech. Plutarch wrote, eighteen\ncenturies ago, If you go through all the world, you may find cities\nwithout walls, without letters, without rulers, without money, without\ntheatres, but never without temples and gods, or without _prayers_,\noaths, prophecies, and sacrifices, used to obtain blessings and\nbenefits, or to avert curses and calamities.[117] The naturalness of\nprayer is admitted even by the modern unbeliever. Gerrit Smith says,\n\"Let us who believe that the religion of reason calls for the religion\nof nature, remember that the flow of prayer is just as natural as the\nflow of water; the prayerless man has become an unnatural man.\"[118] Is\nman in sorrow or in danger, his most natural and spontaneous refuge is\nin prayer. The suffering, bewildered, terror-stricken soul turns towards\nGod. \"Nature in an agony is no atheist; the soul that knows not where to\nfly, flies to God.\" And in the hour of deliverance and joy, a feeling of\ngratitude pervades the soul--and gratitude, too, not to some blind\nnature-force, to some unconscious and impersonal power, but gratitude to\nGod. The soul's natural and appropriate language in the hour of\ndeliverance is thanksgiving and praise.\n\n[Footnote 117: \"Against Kalotes,\" ch. xxxi.]\n\n[Footnote 118: \"Religion of Reason.\"]\n\nThis universal tendency to recognize a superior Power upon whom we are\ndependent, and by whose hand our well-being and our destinies are\nabsolutely controlled, has revealed itself even amid the most\ncomplicated forms of polytheistic worship. Amid the even and undisturbed\nflow of every-day life they might be satisfied with the worship of\nsubordinate deities, but in the midst of sudden and unexpected\ncalamities, and of terrible catastrophes, then they cried to the Supreme\nGod.[119] \"When alarmed by an earthquake,\" says Aulus Gellius, \"the\nancient Romans were accustomed to pray, not to some one of the gods\nindividually, but to God in general, _as to the Unknown_.\"[120]\n\n[Footnote 119: \"At critical moments, when the deepest feelings of the\nhuman heart are stirred, the old Greeks and Romans seem suddenly to have\ndropped all mythological ideas, and to have fallen back on the universal\nlanguage of true religion.\"--Max Mueller, \"Science of Language.\" p. 436.]\n\n[Footnote 120: Tholuck, \"Nature and Influence of Heathenism,\" p. 23.]\n\n\"Thus also Minutius Felix says, 'When they stretch out their hands to\nheaven they mention only God; and these forms of speech, _He is great_,\nand _God is true_, and _If God grant_(which are the natural language of\nthe vulgar), are a plain confession of the truth of Christianity.' And\nalso Lactantius testifies, 'When they swear, and when they wish, and\nwhen they give thanks, they name not many gods, but God only; the truth,\nby a secret force of nature, thus breaking forth from them whether they\nwill or no;' and again he says, 'They fly to God; aid is desired of God;\nthey pray that God would help them; and when one is reduced to extreme\nnecessity, he begs for God's sake, and by his divine power alone\nimplores the mercy of men.'\"[121] The account which is given by Diogenes\nLaertius[122] of the erection of altars bearing the inscription \"to the\nunknown God,\" clearly shows that they had their origin in this general\nsentiment of dependence on a higher Power. \"The Athenians being\nafflicted with pestilence invited Epimenides to lustrate their city. The\nmethod adopted by him was to carry several sheep to the Areopagus,\nwhence they were left to wander as they pleased, under the observation\nof persons sent to attend them. As each sheep lay down it was sacrificed\nto _the propitious God_. By this ceremony it is said the city was\nrelieved; but as it was still unknown what deity was propitious, an\naltar was erected _to the unknown God_ on every spot where a sheep had\nbeen sacrificed.\"[123]\n\n[Footnote 121: Cudworth, vol. i. p. 300.]\n\n[Footnote 122: \"Lives of Philosophers,\" book i., Epimenides.]\n\n[Footnote 123: See Townsend's \"Chronological Arrangement of New\nTestament,\" note 19, part xii.; Doddridge's \"Exposition;\" and Barnes's\n\"Notes on Acts.\"]\n\n\"The unknown God\" was their deliverer from the plague. And the erection\nof an altar to him was a confession of their absolute dependence upon\nhim, of their obligation to worship him, as well as of their need of a\ndeeper knowledge of him. The gods who were known and named were not able\nto deliver them in times of calamity, and they were compelled to look\nbeyond the existing forms of Grecian mythology for relief. Beyond all\nthe gods of the Olympus there was \"one God over all,\" the Father of gods\nand men, the Creator of all the subordinate local deities, upon whom\neven these created gods were dependent, upon whom man was absolutely\ndependent, and therefore in times of deepest need, of severest\nsuffering, of extremest peril, then they cried to the living, supreme,\neternal God.[124]\n\n[Footnote 124: \"The men and women of the Iliad and Odyssey are\nhabitually religious. The language of religion is often on their\ntongues, as it is ever on the lips of every body in the East at this\nday. The thought of the gods, and of their providence and government of\nthe world, is a familiar thought. They seem to have an abiding\nconviction of their _dependence_ on the gods. The results of all actions\ndepend on the will of the gods; _it lies on their knees_ (Theon ev\ngounasi keitai, Od. i. 267), is the often repeated and significant\nexpression of their feeling of dependence.\"--Tyler, \"Theology of Greek\nPoets,\" p. 165.]\n\n3. The Athenians developed in a high degree those religious emotions\nwhich always accompany the consciousness of dependence on a Supreme\nBeing.\n\nThe first emotional element of all religion is _fear_. This is\nunquestionably true, whether religion be considered from a Christian or\na heathen stand-point. \"The _fear_ of the Lord is the beginning of\nwisdom.\" Associated with, perhaps preceding, all definite ideas of God,\nthere exists in the human mind certain feelings of _awe_, and\n_reverence_, and _fear_ which arise spontaneously in presence of the\nvastness, and grandeur, and magnificence of the universe, and of the\npower and glory of which the created universe is but the symbol and\nshadow. There is the felt apprehension that, beyond and back of the\nvisible and the tangible, there is a _personal, living Power_, which is\nthe foundation of all, and which fashions all, and fills all with its\nlight and life; that \"the universe is the living vesture in which the\nInvisible has robed his mysterious loveliness.\" There is the feeling of\nan _overshadowing Presence_ which \"compasseth man behind and before, and\nlays its hand upon him.\"\n\nThis wonderful presentiment of an invisible power and presence pervading\nand informing all nature is beautifully described by Wordsworth in his\nhistory of the development of the Scottish herdsman's mind:\n\n     So the foundations of his mind were laid\n     In such communion, not from terror free.\n     While yet a child, and long before his time,\n     Had he perceived the presence and the power\n     Of greatness; and deep feelings had impressed\n     So vividly great objects, that they lay\n     Upon his mind like substances, whose presence\n     Perplexed the bodily sense.\n                        ... In the after-day\n     Of boyhood, many an hour in caves forlorn,\n     And 'mid the hollow depths of naked crags,\n     He sat, and even in their fixed lineaments,\n     Or from the power of a peculiar eye,\n     Or by creative feeling overborne,\n     Or by predominance of thought oppressed,\n     Even in their fixed and steady lineaments\n     He traced an ebbing and a flowing mind....\n     Such was the Boy,--but for the growing Youth,\n     What soul was his, when, from the naked top\n     Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun\n     Rise up, and bathe the world in light! He looked:\n     Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth\n     And ocean's liquid mass, in gladness lay\n     Beneath him; far and wide the clouds were touched.\n     And in their silent faces could he read\n     Unutterable love. Sound needed none,\n     Nor any voice of joy; his spirit drank\n     The spectacle: sensation, soul, and form\n     All melted into him; they swallowed up\n     His animal being; in them did he live,\n     And by them did he live; they were his life,\n     In such access of mind, in such high hour\n     Of visitation from the living God.[125]\n\nBut it may be said this is all mere poetry; to which we answer, in the\nwords of Aristotle, \"Poetry is a thing more philosophical and weightier\nthan history.\"[126] The true poet is the interpreter of nature. His soul\nis in the fullest sympathy with the grand ideas which nature symbolizes,\nand he \"deciphers the universe as the autobiography of the Infinite\nSpirit.\" Spontaneous feeling is a kind of inspiration.\n\nIt is true that all minds may not be developed in precisely the same\nmanner as Wordsworth's herdsman's, because the development of every\nindividual mind is modified in some measure by exterior conditions. Men\nmay contemplate nature from different points of view. Some may be\nimpressed with one aspect of nature, some with another. But none will\nfail to recognize a mysterious _presence_ and invisible _power_ beneath\nall the fleeting and changeful phenomena of the universe. \"And sometimes\nthere are moments of tenderness, of sorrow, and of vague mystery which\nbring the feeling of the Infinite Presence close to the human\nheart.\"[127]\n\n[Footnote 125: \"The Wanderer.\"]\n\n[Footnote 126: Poet, ch. ix.]\n\n[Footnote 127: Robertson.]\n\nNow we hold that _this feeling and sentiment of the Divine_--the\nsupernatural--exists in every mind. It may be, it undoubtedly is,\nsomewhat modified in its manifestations by the circumstances in which\nmen are placed, and the degree of culture they have enjoyed. The African\nFetichist, in his moral and intellectual debasement, conceives a\nsupernatural power enshrined in every object of nature. The rude Fijian\nregards with dread, and even terror, the Being who darts the lightnings\nand wields the thunderbolts. The Indian \"sees God in clouds, and hears\nhim in the wind.\" The Scottish \"herdsman\" on the lonely mountain-top\n\"feels the presence and the power of greatness,\" and \"in its fixed and\nsteady lineaments he sees an ebbing and a flowing mind.\" The\nphilosopher[128] lifts his eyes to \"the starry heavens\" in all the depth\nof their concave, and with all their constellations of glory moving on\nin solemn grandeur, and, to his mind, these immeasurable regions seem\n\"filled with the splendors of the Deity, and crowded with the monuments\nof his power;\" or he turns his eye to \"the Moral Law within,\" and he\nhears the voice of an intelligent and a righteous God. In all these\ncases we have a revelation of the sentiment of the Divine, which dwells\nalike in all human minds. In the Athenians this sentiment was developed\nin a high degree. The serene heaven which Greece enjoyed, and which was\nthe best-loved roof of its inhabitants, the brilliant sun, the mountain\nscenery of unsurpassed grandeur, the deep blue sea, an image of the\ninfinite, these poured all their fullness on the Athenian mind, and\nfurnished the most favorable conditions for the development of the\nreligious sentiments. The people of Athens spent most of their time in\nthe open air in communion with nature, and in the cheerful and temperate\nenjoyment of existence. To recognize the Deity in the living powers of\nnature, and especially in man, as the highest sensible manifestation of\nthe Divine, was the peculiar prerogative of the Grecian mind. And here\nin Athens, art also vied with nature to deepen the religious sentiments.\nIt raised the mind to ideal conceptions of a beauty and a sublimity\nwhich transcended all mere nature-forms, and by images, of supernatural\ngrandeur and loveliness presented to the Athenians symbolic\nrepresentations of the separate attributes and operations of the\ninvisible God. The plastic art of Greece was designed to express\nreligious ideas, and was consecrated by religious feeling. Thus the\nfacts of the case are strikingly in harmony with the words of the\nApostle: \"All things which I behold bear witness to your carefulness in\nreligion,\" your \"reverence for the Deity,\" your \"fear of God.\"[129] \"The\nsacred objects\" in Athens, and especially \"the altar to the Unknown\nGod,\" were all regarded by Paul as evidences of their instinctive faith\nin the invisible, the supernatural, the divine.\n\n[Footnote 128: Kant, in \"Critique of Practical Reason.\"]\n\n[Footnote 129: See Parkhurst's Lexicon, under _Deisidaimonia_, which\nSuidas explains by eulabeia peri to Theion--_reverence for the Divine_,\nand Hesychius by Phubutheia--_fear of God_. Also, Josephus, Antiq., book\nx. ch. iii, Sec. 2: \"Manasseh, after his repentance and reformation, strove\nto behave himself (te deisidaimonia chrestheia) in the _most religious\nmanner_ towards God.\" Also see A. Clarke on Acts xvii.]\n\nAlong with this sentiment of the Divine there is also associated, in all\nhuman minds, an _instinctive yearning_ after the Invisible; not a mere\nfeeling of curiosity to pierce the mystery of being and of life, but\nwhat Paul designates \"a feeling after God,\" which prompts man to seek\nafter a deeper knowledge, and a more immediate consciousness. To attain\nthis deeper knowledge--this more conscious realization of the being and\nthe presence of God, has been the effort of all philosophy and all\nreligion in all ages. The Hindoo Yogis proposes to withdraw into his\ninmost self, and by a complete suspension of all his active powers to\nbecome absorbed and swallowed up in the Infinite.[130] Plato and his\nfollowers sought by an immediate abstraction to apprehend \"the\nunchangeable and permanent Being,\" and, by a loving contemplation, to\nbecome \"assimilated to the Deity,\" and in this way to attain the\nimmediate consciousness of God. The Neo-Platonic mystic sought by\nasceticism and self-mortification to prepare himself for divine\ncommunings. He would contemplate the divine perfections in himself; and\nin an _ecstatic_ state, wherein all individuality vanishes, he would\nrealize a union, or identity, with the Divine Essence.[131] While the\nuniversal Church of God, indeed, has in her purest days always taught\nthat man may, by inward purity and a believing love, be rendered capable\nof spiritually apprehending, and consciously feeling, the presence of\nGod. Some may be disposed to pronounce this as all mere mysticism. We\nanswer, The living internal energy of religion is always _mystical_, it\nis grounded in _feeling_--a \"_sensus numinis_\" common to humanity. It is\nthe mysterious sentiment of the Divine; it is the prolepsis of the human\nspirit reaching out towards the Infinite; the living susceptibility of\nour spiritual nature stretching after the powers and influences of the\nhigher world. It is upon this inner instinct of the supernatural that\nall religion rests. I do not say every religious idea, but whatever is\npositive, practical, powerful, durable, and popular. Everywhere, in all\nclimates, in all epochs of history, and in all degrees of civilization,\nman is animated by the sentiment--I would rather say, the\npresentiment--that the world in which he lives, the order of things in\nthe midst of which he moves, the facts which regularly and constantly\nsucceed each other, are not _all_. In vain he daily makes discoveries\nand conquests in this vast universe; in vain he observes and learnedly\nverifies the general laws which govern it; _his thought is not inclosed\nin the world surrendered to his science_; the spectacle of it does not\nsuffice his soul, it is raised beyond it; it searches after and catches\nglimpses of something beyond it; it aspires higher both for the universe\nand itself; it aims at another destiny, another master.\n\n[Footnote 130: Vaughan, \"Hours with the Mystics,\" vol. i. p. 44.]\n\n[Footnote 131: Id. ib., vol. i. p. 65.]\n\n      \"'Par dela tous ces cieux le Dieu des cieux reside.'\"[132]\n\nSo Voltaire has said, and the God who is beyond the skies is not nature\npersonified, but a supernatural Personality. It is to this highest\nPersonality that all religions address themselves. It is to bring man\ninto communion with Him that they exist.[133]\n\n[Footnote 132: \"Beyond all these heavens the God of the heavens\nresides.\"]\n\n[Footnote 133: Guizot, \"L'Eglise et la Societe Chretiennes\" en 1861.]\n\n4. The Athenians had that deep consciousness of sin and guilt, and of\nconsequent liability to punishment, which confesses the need of\nexpiation by piacular sacrifices.\n\nEvery man feels himself to be an accountable being, and he is conscious\nthat in wrong-doing he is deserving of blame and of punishment. Deep\nwithin the soul of the transgressor is the consciousness that he is a\nguilty man, and he is haunted with the perpetual apprehension of a\nretribution which, like the spectre of evil omen, crosses his every\npath, and meets him at every turn.\n\n     \"'Tis guilt alone,\n       Like brain-sick frenzy in its feverish mode,\n       Fills the light air with visionary terrors,\n       And shapeless forms of fear.\"\n\nMan does not possess this consciousness of guilt so much as it holds\npossession of him. It pursues the fugitive from justice, and it lays\nhold on the man who has resisted or escaped the hand of the executioner.\nThe sense of guilt is a power over and above man; a power so wonderful\nthat it often compels the most reckless criminal to deliver himself up,\nwith the confession of his deed, to the sword of justice, when a\nfalsehood would have easily protected him. Man is only able by\npersevering, ever-repeated efforts at self-induration, against the\nremonstrances of conscience, to withdraw himself from its power. His\nsuccess is, however, but very partial; for sometimes, in the moments of\nhis greatest security, the reproaches of conscience break in upon him\nlike a flood, and sweep away all his refuge of lies. \"The evil\nconscience is the divine bond which binds the created spirit, even in\ndeep apostasy, to its Original. In the consciousness of guilt there is\nrevealed the essential relation of our spirit to God, although\nmisunderstood by man until he has something higher than his evil\nconscience. The trouble and anguish which the remonstrances of this\nconsciousness excite--the inward unrest which sometimes seizes the slave\nof sin--are proofs that he has not quite broken away from God.\"[134]\n\n[Footnote 134: Mueller, \"Christian Doctrine of Sin,\" vol. i. pp. 225,\n226.]\n\nIn Grecian mythology there was a very distinct recognition of the power\nof conscience, and a reference of its authority to the Divinity,\ntogether with the idea of retribution. Nemesis was regarded as the\nimpersonation of the upbraidings of conscience, of the natural dread of\npunishment that springs up in the human heart after the commission of\nsin. And as the feeling of remorse may be considered as the consequence\nof the displeasure and vengeance of an offended God, Nemesis came to be\nregarded as the goddess of retribution, relentlessly pursuing the guilty\nuntil she has driven them into irretrievable woe and ruin. The Erinyes\nor Eumenides are the deities whose business it is to punish, in hades,\nthe crimes committed upon earth. When an aggravated crime has excited\ntheir displeasure they manifest their greatest power in the disquietude\nof conscience.\n\nAlong with this deep consciousness of guilt, and this fear of\nretribution which haunts the guilty mind, there has also rested upon the\nheart of universal humanity a deep and abiding conviction that\n_something must be done to expiate the guilt of sin_--some restitution\nmust be made, some suffering must be endured,[135] some sacrifice\noffered to atone for past misdeeds. Hence it is that men in all ages\nhave had recourse to penances and prayers, to self-inflicted tortures\nand costly sacrifices to appease a righteous anger which their sins had\nexcited, and avert an impending punishment. That sacrifice to atone for\nsin has prevailed universally--that it has been practised \"_sem-per,\nubique, et ab omnibus,_\" always, in all places, and by all men--will not\nbe denied by the candid and competent inquirer. The evidence which has\nbeen collected from ancient history by Grotius and Magee, and the\nadditional evidence from contemporaneous history, which is being now\nfurnished by the researches of ethnologists and Christian missionaries,\nis conclusive. No intelligent man can doubt the fact. Sacrificial\nofferings have prevailed in every nation and in every age. \"Almost the\nentire worship of the pagan nations consisted in rites of deprecation.\nFear of the Divine displeasure seems to have been the leading feature of\ntheir religious impressions; and in the diversity, the costliness, the\ncruelty of their sacrifices they sought to appease gods to whose wrath\nthey felt themselves exposed, from a consciousness of sin, unrelieved by\nany information as to the means of escaping its effects.\"[136]\n\n[Footnote 135: Punishment is the penalty due to sin; or, to use the\nfavorite expression of Homer, not unusual in the Scriptures also, it is\nthe payment of a debt incurred by sin. When he is punished, the criminal\nis said to pay off or pay back (apotinein) his crimes; in other words,\nto expiate or atone for them (Iliad, iv. 161,162),\n\n      syn te megalo apetisan syn sphesin kephalesi gynaixi te kai\n      tekeessin.\n\nthat is, they shall pay off, pay back, atone, etc., for their treachery\nwith a great price, with their lives, and their wives and\nchildren.--Tyler, \"Theology of Greek Poets,\" p. 194.]\n\n[Footnote 136: Magee, \"On the Atonement,\" No. V. p. 30.]\n\nIt must be known to every one at all acquainted with Greek mythology\nthat the idea of _expiation_--atonement--was a fundamental idea of their\nreligion. Independent of any historical research, a very slight glance\nat the Greek and Roman classics, especially the poets, who were the\ntheologians of that age, can leave little doubt upon this head.[137]\nTheir language everywhere announces the notion of _propitiation_, and,\nparticularly the Latin, furnishes the terms which are still employed in\ntheology. We need only mention the words ilasmos, ilaskomai, lytron,\nperipsema, as examples from the Greek, and _placare, propitiare,\nexpiare, piaculum_, from the Latin. All these indicate that the notion\nof expiation was interwoven into the very modes of thought and framework\nof the language of the ancient Greeks.\n\n[Footnote 137: In Homer the doctrine is expressly taught that the gods\nmay, and sometimes do, remit the penalty, when duly propitiated by\nprayers and sacrifices accompanied by suitable reparations (\"Iliad,\" ix.\n497 sqq.). \"We have a practical illustration of this doctrine in the\nfirst book of the Iliad, where Apollo averts the pestilence from the\narmy, when the daughter of his priest is returned without ransom, and a\n_sacrifice_ (elatombe) is sent to the altar of the god at sacred\nChrysa.... Apollo hearkens to the intercession of his priest, accepts\nthe sacred hecatomb, is delighted with the accompanying songs and\nlibations, and sends back the embassy with a favoring breeze, and a\nfavorable answer to the army, who meanwhile had been _purifying_\n(apelymainonto) themselves, and offering unblemished hecatombs of bulls\nand goats on the shore of the sea which washes the place of their\nencampment.\"\n\n\"The object of the propitiatory embassy to Apollo is thus stated by\nUlysses: Agamemnon, king of men, has sent me to bring back thy daughter\nChryses, and to offer a sacred hecatomb for (yper) the Greeks, that we\nmay _propitiate_ (ilasomestha) the king, who now sends woes and many\ngroans upon the Argives\" (442 sqq.).--Tyler, \"Theology of Greek Poets,\"\npp. 196, 197.]\n\nWe do not deem it needful to discuss at length the question which has\nbeen so earnestly debated among theologians, as to whether the idea of\nexpiation be a primitive and necessary idea of the human mind, or\nwhether the practice of piacular sacrifices came into the post-diluvian\nworld with Noah, as a positive institution of a primitive religion then\nfirst directly instituted by God. On either hypothesis the practice of\nexpiatory rites derives its authority from God; in the latter case, by\nan outward and verbal revelation, in the former by an inward and\nintuitive revelation.\n\nThis much, however, must be conceded on all hands, that there are\ncertain fundamental intuitions, universal and necessary, which underlie\nthe almost universal practice of expiatory sacrifice, namely, _the\nuniversal consciousness of guilt, and the universal conviction that\nsomething must be done to expiate guilt_, to compensate for wrong, and\nto atone for past misdeeds. But _how_ that expiation can be effected,\nhow that atonement can be made, is a question which reason does not seem\ncompetent to answer. That personal sin can be atoned for by vicarious\nsuffering, that national guilt can be expiated and national punishment\naverted by animal sacrifices, or even by human sacrifices, is repugnant\nto rather than conformable with natural reason. There exists no\ndiscernible connection between the one and the other. We may suppose\nthat eucharistic, penitential, and even deprecatory sacrifices may have\noriginated in the light of nature and reason, but we are unable to\naccount for the practice of piacular sacrifices for substitutional\natonement, on the same principle. The ethical principle, that one's own\nsins are not transferable either in their guilt or punishment, is so\nobviously just that we feel it must have been as clear to the mind of\nthe Greek who brought his victim to be offered to Zeus, as it is to the\nphilosophic mind of to-day.[138] The knowledge that the Divine\ndispleasure can be averted by sacrifice is not, by Plato, grounded upon\nany intuition of reason, as is the existence of God, the idea of the\ntrue, the just, and good, but on \"tradition,\"[139] and the\n\"interpretations\" of Apollo. \"To the Delphian Apollo there remains the\ngreatest, noblest, and most important of legal institutions--the\nerection of temples, sacrifices, and other services to the gods,... and\nwhat other services should be gone through with a view to their\n_propitiation_. Such things as these, indeed, _we neither know\nourselves, nor in founding the State would we intrust them to others_,\nif we be wise;... the god of the country is the natural interpreter to\nall men about such matters.\"[140]\n\n[Footnote 138: \"He that hath done the deed, to suffer for it--thus cries\na proverb thrice hallowed by age.\"--AEschylus, \"Choeph,\" 311.]\n\n[Footnote 139: \"Laws,\" book vi. ch. xv.]\n\n[Footnote 140: \"Republic,\" book iv. ch. v.]\n\nThe origin of expiatory sacrifices can not, we think, be explained\nexcept on the principle of a primitive revelation and a positive\nappointment of God. They can not be understood except as a\ndivinely-appointed symbolism, in which there is exhibited a confession\nof personal guilt and desert of punishment; an intimation and a hope\nthat God will be propitious and merciful; and a typical promise and\nprophecy of a future Redeemer from sin, who shall \"put away sin by the\nsacrifice of himself.\" This sacred rite was instituted in connection\nwith the _protevangelium_ given to our first parents; it was diffused\namong the nations by tradition, and has been kept alive as a general,\nand, indeed, almost universal observance, by that deep sense of sin, and\nconsciousness of guilt, and personal urgency of the need of a\nreconciliation, which are so clearly displayed in Grecian mythology.\n\nThe legitimate inference we find ourselves entitled to draw from the\nwords of Paul, when fairly interpreted in the light of the past\nreligious history of the world, is, that the Athenians were a religious\npeople; that is, _they were, however unknowing, believers in and\nworshippers of the One Supreme God_.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER IV.\n\nTHE RELIGION OF THE ATHENIANS: ITS MYTHOLOGICAL AND SYMBOLICAL ASPECTS.\n\n\n\"That there is one Supreme Deity, both philosophers and poets, and even\nthe vulgar worshippers of the gods themselves frequently acknowledge;\nwhich because the assertors of gods well understood, they affirm these\ngods of theirs to preside over the several parts of the world, yet so\nthat there is only one chief governor. Whence it follows, that all their\nother gods can be no other than ministers and officers which one\ngreatest God, who is omnipotent, hath variously appointed, and\nconstituted so as to serve his command.\"--LACTANTIUS.\n\nThe conclusion reached in the previous chapter that the Athenians were\nbelievers in and worshippers of the One Supreme God, has been challenged\nwith some considerable show of reason and force, on the ground that they\nwere _Polytheists_ and _Idolaters_.\n\nAn objection which presents itself so immediately on the very face of\nthe sacred narrative, and which is sustained by the unanimous voice of\nhistory, is entitled to the fullest consideration. And as the interests\nof truth are infinitely more precious than the maintenance of any\ntheory, however plausible, we are constrained to accord to this\nobjection the fullest weight, and give to it the most impartial\nconsideration. We can not do otherwise than at once admit that the\nAthenians were _Polytheists_--they worshipped \"many gods\" besides \"the\nunknown God.\" It is equally true that they were _Idolaters_--they\nworshipped images or statues of the gods, which images were also, by an\neasy metonymy, called \"gods.\"\n\nBut surely no one supposes that this is all that can be said upon the\nsubject, and that, after such admissions, the discussion must be closed.\nOn the contrary, we have, as yet, scarce caught a glimpse of the real\ncharacter and genius of Grecian polytheistic worship, and we have not\nmade the first approach towards a philosophy of Grecian mythology.\n\nThe assumption that the heathen regarded the images \"graven by art and\ndevice of man\" as the real creators of the world and man, or as having\nany control over the destinies of men, sinks at once under the weight of\nits own absurdity. Such hypothesis is repudiated with scorn and\nindignation by the heathens themselves. Cotta, in _Cicero_, declares\nexplicitly: \"though it be common and familiar language amongst us to\ncall corn Ceres, and wine Bacchus, yet who can think any one so mad as\nto take that to be really a god that he feeds upon?\"[141] And _Plutarch_\ncondemns the whole practice of giving the names of gods and goddesses to\ninanimate objects, as absurd, impious, and atheistical: \"they who give\nthe names of gods to senseless matter and inanimate things, and such as\nare destroyed by men in the using, beget most wicked and atheistical\nopinions in the minds of men, since it can not be conceived how these\nthings should be gods, for nothing that is inanimate is a god.\"[142] And\nso also the Hindoo, the Buddhist, the American Indian, the Fijian of\nto-day, repel the notion that their visible images are real gods, or\nthat they worship them instead of the unseen God.\n\n[Footnote 141: Cudworth's \"Intell. System,\" vol. ii. p. 257, Eng. ed.]\n\n[Footnote 142: Quoted in Cudworth's \"Intell. System,\" vol. ii. p. 258,\nEng. ed.]\n\nAnd furthermore, that even the invisible divinities which these images\nwere designed to represent, were each independent, self-existent beings,\nand that the stories which are told concerning them by Homer and Hesiod\nwere received in a literal sense, is equally improbable. The earliest\nphilosophers knew as well as we know, that the Deity, in order to be\nDeity, must be either _perfect_ or nothing--that he must be _one_, not\nmany--without parts and passions; and they were scandalized and shocked\nby the religious fables of the ancient mythology as much as we are.\n_Xenophanes_, who lived, as we know, before Pythagoras, accuses Homer\nand Hesiod of having ascribed to the gods every thing that is\ndisgraceful amongst men, as stealing, adultery, and deceit. He remarks\n\"that men seem to have created their gods, and to have given them their\nown mind, and voice, and figure.\" He himself declares that \"God is\n_one,_ the greatest amongst gods and men, neither in form nor in thought\nlike unto men.\" He calls the battles of the Titans and the Giants, and\nthe Centaurs, \"the inventions of former generations,\" and he demands\nthat God shall be praised in holy songs and nobler strains.[143]\nDiogenes Laertius relates the following of _Pythagoras_, \"that when he\ndescended to the shades below, he saw the soul of Hesiod bound to a\npillar of brass and gnashing his teeth; and that of Homer, as suspended\non a tree, and surrounded by serpents; as a punishment for the things\nthey had said of the gods.\"[144] These poets, who had corrupted\ntheology, _Plato_ proposes to exclude from his ideal Republic; or if\npermitted at all, they must be subjected to a rigid expurgation. \"We\nshall,\" says he, \"have to repudiate a large part of those fables which\nare now in vogue; and, especially, of what I call the greater\nfables,--the stories which Hesiod and Homer tell us. In these stories\nthere is a fault which deserves the gravest condemnation; namely, when\nan author gives a _bad representation of gods and heroes_. We must\ncondemn such a poet, as we should condemn a painter, whose pictures bear\nno resemblance to the objects which he tries to imitate. For instance,\nthe poet Hesiod related an ugly story when he told how Uranus acted, and\nhow Kronos had his revenge upon him. They are offensive stories, and\nmust not be repeated in our cities. Not yet is it proper to say, in any\ncase,--what is indeed untrue--that gods wage war against gods, and\nintrigue and fight among themselves. Stories like the chaining of Juno\nby her son Vulcan, and the flinging of Vulcan out of heaven for trying\nto take his mother's part when his father was beating her, and all other\nbattles of the gods which are found in Homer, must be refused admission\ninto our state, _whether they are allegorical or not_. For a child can\nnot discriminate between what is allegorical and what is not; and\nwhatever is adopted, as a matter of belief, in childhood, has a tendency\nto become fixed and indelible; and therefore we ought to esteem it as of\nthe greatest importance that the fables which children first hear should\nbe adapted, as far as possible, to promote virtue.\"[145]\n\n[Footnote 143: Max Muller, \"Science of Language,\" pp. 405, 406.]\n\n[Footnote 144: \"Lives,\" bk. viii. ch. xix. p. 347.]\n\n[Footnote 145: \"Republic,\" bk. ii. ch. xvii.]\n\nIf, then, poetic and allegorical representations of divine things are to\nbe permitted in the ideal republic, then the founders of the state are\nto prescribe \"the moulds in which the poets are to cast their fictions.\"\n\n\"Now what are these moulds to be in the case of _Theology?_ They may be\ndescribed as follows: It is right always to represent God as he really\nis, whether the poet describe him in an epic, or a lyric, or a dramatic\npoem. Now God is, beyond all else, _good in reality_, and therefore so\nto be represented. But nothing that is good is hurtful. That which is\ngood hurts not; does no evil; is the cause of no evil. That which is\ngood is beneficial; is the cause of good. And, therefore, that which is\ngood is not the cause of _all_ which is and happens, but only of that\nwhich is as it should be.... The good things we must ascribe to God,\nwhilst we must seek elsewhere, and not in him, the causes of evil\nthings.\"\n\nWe must, then, express our disapprobation of Homer, or any other poet,\nwho is guilty of such a foolish blunder as to tell us (Iliad, xxiv. 660)\nthat:\n\n     'Fast by the threshold of Jove's court are placed\n     Two casks--one stored with evil, one with good:'\n\nand that he for whom the Thunderer mingles both--\n\n     'He leads a life checkered with good and ill.'\n\nBut as for the man to whom he gives the bitter cup unmixed--\n\n                                         'He walks\n     The blessed earth unbless'd, go where he will.'\n\nAnd if any one asserts that the violation of oaths and treaties by the\nact of Pandarus was brought about by Athene and Zeus (Iliad, ii. 60), we\nshould refuse our approbation. Nor can we allow it to be said that the\nstrife and trial of strength between tween the gods (Iliad, xx.) was\ninstigated by Themis and Zeus.... Such language can not be used without\nirreverence; it is both injurious to us, and contradictory in\nitself.[146]\n\nInasmuch as God is perfect to the utmost in beauty and goodness, _he\nabides ever the same_, and without any variation in his form. Then let\nno poet tell us that (Odyss. xvii. 582)\n\n                   'In similitude of strangers oft\n     The Gods, who can with ease all shapes assume,\n     Repair to populous cities.'\n\nAnd let no one slander Proteus and Thetis, or introduce in tragedies, or\nany other poems, Hera transformed into the guise of a princess\ncollecting\n\n     'Alms for the life-giving children of Inachus, river of Argos,'\n\nnot to mention many other falsehoods which we must interdict.[147]\n\n\"When a poet holds such language concerning the gods, we shall be angry\nwith him, and refuse him a chorus. Neither shall we allow our teachers\nto use his writings for the instruction of the young, if we would have\nour guards grow up to be as god-like and god-fearing as it is possible\nfor men to be.\"[148]\n\nWe are thus constrained by the statements of the heathens themselves, as\nwell as by the dictates of common sense, to look beyond the external\ndrapery and the material forms of Polytheism for some deeper and truer\nmeaning that shall be more in harmony with the facts of the universal\nreligious consciousness of our race. The religion of ancient Greece\nconsisted in something more than the fables of Jupiter and Juno, of\nApollo and Minerva, of Venus and Bacchus. \"Through the rank and\npoisonous vegetation of mythic phraseology, we may always catch a\nglimpse of an original stem round which it creeps and winds itself, and\nwithout which it can not enjoy that parasitical existence which has been\nmistaken for independent vitality.\"[149]\n\n[Footnote 146: \"Republic,\" bk. ii. ch. xix.]\n\n[Footnote 147: \"Republic,\" bk. ii. ch. xx. Much more to the same effect\nmay be seen in ch. ii.]\n\n[Footnote 148: \"Republic,\" bk. ii. ch. xxi.]\n\n[Footnote 149: Max Mueller, \"Science of Language,\" 2d series, p. 433.]\n\nIt is an obvious truth, attested by the voice of universal consciousness\nas revealed in history, that the human mind can never rest satisfied\nwithin the sphere of sensible phenomena. Man is impelled by an inward\nnecessity to pass, in thought, beyond the boundary-line of sense, and\ninquire after causes and entities which his reason assures him must lie\nbeneath all sensible appearances. He must and will interpret nature\naccording to the forms of his own personality, or according to the\nfundamental ideas of his own reason. In the childlike subjectivity of\nthe undisciplined mind he will either transfer to nature the phenomena\nof his own personality, regarding the world as a living organism which\nhas within it an informing soul, and thus attain a _pantheistic_\nconception of the universe; or else he will fix upon some extraordinary\nand inexplicable phenomenon of nature, and, investing it with\n_super-natural_ significance, will rise from thence to a religious and\n_theocratic_ conception of nature as a whole. An intelligence--a mind\n_within_ nature, and inseparable from nature, or else _above_ nature and\ngoverning nature, is, for man, an inevitable thought.\n\nIt is equally obvious that humanity can never relegate itself from a\nsupernatural origin, neither can it ever absolve itself from a permanent\ncorrelation with the Divine. Man feels within him an instinctive\nnobility. He did not arise out of the bosom of nature; in some\nmysterious way he has descended from an eternal mind, he is \"the\noffspring of God.\" And furthermore, a theocratic conception of nature,\nassociated with a pre-eminent regard for certain apparently supernatural\nexperiences in the history of humanity, becomes the foundation of\ngovernments, of civil authority, and of laws. Society can not be founded\nwithout the aid of the Deity, and a commonwealth can only be organized\nby Divine interposition. \"A Ceres must appear and sow the fields with\ncorn.\" And a Numa or a Lycurgus must be heralded by the oracle as\n\n     \"Dear to Jove, and all who sit in the halls of the Olympus.\"\n\nHe must be a \"descendant of Zeus,\" appointed by the gods to rule, and\none who will \"prove himself a god.\" These divinely-appointed rulers were\nregarded as the ministers of God, the visible representatives of the\nunseen Power which really governs all. The divine government must also\nhave its invisible agents--its Nemesis, and Themis, and Dike, the\nministers of law, of justice, and of retribution; and its Jupiter, and\nJuno, and Neptune, and Pluto, ruling, with delegated powers, in the\nheavens, the air, the sea, and the nethermost regions. So that, in fact,\nthere exists no nation, no commonwealth, no history without a Theophany,\nand along with it certain sacred legends detailing the origin of the\npeople, the government, the country itself, and the world at large. This\nis especially true of India, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Their primitive\nhistory is eminently _mythological_.\n\nGrecian polytheism can not be otherwise regarded than as a\npoetico-historical religion of _myth_ and _symbol_ which is under-laid\nby a natural Theism; a parasitical growth which winds itself around the\noriginal stem of instinctive faith in a supernatural Power and Presence\nwhich pervades the universe. The myths are oral traditions, floating\ndown from that dim; twilight of _poetic_ history, which separates real\nhistory, with its fixed chronology, from the unmeasured and unrecorded\neternity--faint echoes from that mystic border-land which divides the\nnatural from the supernatural, and in which they seem to have been\nmarvellously commingled. They are the lingering memories of those\nmanifestations of God to men, in which he or his celestial ministers\ncame into visible intercourse with our race; the reality of which is\nattested by sacred history. In all these myths there is a theogonic and\ncosmogonic element. They tell of the generation of the celestial and\naerial divinities--the subordinate agents and ministers of the Divine\ngovernment. They attempt an explanation of the genesis of the visible\nuniverse, the origin of humanity, and the development of human society.\nIn the presence of history, the substance of these myths is preserved by\n_symbols_, that is, by means of natural or artificial, real or striking\nobjects, which, by some analogy or arbitrary association, shall suggest\nthe _idea_ to the mind. These symbols were designed to represent the\ninvisible attributes and operations of the Deity; the powers that\nvitalize nature, that control the elements, that preside over cities,\nthat protect the nations: indeed, all the agencies of the physical and\nmoral government of God. Beneath all the pagan legends of gods, and\nunderlying all the elaborate mechanism of pagan worship, there are\nunquestionably philosophical ideas, and theological conceptions, and\nreligious sentiments, which give as meaning, and even a mournful\ngrandeur to the whole.\n\nWhilst the pagan polytheistic worship is, under one aspect, to be\nregarded as a departure from God, inasmuch as it takes away the honor\ndue to God alone, and transfers it to the creature; still, under another\naspect, we can not fail to recognize in it the effort of the human mind\nto fill up the chasm that seemed, to the undisciplined mind, to separate\nGod and man--and to bridge the gulf between the visible and the\ninvisible, the finite and the infinite. It was unquestionably an attempt\nto bring God nearer to the sense and comprehension of man. It had its\norigin in that instinctive yearning after the supernatural, the Divine,\nwhich dwells in all human hearts, and which has revealed itself in all\nphilosophies, mysticisms, and religions.[150] This longing was\nstimulated by the contemplation of the living beauty and grandeur of the\nvisible universe, which, to the lively fancy and deep feeling of the\nGreeks, seemed as the living vesture of the Infinite Mind,--the temple\nof the eternal Deity. In this visible universe the Divinity was partly\nrevealed, and partly concealed. The unity of the all-pervading\nIntelligence was veiled beneath an apparent diversity of power, and a\nmanifoldness of operations. They caught some glimpses of this universal\npresence in nature, but were more immediately and vividly impressed by\nthe several manifestations of the divine perfections and divine\noperations, as so many separate rays of the Divinity, or so many\nsubordinate agents and functionaries employed to execute the will and\ncarry out the purposes of the Supreme Mind.[151] That unseen,\nincomprehensible Power and Presence was perceived in the sublimity of\nthe deep blue sky, the energy of the vitalizing sun, the surging of the\nsea, the rushing wind, the roaring thunder, the ripening corn, and the\nclustering vine. To these separate manifestations of the Deity they gave\n_personal names_, as Jupiter to the heavens, Juno to the air, Neptune to\nthe sea, Ceres to the corn, and Bacchus to the vine. These personals\ndenoted, not the things themselves, but the invisible, divine powers\nsupposed to preside over those several departments of nature. By a kind\nof prosopopoeia \"they spake of the things in nature, and parts of the\nworld, as persons--and consequently as so many gods and goddesses--yet\nso as the intelligent might easily understand their meaning, _that these\nwere in reality nothing else but so many names and notions of that one\nNumen,--divine force and power which runs through all the world,\nmultiformly displaying itself._\"[152] \"Their various deities were but\ndifferent names, different conceptions, of that Incomprehensible Being\nwhich no _thought_ can reach, and no _language_ express.\"[153] Having\ngiven to these several manifestations of the Divinity personal names,\nthey now sought to represent them to the eye of sense by _visible\nforms_, as the symbols or images of the perfections of the unseen, the\nincomprehensible, the unknown God. And as the Greeks regarded man as the\nfirst and noblest among the phenomena of nature, they selected the human\nform as the highest sensible manifestation of God, the purest symbol of\nthe Divinity. Grecian polytheism was thus a species of _mythical\nanthropomorphism_.\n\n[Footnote 150: The original constitution of man is such that he \"seeks\nafter\" God Acts xvii. 27. \"All men yearn after the gods\" (Homer,\n\"Odyss.\" iii. 48).]\n\n[Footnote 151: \"Heathenism springs directly from this, that the mind\nlays undue stress upon the bare letter in the book of creation; that it\nseparates and individualizes its objects as far as possible; that it\nplaces the sense of the individual part, in opposition to the sense of\nthe whole,--to the _analogia fidei_ or _spiritus_ which alone gives\nunity to the book of nature, while it dilutes and renders as transitory\nas possible the sense of the universal in the whole.... And as it laid\ngreat stress upon the letter in the book of nature, it fell into\npolytheism. The particular symbol of the divine, or of the Godhead,\nbecame a myth of some special deity.\"--Lange's \"Bible-work,\" Genesis, p.\n23.]\n\n[Footnote 152: Cudworth, \"Intellect. System,\" vol. i. p. 308.]\n\n[Footnote 153: Max Mueller, \"Science of Language,\" p. 431.]\n\nA philosophy of Grecian mythology, such as we have outlined in the\npreceding paragraphs, is, in our judgment, perfectly consistent with the\nviews announced by Paul in his address to the Athenians. He intimates\nthat the Athenians \"thought that the Godhead was _like unto_ (e nai\nomoion)--to be imaged or represented by human art--by gold, and silver,\nand precious stone graven by art, and device of man;\" that is, they\nthought the perfections of God could be represented to the eye by an\nimage, or symbol. The views of Paul are still more articulately\nexpressed in Romans, i. 23, 25: \"They changed the glory of the\nincorruptible God into the _similitude of an image_ of corruptible\nman,.... and they worshipped and served the thing made, para--_rather_\nthan, or _more_ than the Creator.\" Here, then, the apostle intimates,\nfirst, that the heathen _knew_ God,[154] and that they worshipped God.\nThey worshipped the creature besides or even more than God, but still\nthey also worshipped God. And, secondly, they represented the\nperfections of God by an image, and under this, as a \"_likeness_\" or\nsymbol, they indirectly worshipped God. Their religious system was,\nthen, even to the eye of Paul, a _symbolic_ worship--that is, the\nobjects of their devotion were the _omoiomata_--the similitudes, the\nlikenesses, the images of the perfections of the invisible God.\n\n[Footnote 154: Verse 21.]\n\nIt is at once conceded by us, that the \"sensus numinis,\" the natural\nintuition of a Supreme Mind, whose power and presence are revealed in\nnature, can not maintain itself, as an influential, and vivifying, and\nregulative belief amongst men, without the continual supernatural\ninterposition of God; that is, without a succession of Divine\nrevelations. And further, we grant that, instead of this symbolic mode\nof worship deepening and vitalizing the sense of God as a living power\nand presence, there is great danger that the symbol shall at length\nunconsciously take the place of God, and be worshipped instead of Him.\nFrom the purest form of symbolism which prevailed in the earliest ages,\nthere may be an inevitable descent to the rudest form of false worship,\nwith its accompanying darkness, and abominations, and crimes; but, at\nthe same time, let us do justice to the religions of the ancient\nworld--the childhood stammerings of religious life--which were something\nmore than the inventions of designing men, or the mere creations of\nhuman fancy; they were, in the words of Paul, \"a _seeking after God_, if\nhaply they might feel after him, and find him, who is not far from any\none of us.\" It can not be denied that the more thoughtful and\nintelligent Greeks regarded the visible objects of their devotion as\nmere symbols of the perfections and operations of the unseen God, and of\nthe invisible powers and subordinate agencies which are employed by him\nin his providential and moral government of the world. And whatever\nthere was of misapprehension and of \"ignorance\" in the popular mind, we\nhave the assurance of Paul that it was \"_overlooked_\" by God.\n\nThe views here presented will, we venture to believe, be found most in\nharmony with a true philosophy of the human mind; with the religious\nphenomena of the world; and, as we shall subsequently see, with the\nwritings of those poets and philosophers who may be fairly regarded as\nrepresenting the sentiments and opinions of the ancient world. At the\nsame time, we have no desire to conceal the fact that this whole\nquestion as to the origin, and character, and philosophy of the\nmythology and symbolism of the religions of the ancient world has been a\nsubject of earnest controversy from Patristic times down to the present\nhour, and that even to-day there exists a wide diversity of opinion\namong philosophers, as well as theologians.\n\nThe principal theories offered may be classed as the _ethical_, the\n_physical_, and the _historical_, according to the different objects the\nframers of the myths are supposed to have had in view. Some have\nregarded the myths as invented by the priests and wise men of old for\nthe improvement and government of society, as designed to give authority\nto laws, and maintain social order.[155] Others have regarded them as\nintended to be allegorical interpretations of physical phenomena--the\npoetic embodiment of the natural philosophy of the primitive races of\nmen;[156] whilst others have looked upon them as historical legends,\nhaving a substratum of fact, and, when stripped of the supernatural and\nmiraculous drapery which accompanies fable, as containing the history of\nprimitive times.[157] Some of the latter class have imagined they could\nrecognize in Grecian mythology traces of sacred personages, as well as\nprofane; in fact, a dimmed image of the patriarchal traditions which are\npreserved in the Old Testament scriptures.[158]\n\nIt is beyond our design to discuss all the various theories presented,\nor even to give a history of opinions entertained.[159] We are fully\nconvinced that the hypothesis we have presented in the preceding pages,\nviz., _that Grecian mythology was a grand symbolic representation of the\nDivine as manifested in nature and providence_, is the only hypothesis\nwhich meets and harmonizes all the facts of the case. This is the theory\nof Plato, of Cudworth, Baumgarten, Max Mueller, and many other\ndistinguished scholars.\n\n[Footnote 155: Empedocles, Metrodorus.]\n\n[Footnote 156: Aristotle.]\n\n[Footnote 157: Hecataeus, Herodotus, some of the early Fathers, Niebuhr,\nJ.H. Voss, Arnold.]\n\n[Footnote 158: Bochart, G.J. Vossius, Faber, Gladstone.]\n\n[Footnote 159: To the English reader who desires an extended and\naccurate acquaintance with the classic and patristic literature of this\ndeeply interesting subject, we commend the careful study of Cudworth's\n\"Intellectual System of the Universe,\" especially ch. iv. The style of\nCudworth is perplexingly involved, and his great work is unmethodical in\nits arrangement and discussion. Nevertheless, the patient and\npersevering student will be amply rewarded for his pains. A work of more\nprofound research into the doctrine of antiquity concerning God, and\ninto the real import of the religious systems of the ancient world, is,\nprobably, not extant in any language.]\n\nThere are two fundamental propositions laid down by Cudworth which\nconstitute the basis of this hypothesis.\n\n1. _No well-authenticated instance can be furnished from among the Greek\nPolytheists of one who taught the existence of a multiplicity of\nindependenty uncreated, self-existent deities; they almost universally_\n_believed in the existence of_ ONE SUPREME, UNCREATED, ETERNAL GOD,\n\"_The Maker of all things_\"--\"_the Father of gods and men_,\"--\"_the\nsole Monarch and Ruler of the world_.\"\n\n2. _The Greek Polytheists taught a plurality of_\"GENERATED DEITIES,\"\n_who owe their existence to the power and will of the Supreme God, who\nare by Him invested with delegated powers, and who, as the agents of his\nuniversal providence, preside over different departments of the created\nuniverse_.\n\nThe evidence presented by Cudworth in support of his theses is so varied\nand so voluminous, that it defies all attempts at condensation. His\nvolumes exhibit an extent of reading, of patient research, and of varied\nlearning, which is truly amazing. The discussion of these propositions\ninvolves, in fact, nothing less than a complete and exhaustive survey of\nthe entire field of ancient literature, a careful study of the Greek and\nLatin poets, of the Oriental, Greek, and Alexandrian philosophers, and a\nreview of the statements and criticisms of Rabbinical and Patristic\nwriters in regard to the religions of the pagan world. An adequate\nconception of the varied and weighty evidence which is collected by our\nauthor from these fields, in support of his views, could only be\nconveyed by transcribing to our pages the larger portion of his\nmemorable _fourth_ chapter. But inasmuch as Grecian polytheism is, in\nfact, the culmination of all the mythological systems of the ancient\nworld, the fully-developed flower and ripened fruit of the cosmical and\ntheological conceptions of the childhood-condition of humanity, we\npropose to epitomize the results of his inquiry as to the _theological_,\nopinions of the Greeks, supplying additional confirmation of his views\nfrom other sources.\n\nAnd first, he proves most conclusively that Orpheus, Homer, and\nHesiod,[160] who are usually designated \"the theologians\" of Greece, but\nwho were in fact the depravers and corrupters of pagan theology, do not\nteach the existence of a multitude of _unmade, self-existent, and\nindependent deities_. Even they believed in the existence of _one_\nuncreated and eternal mind, _one Supreme God_, anterior and superior to\nall the gods of their mythology. They had some intuition, some\napperception of the _Divine_, even before they had attached to it a\nsacred name. The gods of their mythology had all, save one, a temporal\norigin; they were generated of Chaos and Night, by an active principle\ncalled _Love_. \"One might suspect,\" says Aristotle, that Hesiod, and if\nthere be any other who made _love_ or _desire_ a principle of things,\naimed at these very things (viz., the designation of the efficient cause\nof the world); for Parmenides, describing the generation of the\nuniverse, says:\n\n     'First of all the gods planned he _love_;'\n\nand further, Hesiod:\n\n     'First of all was Chaos, afterwards Earth,\n     With her spacious bosom,\n     And _Love_, who is pre-eminent among all the immortals;'\n\nas intimating here that in entities there should exist some _cause_ that\nwill impart motion, and hold bodies in union together. But how, in\nregard to these, one ought to distribute them, as to the order of\npriority, can be decided afterwards.[161]\n\n[Footnote 160: We do not concern ourselves with the chronological\nantecedence of these ancient Greek poets. It is of little consequence to\nus whether Homer preceded Orpheus, or Orpheus Homer. They were not the\nreal creators of the mythology of ancient Greece. The myths were a\nspontaneous growth of the earliest human thought even before the\nseparation of the Aryan family into its varied branches.\n\nThe study of Comparative Mythology, as well as of Comparative Language,\nassures us that the myths had an origin much earlier than the times of\nHomer and Orpheus. They floated down from ages on the tide of oral\ntradition before they were systematized, embellished, and committed to\nwriting by Homer, and Orpheus, and Hesiod. And between the systems of\nthese three poets a perceptible difference is recognizable, which\nreflects the changes that verbal recitations necessarily and\nimperceptibly undergo.]\n\n[Footnote 161: \"Metaphysics,\" bk. i. ch. iv.]\n\nNow whether this \"first principle,\" called \"_Love_,\" \"the cause of\nmotion and of union\" in the universe, was regarded as a personal Being,\nand whether, as the ancient scholiast taught, Hesiod's love was \"the\nheavenly Love, which is also God, that other love that was born of Venus\nbeing junior,\" is just now of no moment to the argument. The more\nimportant inference is, that amongst the gods of Pagan theology but\n_one_ is self-existent, or else none are. Because the Hesiodian gods,\nwhich are, in fact, all the gods of the Greek mythology, \"were either\nall of them derived from chaos, love itself likewise being generated out\nof it; or else love was supposed to be distinct from chaos, and the\nactive principle of the universe, from whence, together with chaos, all\nthe theogony and cosmogony was derived.\"[162] Hence it is evident the\npoets did not teach the existence of a multiplicity of unmade,\nself-existent, independent deities.\n\n[Footnote 162: \"Cudworth,\" vol. i. p. 287.]\n\nThe careful reader of Cudworth will also learn another truth of the\nutmost importance in this connection, viz., _that the theogony of the\nGreek poets was, in fact, a cosmogony_, the generation of the gods\nbeing, in reality, the generation of the heavens, the sun, the moon, the\nstars, and all the various powers and phenomena of nature. This is dimly\nshadowed forth in the very names which are given to some of these\ndivinities. Thus Helios is the sun, Selena is the moon, Zeus the\nsky--the deep blue heaven, Eos the dawn, and Erse the dew. It is\nrendered still more evident by the opening lines of Hesiod's\n\"Theogonia,\" in which he invokes the muses:\n\n     \"Hail ye daughters of Jupiter! Grant a delightsome song.\n     Tell of the race of immortal gods, always existing,\n     Who are the offspring of the earth, of the starry sky,\n     And of the gloomy night, whom also the ocean nourisheth.\n     Tell how the gods and the earth at first were made,\n     And the rivers, and the mighty deep, boiling with waves,\n     And the glowing stars, and the broad heavens above,\n     And the gods, givers of good, born of these.\"\n\nWhere we see plainly that the generation of the gods is the generation\nof the earth, the heaven, the stars, the seas, the rivers, and other\nthings produced by them. \"But immediately after invocation of the Muses\nthe poet begins with Chaos, and Tartara, and Love, as the first\nprinciples, and then proceeds to the production of the earth and of\nnight out of chaos; of the ether and of day, from night; of the starry\nheavens, mountains, and seas. All which generation of gods is really\nnothing but a poetic description of the cosmogonia; as through the\nsequel of the poem all seems to be physiology veiled under fiction and\nallegory.... Hesiod's gods are thus not only the animated parts of the\nworld, but also the other things of nature personified and deified, or\nabusively called gods and goddesses.\"[163] The same is true both of the\nOrphic and Homeric gods. \"Their generation of the gods is the same with\nthe generation or creation of the world, both of them having, in all\nprobability, derived it from the Mosaic cabala, or tradition.\"[164]\n\nBut in spite of all this mythological obscuration, the belief in one\nSupreme God is here and there most clearly recognizable. \"That Zeus was\noriginally to the Greeks the Supreme God, the true God--nay, at some\ntime their only God--can be perceived in spite of the haze which\nmythology has raised around his name.\"[165] True, they sometimes used\nthe word \"Zeus\" in a physical sense to denote the deep expanse of\nheaven, and sometimes in a historic sense, to designate a hero or\ndeified man said to have been born in Crete. It is also true that the\nHomeric Zeus is full of contradictions. He is \"all-seeing,\" yet he is\ncheated; he is \"omnipotent,\" yet he is defied; he is \"eternal,\" yet he\nhas a father; he is \"just,\" yet he is guilty of crime. Now, as Mueller\nvery justly remarks, these contradictions may teach us a lesson. If all\nthe conceptions of Zeus had sprung from one origin, these contradictions\ncould not have existed. If Zeus had simply and only meant the Supreme\nGod, he could not have been the son of Kronos (Time). If, on the other\nhand, Zeus had been a mere mythological personage, as Eos, the dawn, and\nHelios, the sun, he could never have been addressed as he is addressed\nin the famous prayer of Achilles (Iliad, bk. xxi.).[166]\n\n[Footnote 163: Cudworth, vol. i. pp. 321, 332.]\n\n[Footnote 164: Id., ib., vol. i. p. 478.]\n\n[Footnote 165: Max Mueller, \"Science of Language,\" p. 457.]\n\n[Footnote 166: Id., ib., p. 458.]\n\nIn Homer there is a perpetual blending of the natural and the\nsupernatural, the human and divine. The _Iliad_ is an incongruous medley\nof theology, physics, and history. In its gorgeous scenic\nrepresentations, nature, humanity, and deity are mingled in inextricable\nconfusion. The gods are sometimes supernatural and superhuman\npersonages; sometimes the things and powers of nature personified; and\nsometimes they are deified men. And yet there are passages, even in\nHomer, which clearly distinguish Zeus from all the other divinities, and\nmark him out as the Supreme. He is \"the highest, first of Gods\" (bk.\nxix. 284); \"most great, most glorious Jove\" (bk. ii. 474). He is \"the\nuniversal Lord\" (bk. xi. 229); \"of mortals and immortals king supreme,\"\n(bk. xii. 263); \"over all the immortal gods he reigns in unapproached\npre-eminence of power\" (bk. xv. 125). He is \"the King of kings\" (bk.\nviii. 35), whose \"will is sovereign\" (bk. iv. 65), and his \"power\ninvincible\" (bk. viii. 35). He is the \"eternal Father\" (bk. viii. 77).\nHe \"excels in wisdom gods and men; all human things from him proceed\"\n(bk. xiii. 708-10); \"the Lord of counsel\" (bk. i. 208), \"the all-seeing\nJove\" (bk. xiii. 824). Indeed the mere expression \"Father of gods and\nmen\" (bk. i. 639), so often applied to Zeus, and him _alone_, is proof\nsufficient that, in spite of all the legendary stories of gods and\nheroes, the idea of Zeus as the Supreme God, the maker of the world, the\nFather of gods and men, the monarch and ruler of the world, was not\nobliterated from the Greek mind.[167]\n\n[Footnote 167: \"In the order of legendary chronology Zeus comes after\nKronos and Uranos, but in the order of Grecian conception Zeus is the\nprominent person, and Kronos and Uranos are inferior and introductory\nprecursors, set up in order to be overthrown, and to serve as mementos\nof the powers of their conqueror. To Homer and Hesiod, as well as to the\nGreeks universally, Zeus is the great, the predominant God, 'the Father\nof gods and men,' whose power none of the gods can hope to resist, or\neven deliberately think of questioning. All the other gods have their\nspecific potency, and peculiar sphere of action and duty, with which\nZeus does not usually interfere; but it is he who maintains the\nlineaments of a providential government, as well over the phenomena of\nOlympus as over the earth.\"--Grote, \"Hist. of Greece,\" vol. i. p. 3.\n\nZeus is not only lord of heaven but likewise the ruler of the lower\nworld, and the master of the sea.--Welcher, \"Griechische Goetterlehre,\"\nvol. i. p. 164. The Zeus of the Greek poets is unquestionably the god of\nwhom Paul declared: In him we live and move, and have our being, as\ncertain of your own poets have also said--\n\n     \"'For we are his offspring.'\"\n\nNow whether this be a quotation from Aratus or Cleanthes, the language\nof the poets is, \"We are the offspring of Zeus;\" consequently the Zeus\nof the poets and the God of Christianity are the same God.\n\n\"The father of gods and men in Homer is, of course, the Universal Father\nof the Scriptures.\"--Tyler, \"Theology of Greek Poets,\" p. 171.]\n\n\"When Homer introduces Eumaios, the swineherd, speaking of this life and\nthe higher powers that rule it, he knows only of just gods 'who hate\ncruel deeds, but honor justice and the righteous works of men' (Od. xiv.\n83). His whole life is built up on a complete trust in the divine\ngovernment of the world without any artificial helps, as the Erinys, the\nNemesis, or Moira. 'Eat,' says the swineherd, 'and enjoy what is here,\nfor _God_[168] will grant one thing, but another he will refuse,\nwhatever he will in his mind, for he can do all things' (Od. xiv. 444;\nx. 306). This surely is religion, and it is religion untainted by\nmythology. Again, the prayer of the female slave, grinding corn in the\nhouse of Ulysses is religious in the truest sense--'Father Zeus, thou\nwho rulest over gods and men, surely thou hast just thundered in the\nstarry sky, and there is no cloud anywhere. Thou showest this as a sign\nto some one. Fulfill now, even to me, miserable wretch, the prayer which\nI now offer'\" (Od. xx. 141-150).[169]\n\n[Footnote 168: No sound reason can be assigned for translating _Theos_\nby \"_a_ god\" as some have proposed, rather than \"_God_.\" But even if it\nwere translated \"a god,\" this god must certainly be understood as Zeus.\nPlato tells us that Zeus is the most appropriate name for God. \"For in\nreality the name Zeus is, as it were, a sentence; and persons dividing\nit in two parts, some of us make use of one part, and some of another;\nfor some call him Zen, and some Dis. But these parts, collected together\ninto one, exhibit the nature of the God;... for there is no one who is\nmore the cause of living, both to us and everything else, than he who is\nthe ruler and king of all. It follows, therefore, that this god is\nrightly named, through whom _life_ is present in all living\nbeings.\"--Cratylus, Sec. 28.\n\nTheos was usually employed, says Cudworth, to designate _God_ by way of\npre-eminence, Theoi to designate inferior divinities.]\n\n[Footnote 169: Mueller, \"Science of Language,\" p. 434.]\n\nThe Greek tragedians were the great religious instructors of the\nAthenian people. \"Greek tragedy grew up in connection with religious\nworship, and constituted not only a popular but a sacred element in the\nfestivals of the gods.... In short, strange as it may sound to modern\nears, the Greek stage was, more nearly than any thing else, the Greek\npulpit.[170] With a priesthood that offered sacrifice, but did not\npreach, with few books of any kind, the people were, in a great measure,\ndependent on oral instruction for knowledge; and as they learned their\nrights and duties as citizens from their orators, so they hung on the\nlips of the 'lofty, grave tragedians' for instruction touching their\norigin, duty, and destiny as mortal and immortal beings.... Greek\ntragedy is essentially didactic, ethical, mythological, and\nreligious.\"[171]\n\n[Footnote 170: Pulpitum, a stage.]\n\n[Footnote 171: Tyler, \"Theology of Greek Poets,\" pp. 205, 206.]\n\nNow it is unquestionable that, with the tragedians, Zeus is the Supreme\nGod. AEschylus is pre-eminently the theological poet of Greece. The great\nproblems which lie at the foundation of religious faith and practice are\nthe main staple of nearly all his tragedies. Homer, Hesiod, the sacred\npoets, had looked at these questions in their purely poetic aspects. The\nsubsequent philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, developed them more fully\nby their didactic method. AEschylus stands on the dividing-line between\nthem, no less poetic than the former, scarcely less philosophical than\nthe latter, but more intensely practical, personal, and _theological_\nthan either. The character of the Supreme Divinity, as represented in\nhis tragedies, approaches more nearly to the Christian idea of God. He\nis the Universal Father--Father of gods and men; the Universal Cause\n(panaitios, Agamem. 1485); the All-seer and All-doer (pantopies,\npanergetes, ibid, and Sup. 139); the All-wise and All-controlling\n(pankrates, Sup. 813); the Just and the Executor of justice (dikephoros,\nAgamem. 525); true and incapable of falsehood (Prom. 1031);\n\n     pseudegorein gar ouk epistatai stoma\n     to dion, alla pan epos telei,--\n\nholy (agnos, Sup. 650); merciful (preumenes, ibid. 139); the God\nespecially of the suppliant and the stranger (Supplices, passim); the\nmost high and perfect One (teleion upsiston, Eumen. 28); King of kings,\nof the happy, most happy, of the perfect, most perfect power, blessed\nZeus (Sup. 522).[172] Such are some of the titles by which Zeus is most\nfrequently addressed; such the attributes commonly ascribed to him in\nAEschylus.\n\nSophocles was the great master who carried Greek tragedy to its highest\nperfection. Only seven out of more than a hundred of his tragedies have\ncome down to us. There are passages cited by Justin Martyr, Clemens\nAlexandrinus, and others which are not found in those tragedies now\nextant. The most famous and extensively quoted passage is given by\nCudworth.[173]\n\n     Eis tais aletheiaisin, eis estin Theos,\n     Os ouranon t' eteuxe kai gaian makran,\n     Poniou te karapon oidma, kanemon bian, k. t. l.[174]\n\nThis \"one only God\" is Zeus, who is the God of justice, and reigns\nsupreme:\n\n     \"Still in yon starry heaven supreme,\n     Jove, all-beholding, all-directing, dwells--\n     To him commit thy vengeance.\"--\"Electra,\" p. 174 sqq.\n\nThis description of the unsleeping, undecaying power and dominion of\nZeus is worthy of some Hebrew prophet--\n\n     \"Spurning the power of age, enthroned in might,\n     Thou dwell'st mid heaven's broad light;\n     This was in ages past thy firm decree,\n     Is now, and shall forever be:\n     That none of mortal race on earth shall know\n     A life of joy serene, a course unmarked by woe.\"\n\n     \"Antigone,\" pp. 606-614.[175]\n\n[Footnote 172: Tyler, \"Theology of Greek Poets,\" pp. 213, 214.]\n\n[Footnote 173: \"Intellectual Syst.,\" vol. i. p. 483.]\n\n[Footnote 174: \"There is, in truth, one only God, who made heaven and\nearth, the sea, air, and winds,\" etc.]\n\n[Footnote 175: \"Theology of Greek Poets,\" p. 322.]\n\nWhether we regard the poets as the principal theological teachers of the\nancient Greeks, or as the compilers, systematizers, and artistic\nembellishers of the theological traditions and myths which were afloat\nin the primitive Hellenic families, we can not resist the conclusion\nthat, for the masses of the people Zeus was the Supreme God, \"the God of\ngods\" as Plato calls him. Whilst all other deities in Greece are more or\nless local and tribal gods, Zeus was known in every village and to every\nclan. \"He is at home on Ida,[176] on Olympus, at Dodona.[177] While\nPoseidon drew to himself the AEolian family, Apollo the Dorian, Athene\nthe Ionian, there was one powerful God for all the sons of\nHellen--Dorians, AEolians, Ionians, Achaeans, viz., the Panhellenic\nZeus.\"[178] Zeus was the name invoked in their solemn nuncupations of\nvows--\n\n     \"O Zeus, father, O Zeus, king.\"\n\nIn moments of deepest sorrow, of immediate urgency and need, of greatest\nstress and danger, they had recourse to Zeus.\n\n     \"Courage, courage, my child!\n     There is still in heaven the great Zeus;\n     He watches over all things, and he rules.\n     Commit thy exceeding bitter griefs to him,\n     And be not angry against thine enemies,\n     Nor forget them.\"[179]\n\n[Footnote 176: \"Iliad,\" bk. iii. 324.]\n\n[Footnote 177: Bk. xvi. 268.]\n\n[Footnote 178: Mueller, p. 452.]\n\n[Footnote 179: Sophocles, \"Electra,\" v. 188.]\n\nHe was supplicated, as the God who reigns on high, in the prayer of the\nAthenian--\n\n     \"Rain, rain, O dear Zeus, on the land of the Athenians and on their\n     fields.\"\n\nIt has been urged that, as Zeus means the sky, therefore he is no more\nthan the deep concave of heaven personified and deified, and that\nconsequently Zeus is not the true, the only God. This argument is only\nequalled in feebleness by that of the materialist, who argues that\n\"spiritus\" means simply breath, therefore the breath is the soul. Even\nif the Greeks remembered that, originally, Zeus meant the sky, that\nwould have no more perplexed their minds than the remembrance that\n\"thymos\"--mind--meant originally blast. \"The fathers of Greek theology\ngave to that Supreme Intelligence, which they instinctively recognized\nas above and ruling over the universe, the name of Zeus; but in doing\nso, they knew well that by Zeus they meant more than the sky. The\nunfathomable depth, the everlasting calm of the ethereal sky was to\ntheir minds an image of that Infinite Presence which overshadows all,\nand looks down on all. As the question perpetually recurred to their\nminds, 'Where is he who abideth forever?' they lifted up their eyes, and\nsaw, as they thought, beyond sun, and moon, and stars, and all which\nchanges, and will change, the clear blue sky, the boundless firmament of\nheaven. That never changed, that was always the same. The clouds and\nstorms rolled far below it, and all the bustle of this noisy world; but\nthere the sky was still, as bright and calm as ever. The Almighty Father\nmust be there, unchangeable in the unchangeable heaven; bright, and\npure, and boundless like the heavens, and like the heavens, too, afar\noff.\"[180] So they named him after the sky, _Zeus_, the God who lives in\nthe clear heaven--the heavenly Father.\n\n[Footnote 180: Kingsley, \"Good News from God,\" p. 237, Am. ed.]\n\nThe high and brilliant sky has, in many languages and many religions,\nbeen regarded as the dwelling-place of God. Indeed, to all of us in\nChristian times \"God is above;\" he is \"the God of heaven;\" \"his throne\nis in the heavens;\" \"he reigns on high.\" Now, without doing any violence\nto thought, the name of the abode might be transferred to him who dwells\nin heaven. So that in our own language \"heaven\" may still be used as a\nsynonym for \"God.\" The prodigal son is still represented as saying, I\nhave sinned against \"_heaven_.\" And a Christian poet has taught us to\nsing--\n\n     \"High _heaven_, that heard my solemn vow,\n     That vow renewed shall daily hear,\" etc.\n\nWhenever, therefore, we find the name of heaven thus used to designate\nalso the Deity, we must bear in mind that those by whom it was\noriginally employed were simply transferring that name from an object\nvisible to the eye of sense to another object perceived by the eye of\nreason. They who at first called God \"_Heaven_\" had some conception\nwithin them they wished to name--the growing image of a God, and they\nfixed upon the vastest, grandest, purest object in nature, the deep blue\nconcave of heaven, overshadowing all, and embracing all, as the symbol\nof the Deity. Those who at a later period called heaven \"_God_\" had\nforgotten that they were predicating of heaven something more which was\nvastly higher than the heaven.[181]\n\n[Footnote 181: See \"Science of Language,\" p. 457.]\n\nNotwithstanding, then, that the instinctive, native faith of humanity in\nthe existence of one supreme God was overlaid and almost buried beneath\nthe rank and luxuriant vegetation of Grecian mythology, we can still\ncatch glimpses here and there of the solid trunk of native faith, around\nwhich this parasitic growth of fancy is entwined. Above all the\nphantasmata of gods and goddesses who descended to the plains of Troy,\nand mingled in the din and strife of battle, we can recognize an\novershadowing, all-embracing Power and Providence that dwells on high,\nwhich never descends into the battle-field, and is never seen by mortal\neyes--_the Universal King and Father,--the \"God of gods_.\"\n\nBesides the direct evidence, which is furnished by the poets and\nmythologists, of the presence of this universal faith in \"_the heavenly\nFather_,\" there is also a large amount of collateral testimony that this\nidea of one Supreme God was generally entertained by the Greek pagans,\nwhether learned or unlearned.[182] Dio Chrysostomus says that \"all the\npoets call the first and greatest God the Father, universally, of all\nrational kind, as also the King thereof. Agreeably with which doctrine\nof the poets do mankind erect altars to Jupiter-King (Dios Basileos) and\nhesitate not to call him Father in their devotions\" (Orat. xxxvi.). And\nMaximus Tyrius declares that both the learned and the unlearned\nthroughout the pagan world universally agree in this; that there is one\nSupreme God, the Father of gods and men. \"If,\" says he, \"there were a\nmeeting called of all the several trades and professions,... and all\nwere required to declare their sense concerning God, do you think that\nthe painter would say one thing, the sculptor another, the poet another,\nand the philosopher another? No; nor the Scythian neither, nor the\nGreek, nor the hyperborean. In regard to other things, we find men\nspeaking discordantly one to another, all men, as it were, differing\nfrom all men... Nevertheless, on this subject, you may find universally\nthroughout the world one agreeing law and opinion; _that there is one\nGod, the King and Father of all, and many gods, the sons of God,\nco-reigners together with God_\"(Diss. i. p. 450).\n\n[Footnote 182: Cudworth, vol. i. pp. 593, 594.]\n\nFrom the poets we now pass to the philosophers. The former we have\nregarded as reflecting the traditional beliefs of the unreasoning\nmultitude. The philosophers unquestionably represent the reflective\nspirit, the speculative thought, of the educated classes of Greek\nsociety. Turning to the writings of the philosophers, we may therefore\nreasonably expect that, instead of the dim, undefined, and nebulous form\nin which the religious sentiment revealed itself amongst the\nunreflecting portions of the Greek populations, we shall find their\ntheological ideas distinctly and articulately expressed, and that we\nshall consequently be able to determine their religious opinions with\nconsiderable accuracy.\n\nNow that Thales, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Anaxagoras, Empedocles,\nSocrates, Plato, and Aristotle were all believers in the existence of\none supreme, uncreated, eternal God, has been, we think, clearly shown\nby Cudworth.[183]\n\n[Footnote 183: Vol. i. pp. 491-554.]\n\nIn subsequent chapters on \"_the Philosophers of Athens_,\" we shall enter\nmore fully into the discussion of this question. Meantime we assume\nthat, with few exceptions, the Greek philosophers were \"genuine\nTheists.\"\n\nThe point, however, with which we are now concerned is, _that whilst\nthey believed in one supreme, uncreated, eternal God, they at the same\ntime recognized the existence of a plurality of generated deities who\nowe their existence to the power and will of the Supreme God, and who,\nas the agents and ministers of His universal providence, preside over\ndifferent departments of the created universe_. They are at once\nMonotheists and Polytheists--believers in \"one God\" and \"many gods.\"\nThis is a peculiarity, an anomaly which challenges our attention, and\ndemands an explanation, if we would vindicate for these philosophers a\nrational Theism.\n\nNow that there can be but one infinite and absolutely perfect Being--one\nsupreme, uncreated, eternal God--is self-evident; therefore a\nmultiplicity of such gods is a contradiction and an impossibility. The\nearly philosophers knew this as well as the modern. The Deity, in order\nto be Deity, must be one and not many: must be perfect or nothing. If,\ntherefore, we would do justice to these old Greeks, we must inquire what\nexplanations they have offered in regard to \"the many gods\" of which\nthey speak. We must ascertain whether they regarded these \"gods\" as\ncreated or uncreated beings, dependent or independent, temporal or\neternal We must inquire in what sense the term \"god\" is applied to these\nlesser divinities,--whether it is not applied in an accommodated and\ntherefore allowable sense, as in the sacred Scriptures it is applied to\nkings and magistrates, and those who are appointed by God as the\nteachers and rulers of men. \"_They are called gods_ to whom the word of\nGod came.\"[184] And if it shall be found that all the gods of which they\nspeak, save _one_, are \"generated deities\"--dependent beings--creatures\nand subjects of the one eternal King and Father, and that the name of\n\"god\" is applied to them in an accommodated sense, then we have\nvindicated for the old Greek philosophers a consistent and rational\nTheism. In what relation, then, do the philosophers place \"_the gods_\"\nto the one Supreme Being?\n\n_Thales_, one of the most ancient of the Greek philosophers, taught the\nexistence of a plurality of gods, as is evident from that saying of his,\npreserved by Diogenes Laertius, \"The world has life, and is full of\ngods.\"[185] At the same time he asserts his belief in one supreme,\nuncreated Deity; \"God is the oldest of all things, because he is unmade,\nor ungenerated.\"[186] All the other gods must therefore have been\n\"generated deities,\" since there is but one unmade God, one only that\nhad \"no beginning.\"[187]\n\n[Footnote 184: See John x. 35.]\n\n[Footnote 185: \"Lives,\" bk. i.; see also Aristotle's \"De Anima,\" bk. i.\nch. viii. panta Thion plere.]\n\n[Footnote 186: \"Lives,\" bk. i.]\n\n[Footnote 187: \"Lives,\" bk. i.]\n\n_Xenophanes_ was also an assertor of many gods, and one God; but his one\nGod is unquestionably supreme. \"There is one God, the greatest amongst\ngods and men;\" or, \"God is one, the greatest amongst gods and men.\"[188]\n\n_Empedocles_ also believed in one Supreme God, who \"is wholly and\nperfectly mind, ineffable, holy, with rapid and swift-glancing thought\npervading the whole world,\" and from whom all things else are\nderived,--\"all things that are upon the earth, and in the air and water,\nmay be truly called the works of God, who ruleth over the world, out of\nwhom, according to Empedocles, proceed all things, plants, men, beasts,\nand _gods_.\"[189] The minor deities are therefore _made_ by God. It will\nnot be denied that _Socrates_ was a devout and earnest Theist. He taught\nthat \"there is a Being whose eye pierces throughout all nature, and\nwhose ear is open to every sound; extending through all time, extended\nto all places; and whose bounty and care can know no other bounds than\nthose fixed by his own creation.\"[190] And yet he also recognized the\nexistence of a plurality of gods, and in his last moments expressed his\nbelief that \"it is lawful and right to pray to the gods that his\ndeparture hence may be happy.\"[191] We see, however, in his words\naddressed to Euthydemus, a marked distinction between these subordinate\ndeities and \"Him who raised this whole universe, and still upholds the\nmighty frame, who perfected every part of it in beauty and in goodness,\nsuffering none of these parts to decay through age, but renewing them\ndaily with unfading vigor;... even he, _the Supreme God_, still holds\nhimself invisible, and it is only in his works that we are capable of\nadmiring him.\"[192]\n\n[Footnote 188: Clem. Alex., \"Stromat.\" bk. v.]\n\n[Footnote 189: Aristotle, \"De Mundo,\" ch. vi.]\n\n[Footnote 190: Xenophon's \"Memorabilia,\" i. 4.]\n\n[Footnote 191: \"Phaedo,\" Sec. 152.]\n\n[Footnote 192: \"Memorabilia,\" iv. 3.]\n\nIt were needless to attempt the proof that _Plato_ believed in one\nSupreme God, and _only_ one. This one Being is, with him, \"the first\nGod;\" \"the greatest of the gods;\" \"the God over all;\" \"the sole\nPrinciple of the universe.\" He is \"the Immutable;\" \"the All-perfect;\"\n\"the eternal Being.\" He is \"the Architect of the world; \"the Maker of\nthe universe; the Father of gods and men; the sovereign Mind which\norders all things, and passes through all things; the sole Monarch and\nRuler of the world.[193]\n\nAnd yet remarkable as these expressions are, sounding, as they do, so\nlike the language of inspiration,[194] there can be no doubt that Plato\nwas also a sincere believer in a plurality of gods, of which, indeed,\nany one may assure himself by reading the _tenth_ book of \"the Laws.\"\n\n[Footnote 193: See chap. xi.]\n\n[Footnote 194: Some writers have supposed that Plato must have had\naccess through some medium to \"the Oracles of God.\" See Butler, vol. ii.\np. 41.]\n\nAnd, now that we have in Plato the culmination of Grecian speculative\nthought, we may learn from him the mature and final judgment of the\nancients in regard to the gods of pagan mythology. We open the _Timaeus_,\nand here we find his views most definitely expressed. After giving an\naccount of the \"generation\" of the sun, and moon, and planets, which are\nby him designated as \"visible gods,\" he then proceeds \"to speak\nconcerning the other divinities:\" \"We must on this subject assent to\nthose who in former times have spoken thereon; who were, as they said,\nthe offspring of the gods, and who doubtless were well acquainted with\ntheir own ancestors..... Let then the genealogy of the gods be, and be\nacknowledged to be, that which they deliver. Of Earth and Heaven the\nchildren were Oceanus and Tethys; and of these the children were\nPhorcys, and Kronos, and Rhea, and all that followed these; and from\nthese were born Zeus and Hera, and those who are regarded as brothers\nand sisters of these, and others their offspring.\n\n\"When, then, _all the gods were brought into existence_, both those\nwhich move around in manifest courses [the stars and planets], and those\nwhich appear when it pleases them [the mythological deities], the\nCreator of the Universe thus addressed them: 'Gods, and sons of gods, of\nwhom I am the father and the author, produced by me, ye are\nindestructible because I will.... Now inasmuch as you have been\n_generated_, you are hence _not_ immortal, nor wholly indissoluble; yet\nyou shall never be dissolved nor become subject to the fatality of\ndeath, because _so I have willed_.... Learn, therefore, my commands.\nThree races of mortals yet remain to be created. Unless these be\ncreated, the universe will be imperfect, for it will not contain within\nit every kind of animal.... In order that these mortal creatures may be,\nand that this world may be really a cosmos, do you apply yourselves to\nthe creation of animals, imitating the exercises of my power in\n_creating_ you.'\"[195]\n\n[Footnote 195: \"Timaeus,\" ch. xv.]\n\nHere, then, we see that Plato carefully distinguishes between the sole\nEternal Author of the universe, on one hand, and the \"souls,\" vital and\nintelligent, which he attaches to the heavenly orbs, and diffuses\nthrough all nature, on the other. These subordinate powers or agents are\nall created, \"_generated_ deities,\" who owe their continued existence to\nthe _will_ of God; and though intrusted with a sort of deputed creation,\nand a subsequent direction and government of created things, they are\nstill only the _servants_ and the _deputies_ of the Supreme Creator, and\nDirector, and Ruler of all things. These subordinate agents and\nministers employed in the creation and providential government of the\nworld appear, in the estimation of Plato, to have been needed--\n\n1. _To satisfy the demands of the popular faith_, which presented its\nfacts to be explained no less than those of external nature. Plato had\nevidently a great veneration for antiquity, a peculiar regard for\n\"tradition venerable through ancient report,\" and \"doctrines hoary with\nyears.\"[196] He aspired after supernatural light and guidance; he longed\nfor some intercourse with, some communication from, the Deity. And\nwhilst he found many things in the ancient legends which revolted his\nmoral sense, and which his reason rejected, yet the sentiment and the\nlesson which pervades the whole of Grecian mythology, viz., that the\ngods are in ceaseless intercourse with the human race, and if men will\ndo right the gods will protect and help them, was one which commended\nitself to his heart.\n\n[Footnote 196: Ibid., ch. v.]\n\n2. These intermediate agents seem to have been demanded to _satisfy the\ndisposition and tendency which has revealed itself in all systems, of\ninterposing some scale of ascent between the material creation and the\ninfinite Creator_.\n\nThe mechanical theory of the universe has interposed its long series of\nsecondary causes--the qualities, properties, laws, forces of nature; the\nvital theory which attaches a separate \"soul\" to the various parts of\nnature as the cause and intelligent director of its movements. Of these\n\"souls\" or gods, there were different orders and degrees--deified men or\nheroes, aerial, terrestrial, and celestial divinities, ascending from\nnature up to God. And this tendency to supply some scale of ascent\ntowards the Deity, or at least to people the vast territory which seems\nto swell between the world and God, finds some countenance in \"the\nangels and archangels,\" \"the thrones, and dominions, and principalities,\nand powers\" of the Christian scriptures.[197]\n\n3. These inferior ministers also seemed to Plato to _increase the\nstately grandeur and imperial majesty of the Divine government._ They\nswell the retinue of the Deity in his grand \"circuit through the highest\narch of heaven.\"[198] They wait to execute the Divine commands. They are\nthe agents of Divine providence, \"the messengers of God\" to men.\n\n[Footnote 197: \"The gods of the Platonic system answer, in office and\nconception, to the angels of Christian Theology.\"--Butler, vol. i. p.\n225.]\n\n[Footnote 198: \"Phaedrus,\" Sec. 56,7.]\n\n4. And, finally, the host of inferior deities interposed between the\nmaterial sensible world and God seemed to Plato as _needful in order to\nexplain the apparent defects and disorders of sublunary affairs_. Plato\nwas jealous of the Divine honor. \"All good must be ascribed to God, and\nnothing but good. We must find evil, disorder, suffering, in some other\ncause.\"[199] He therefore commits to the junior deities the task of\ncreating animals, and of forming \"the mortal part of man,\" because the\nmortal part is \"possessed of certain dire and necessary passions.\"[200]\n\n[Footnote 199: \"Republic,\" bk. ii. p.18.]\n\n[Footnote 200: \"Timaeus,\" xliv.]\n\nAristotle seems to have regarded the popular polytheism of Greece as a\nperverted relic of a deeper and purer \"Theology\" which he conceives to\nhave been, in all probability, perfected in the distant past, and then\ncomparatively lost. He says--\"The tradition has come down from very\nancient times, being left in a mythical garb to succeeding generations,\nthat these (the heavenly bodies) are gods, and that the Divinity\n_encompasses the whole of nature_. There have been made, however, to\nthese certain fabulous additions for the purpose of winning the belief\nof the multitude, and thus securing their obedience to the laws, and\ntheir co-operation towards advancing the general welfare of the state.\nThese additions have been to the effect that these gods were of the same\nform as men, and even that some of them were in appearance similar to\ncertain others amongst the rest of the animal creation. The wise course,\nhowever, would be for the philosopher to disengage from these traditions\nthe false element, and to embrace that which is true; and the truth lies\nin that portion of this ancient doctrine which regards the first and\ndeepest ground of all existence to be the _Divine_, and this he may\nregard as a divine utterance. In all probability, every art, and\nscience, and philosophy has been over and over again discovered to the\nfarthest extent possible, and then again lost; and we may conceive these\nopinions to have been preserved to us as a sort of fragment of these\nlost philosophers. We see, then, to some extent the relation of the\npopular belief to these ancient opinions.\"[201] This conception of a\ndeep Divine ground of all existence (for the immateriality and unity of\nwhich he elsewhere earnestly contends)[202] is thus regarded by\nAristotle as underlying the popular polytheism of Greece.\n\n[Footnote 201: \"Metaph.,\" xi. 8.]\n\n[Footnote 202: Bk. xi. ch. ii. Sec. 4.]\n\nThe views of the educated and philosophic mind of Greece in regard to\nthe mythological deities may, in conclusion, be thus briefly stated--\n\nI. _They are all created beings_--\"GENERATED DEITIES,\" _who are\ndependent on, and subject to, the will of one supreme God_.\n\nII. _They are the_ AGENTS _employed by God in the creation of, at least\nsome parts of, the universe, and in the movement and direction of the\nentire cosmos; and they are also the_ MINISTERS _and_ MESSENGERS _of\nthat universal providence which he exercises over the human race_.\n\nThese subordinate deities are, 1. the greater parts of the visible\nmundane system animated by intelligent souls, and called \"_sensible\ngods_\"--the sun, the moon, the stars, and even the earth itself, and\nknown by the names Helios, Selena, Kronos, Hermes, etc.\n\n2. Some are _invisible powers_, having peculiar offices and functions\nand presiding over special places provinces and departments of the\nuniverse;--one ruling in the heavens (Zeus), another in the air (Juno),\nanother in the sea (Neptune), another in the subterranean regions\n(Pluto); one god presiding over learning and wisdom (Minerva), another\nover poetry, music, and religion (Apollo), another over justice and\npolitical order (Themis), another over war (Mars), another over corn\n(Ceres), and another the vine (Bacchus).\n\n3. Others, again, are _ethereal_ and _aerial_ beings, who have the\nguardianship of individual persons and things, and are called _demons,\ngenii_, and _lares_; superior indeed to men, but inferior to the gods\nabove named.\n\n\"Wherefore, since there were no other gods among the Pagans besides\nthose above enumerated, unless their images, statues, and symbols should\nbe accounted such (because they were also sometimes abusively called\n'gods'), which could not be supposed by them to have been unmade or\nwithout beginning, they being the workmanship of their own hands, we\nconclude, universally, that all that multiplicity of Pagan gods which\nmake so great a show and noise was really either nothing but several\nnames and notions of one supreme Deity, according to his different\nmanifestations, gifts, and effects upon the world personated, or else\nmany inferior understanding beings, generated or created by one supreme:\nso that one unmade, self-existent Deity, and no more, was acknowledged\nby the more intelligent Pagans, and, consequently, the Pagan Polytheism\n(or idolatry) consisted not in worshipping a multiplicity of unmade\nminds, deities, and creators, self-existent from eternity, and\nindependent upon one Supreme, but in mingling and blending some way or\nother, unduly, creature-worship with the worship of the Creator.\"[203]\n\n[Footnote 203: Cudworth, \"Intellectual System,\" vol. i. p. 311.]\n\nThat the heathen regard the one Supreme Being as the first and chief\nobject of worship is evident from the apologies which they offered for\nworshipping, besides Him, many inferior divinities.\n\n1. They claimed to worship them _only_ as inferior beings, and that\ntherefore they were not guilty of giving them that honor which belonged\nto the Supreme. They claimed to worship the supreme God incomparably\nabove all. 2. That this honor which is bestowed upon the inferior\ndivinities does ultimately redound to the supreme God, and aggrandize\nhis state and majesty, they being all his ministers and attendants. 3.\nThat as demons are mediators between the celestial gods and men, so\nthose celestial gods are also mediators between men and the supreme God,\nand, as it were, convenient steps by which we ought with reverence to\napproach him. 4. That demons or angels being appointed to preside over\nkingdoms, cities, and persons, and being many ways benefactors to us,\nthanks ought to be returned to them by sacrifice. 5. Lastly, that it can\nnot be thought that the Supreme Being will envy those inferior beings\nthat worship or honor which is bestowed upon them; nor suspect that any\nof these inferior deities will factiously go about to set up themselves\nagainst the Supreme God.\n\nThe Pagans, furthermore, apologized for worshipping God in images,\nstatues, and symbols, on the ground that these were only schetically\nworshipped by them, the honor passing from them to the prototype. And\nsince we live in bodies, and can scarcely, conceive of any thing without\nhaving some image or phantasm, we may therefore be indulged in this\ninfirmity of human nature (at least in the vulgar) to worship God under\na corporeal image, as a means of preventing men from falling into\nAtheism.\n\nTo the Christian conscience the above reasons assigned furnish no real\njustification of Polytheism and Idolatry; but they are certainly a tacit\nconfession of their belief in the one Supreme God, and their conviction\nthat, notwithstanding their idolatry, He only ought to be worshipped.\nThe heathen polytheists are therefore justly condemned in Scripture, and\npronounced to be \"_inexcusable_.\" They had the knowledge of the true\nGod--\" they _knew God_\" and yet \"they glorified him not as God.\" \"They\nchanged the glory of the incorruptible God into a likeness of\ncorruptible man.\" And, finally, they ended in \"worshipping and serving\nthe creature _more_ than the Creator.\"[204]\n\n[Footnote 204: Romans i. 21, 25.]\n\nIt can not, then, with justice be denied that the Athenians had some\nknowledge of the true God, and some just and worthy conceptions of his\ncharacter. It is equally certain that a powerful and influential\nreligious sentiment pervaded the Athenian mind. Their extreme\n\"carefulness in religion\" must be conceded by us, and, in some sense,\ncommended by us, as it was by Paul in his address on Mars' Hill. At the\nsame time it must also be admitted and deplored that the purer theology\nof primitive times was corrupted by offensive legends, and encrusted by\npolluting myths, though not utterly defaced.[205] The Homeric gods were\nfor the most part idealized, human personalities, with all the passions\nand weaknesses of humanity. They had their favorites and their enemies;\nsometimes they fought in one camp, sometimes in another. They were\nsusceptible of hatred, jealousy, sensual passion. It would be strange\nindeed if their worshippers were not like unto them. The conduct of the\nHomeric heroes was, however, better than their creed. And there is this\nstrange incongruity and inconsistency in the conduct of the Homeric\ngods,--they punish mortals for crimes of which they themselves are\nguilty, and reward virtues in men which they do not themselves always\npractise. \"They punish with especial severity social and political\ncrimes, such as perjury (Iliad, iii. 279), oppression of the poor (Od.\nxvii. 475), and unjust judgment in courts of justice (Iliad, xvi. 386).\"\nJupiter is the god of justice, and of the domestic hearth; he is the\nprotector of the exile, the avenger of the poor, and the vigilant\nguardian of hospitality. \"And with all the imperfections of society,\ngovernment, and religion, the poem presents a remarkable picture of\nprimitive simplicity, chastity, justice, and practical piety, under the\nthree-fold influence of moral feeling, mutual respect, and fear of the\ndivine displeasure; such, at least, are the motives to which Telemachus\nmakes his appeal when he endeavors to rouse the assembled people of\nIthaca to the performance of their duty (Od. ii. 64).\"[206]\n\n[Footnote 205: \"There was always a double current of religious ideas in\nGreece; one spiritualist, the other tainted with impure\nlegends.\"--Pressense.]\n\n[Footnote 206: Tyler, \"Theology of Greek Poets,\" pp. 167, 168;\nPressense, \"Religion before Christ,\" p. 77.]\n\nThe influence of the religious dramas of AEschylus and Sophocles on the\nAthenian mind must not be overlooked. No writer of pagan antiquity made\nthe voice of conscience speak with the same power and authority that\nAEschylus did. \"Crime,\" he says, \"never dies without posterity.\" \"Blood\nthat has been shed congeals on the ground, crying out for an avenger.\"\nThe old poet made himself the echo of what he called \"the lyreless hymn\nof the Furies,\" who, with him, represented severe Justice striking the\nguilty when his hour comes, and giving warning beforehand by the terrors\nwhich haunt him. His dramas are characterized by deep religious feeling.\nReverence for the gods, the recognition of an inflexible moral order,\nresignation to the decisions of Heaven, an abiding presentiment of a\nfuture state of reward and punishment, are strikingly predominant.\n\nWhilst AEschylus reveals to us the sombre, terror-stricken side of\nconscience, Sophocles shows us the divine and luminous side. No one has\never spoken with nobler eloquence than he of moral obligation--of this\nimmortal, inflexible law, in which dwells a God that never grows old--\n\n        \"Oh be the lot forever mine\n            Unsullied to maintain,\n         In act and word, with awe divine,\n            What potent laws ordain.\n\n     \"Laws spring from purer realms above:\n      Their father is the Olympian Jove.\n      Ne'er shall oblivion veil their front sublime,\n      Th' indwelling god is great, nor fears the wastes of time.\"[207]\n\nThe religious inspiration that animates Sophocles breaks out with\nincomparable beauty in the last words of oedipus, when the old banished\nking sees through the darkness of death a mysterious light dawn, which\nillumines his blind eyes, and which brings to him the assurance of a\nblessed immortality.[208]\n\n[Footnote 207: \"oedipus Tyran.,\" pp. 863-872.]\n\n[Footnote 208: Pressense, \"Religion before Christ,\" pp. 85-87.]\n\nSuch a theology could not have been utterly powerless. The influence of\ntruth, in every measure and degree, must be salutary, and especially of\ntruth in relation to God, to duty, and to immortality. The religion of\nthe Athenians must have had some wholesome and conserving influence of\nthe social and political life of Athens.[209] Those who resign the\ngovernment of this lower world almost exclusively to Satan, may see, in\nthe religion of the Greeks, a simple creation of Satanic powers. But he\nwho believes that the entire progress of humanity has been under the\ncontrol and direction of a benignant Providence, must suppose that, in\nthe purposes of God, even Ethnicism has fulfilled some end, or it would\nnot have been permitted to live. God has \"_never left himself without a\nwitness_\" in any nation under heaven. And some preparatory office has\nbeen fulfilled by Heathenism which, at least, repealed the _want_, and\nprepared the mind for, the advent of Christianity.\n\n[Footnote 209: The practice, so common with some theological writers, of\ndrawing dark pictures of heathenism, in which not one luminous spot is\nvisible, in order to exalt the revelations given to the Jews, is\nexceedingly unfortunate, and highly reprehensible. It is unfortunate,\nbecause the skeptical scholar knows that there were some elements of\ntruth and excellence, and even of grandeur, in the religion and\ncivilization of the republics of Greece and Rome; and it is\nreprehensible, because it is a one-sided and unjust procedure, in so far\nas it withholds part of the truth. This species of argument is a\ntwo-edged sword which cuts both ways. The prevalence of murder, and\nslavery, and treachery, and polygamy, in Greece and Rome, is no more a\nproof that \"the religions of the pagan nations were destructive of\nmorality\" (Watson, vol. i. p. 59), than the polygamy of the Hebrews, the\nfalsehoods and impositions of Mediaeval Christianity, the persecutions\nand martyrdoms of Catholic Christianity, the oppressions and wrongs of\nChristian England, and the slavery of Protestant America, are proofs\nthat the Christian religion is \"destructive of morality.\" What a fearful\npicture of the history of Christian nations might be drawn to-day, if\nall the lines of light, and goodness, and charity were left out, and the\ncrimes, and wrongs, and cruelties of the Christian nations were alone\nexhibited!\n\nHow much more convincing a proof of the truth of Christianity to find in\nthe religions of the ancient world a latent sympathy with, and an\nunconscious preparation for, the religion of Christ. \"The history of\nreligions of human origin is the most striking evidence of the agreement\nof revealed religion with the soul of man--for each of these forms of\nworship is the expression of the wants of conscience, its eternal thirst\nfor pardon and restoration--rather let us say, its thirst for\nGod.\"--Pressense, p. 6.]\n\nThe religion of the Athenians was unable to deliver them from the guilt\nof sin, redeem them from its power, and make them pure and holy. It gave\nthe Athenian no victory over himself, and, practically, brought him no\nnearer to the living God. But it awakened and educated the conscience,\nit developed more fully the sense of sin and guilt, and it made man\nconscious of his inability to save himself from sin and guilt; and \"the\nday that humanity awakens to the want of something more than mere\nembellishment and culture, that day it feels the need of being saved and\nrestored from the consequences of sin\" by a higher power. AEsthetic taste\nhad found its fullest gratification in Athens; poetry, sculpture,\narchitecture, had been carried to the highest perfection; a noble\ncivilization had been reached; but \"the need of something deeper and\ntruer was written on the very stones.\" The highest consummation of\nPaganism was an altar to \"the unknown God,\" the knowledge of whom it\nneeded, as the source of purity and peace.\n\nThe strength and the weakness of Grecian mythology consisted in the\ncontradictory character of its divinities. It was a strange blending of\nthe natural and the supernatural, the human and the divine. Zeus, the\neternal Father,--the immortal King, whose will is sovereign, and whose\npower is invincible,--the All-seeing Jove, has some of the weaknesses\nand passions of humanity. God and man are thus, in some mysterious way,\nunited. And here that deepest longing of the human heart is met--the\nunconquerable desire to bring God nearer to the human apprehension, and\ncloser to the human heart. Hence the hold which Polytheism had upon the\nGrecian mind. But in this human aspect was also found its weakness, for\nwhen philosophic thought is brought into contact with, and permitted\ncritically to test mythology, it dethrones the false gods. The age of\nspontaneous religious sentiment must necessarily be succeeded by the age\nof reflective thought. Popular theological faiths must be placed in the\nhot crucible of dialectic analysis, that the false and the frivolous may\nbe separated from the pure and the true. The reason of man demands to be\nsatisfied, as well as the heart. Faith in God must have a logical basis,\nit must be grounded on demonstration and proof. Or, at any rate, the\nquestion must be answered, _whether God is cognizable by human reason_?\nIf this can be achieved, then a deeper foundation is laid in the mind of\nhumanity, upon which Christianity can rear its higher and nobler truths.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER V.\n\nTHE UNKNOWN GOD.\n\n\n\"As I passed by, and beheld your sacred objects, I found an altar with\nthis inscription, _To the Unknown God_.\"--ST. PAUL.\n\n\"That which can be _known_ of God is manifested in their hearts, God\nhimself having shown it to them\" [the heathen nations].--ST. PAUL.\n\nHaving now reached our first landing-place, from whence we may survey\nthe fields that we have traversed, it may be well to set down in\ndefinite propositions the results we have attained. We may then carry\nthem forward, as torches, to illuminate the path of future and still\nprofounder inquiries.\n\nThe principles we have assumed as the only adequate and legitimate\ninterpretation of the facts of religious history, and which an extended\nstudy of the most fully-developed religious system of the ancient world\nconfirms, may be thus announced:\n\nI. A religious nature and destination appertain to man, so that the\npurposes of his existence and the perfection of his being can only be\nsecured in and through religion.\n\nII. The idea of God as the unconditioned Cause, the infinite Mind, the\npersonal Lord and Lawgiver, and the consciousness of dependence upon and\nobligation to God, are the fundamental principles of all religion.\n\nIII. Inasmuch as man is a religious being, the instincts and emotions of\nhis nature constraining him to worship, there must also be implanted in\nhis rational nature some original _a priori_ ideas or laws of thought\nwhich furnish the necessary cognition of the object of worship; that is,\nsome native, spontaneous cognition of God.\n\nA mere blind impulse would not be adequate to guide man to the true end\nand perfection of his being without rational ideas; a tendency or\nappetency, without a revealed object, would be the mockery and misery of\nhis nature--an \"ignis fatuus\" perpetually alluring and forever deceiving\nman.\n\nThat man has a native, spontaneous apperception of a God, in the true\nimport of that sacred name, has been denied by men of totally opposite\nschools and tendencies of thought--by the Idealist and the Materialist;\nby the Theologian and the Atheist. Though differing essentially in their\ngeneral principles and method, they are agreed in asserting that God is\nabsolutely \"_the unknown_;\" and that, so far as reason and logic are\nconcerned, man can not attain to any knowledge of the first principles\nand causes of the universe, and, consequently, can not determine whether\nthe first principle or principles be intelligent or unintelligent,\npersonal or impersonal, finite or infinite, one or many righteous or\nnon-righteous, evil or good.\n\nThe various opponents of the doctrine that God can be cognized by human\nreason may be classified as follows: I. _Those who assert that all human\nknowledge is necessarily confined to the observation and classification\nof phenomena in their orders of co-existence, succession, and\nresemblance_. Man has no faculty for cognizing substances, causes,\nforces, reasons, first principles--no power by which he can _know_ God.\nThis class may be again subdivided into--\n\n1. Those who limit all knowledge to the observation and classification\nof _mental_ phenomena (_e. g_., Idealists like J. S. Mill).\n\n2. Those who limit all knowledge to the observation and classification\nof _material_ phenomena (_e. g_., Materialists like Comte).\n\nII. _The second class comprises all who admit that philosophic knowledge\nis the knowledge of effects as dependent on causes, and of qualities as\ninherent in substances; but at the same time assert that \"all knowledge\nis of the phenomenal_.\" Philosophy can never attain to a positive\nknowledge of the First Cause. Of existence, absolutely and in itself, we\nknow nothing. The infinite can not by us be comprehended, conceived, or\nthought. _Faith_ is the organ by which we apprehend what is beyond\nknowledge. We believe in the existence of God, but we can not _know_\nGod. This class, also, may be again subdivided into--\n\n1. Those who affirm that our idea of the Infinite First Cause is\ngrounded on an _intuitional_ or subjective faith, necessitated by an\n\"impotence of thought\"--that is, by a mental inability to conceive an\nabsolute limitation or an infinite illimitation, an absolute\ncommencement or an infinite non-commencement. Both contradictory\nopposites are equally incomprehensible and inconceivable to us; and yet,\nthough unable to view either as possible, we are forced by a higher\nlaw--the \"Law of Excluded Middle\"--to admit that one, and only one, is\nnecessary (_e. g_., Hamilton and Mansel).\n\n2. Those who assert that our idea of God rests solely on an _historical_\nor objective faith in testimony--the testimony of Scripture, which\nassures us that, in the course of history, God has manifested his\nexistence in an objective manner to the senses, and given verbal\ncommunications of his character and will to men; human reason being\nutterly incapacitated by the fall, and the consequent depravity of man,\nto attain any knowledge of the unity, spirituality, and righteousness of\nGod (_e. g_., Watson, and Dogmatic Theologians generally).\n\nIt will thus be manifest that the great question, the central and vital\nquestion which demands a thorough and searching consideration, is the\nfollowing, to wit: _Is God cognizable by human reason_? Can man attain\nto a positive cognition of God--can he _know_ God; or is all our\nsupposed knowledge \"a learned ignorance,\"[210] an unreasoning faith? We\nventure to answer this question in the affirmative. Human reason is now\nadequate to the cognition of God; it is able, with the fullest\nconfidence, to affirm the being of a God, and, in some degree, to\ndetermine his character. The parties and schools above referred to\nanswer this question in the negative form. Whether Theologians or\nAtheists, they are singularly agreed in denying to human reason all\npossibility of _knowing_ God.\n\n[Footnote 210: Hamilton's \"Philosophy,\" p. 512.]\n\nBefore entering upon the discussion of the negative positions enumerated\nin the above classification, it may be important we should state our own\nposition explicitly, and exhibit what we regard as the true doctrine of\nthe genesis of the idea of God in the human intelligence. The real\nquestion at issue will then stand out in clear relief, and precision\nwill be given to the entire discussion.\n\n(i.) _We hold that the idea of God is a common phenomenon of the\nuniversal human intelligence_. It is found in all minds where reason has\nhad its normal and healthy development; and no race of men has ever been\nfound utterly destitute of the idea of God. The proof of this position\nhas already been furnished in chap, ii.,[211] and needs not be re-stated\nhere. We have simply to remark that the appeal which is made by Locke\nand others of the sensational school to the experiences of infants,\nidiots, the deaf and dumb, or, indeed, any cases wherein the proper\nconditions for the normal development of reason are wanting, are utterly\nirrelevant to the question. The acorn contains within itself the\nrudimental germ of the future oak, but its mature and perfect\ndevelopment depends on the exterior conditions of moisture, light, and\nheat. By these exterior conditions it may be rendered luxuriant in its\ngrowth, or it may be stunted in its growth. It may barely exist under\none class of conditions; it may be distorted and perverted, or it may\nperish utterly under another. And so in the idiotic mind the ideas of\nreason may be wanting, or they may be imprisoned by impervious walls of\ncerebral malformation. In the infant mind the development of reason is\nyet in an incipient stage. The idea of God is immanent to the infant\nthought, but the infant thought is not yet matured. The deaf and dumb\nare certainly not in that full and normal correlation to the world of\nsense which is a necessary condition of the development of reason.\nLanguage, the great vehiculum and instrument of thought, is wanting, and\nreason can not develop itself without words. \"Words without thought are\ndead sounds, _thoughts without words are nothing_. The word is the\nthought incarnate.\"[212] Under proper and normal conditions, the idea of\nGod is the natural and necessary form in which human thought must be\ndeveloped. And, with these explanations, we repeat our affirmation that\nthe idea of God is a common phenomenon of the universal human\nintelligence.\n\n[Footnote 211: Pp. 89,90.]\n\n[Footnote 212: Mueller, \"Science of Language,\" p. 384.]\n\n(ii.) _We do not hold that the idea of God, in its completeness, is a\nsimple, direct, and immediate intuition of the reason alone, independent\nof all experience, and all knowledge of the external world_. The idea of\nGod is a complex idea, and not a simple idea. The affirmation, \"God\nexists,\" is a _synthetic_ and _primitive_ judgment spontaneously\ndeveloped in the mind, and developed, too, independent of all reflective\nreasoning. It is a necessary deduction from the facts of the outer world\nof nature and the primary intuitions of the inner world of reason--a\nlogical deduction from the self-evident truths given in sense,\nconsciousness, and reason. \"We do not _perceive_ God, but we _conceive_\nHim upon the faith of this admirable world exposed to view, and upon the\nother world, more admirable still, which we bear in ourselves.\"[213]\nTherefore we do not say that man is born with an \"innate idea\" of God,\nnor with the definite proposition, \"there is a God,\" written upon his\nsoul; but we do say that the mind is pregnant with certain natural\nprinciples, and governed, in its development, by certain necessary laws\nof thought, which determine it, by a _spontaneous logic_, to affirm the\nbeing of a God; and, furthermore, that this judgment may be called\n_innate_ in the sense, that it is the primitive, universal, and\nnecessary development of the human understanding which \"is innate to\nitself and equal to itself in all men.\"[214]\n\n[Footnote 213: Cousin, \"True, Beautiful and Good,\" p.102.]\n\n[Footnote 214: Leibnitz.]\n\nAs the vital and rudimentary germ of the oak is contained in the acorn;\nas it is quickened and excited to activity by the external conditions of\nmoisture, light, and heat, and is fully de developed under the fixed and\ndeterminative laws of vegetable life--so the germs of the idea of God\nare present in the human mind as the intuitions of pure reason\n(_Rational Psychology_); these intuitions are excited to energy by our\nexperiential and historical knowledge of the facts and laws of the\nuniverse (_Phenomenology_); and these facts and intuitions are developed\ninto form by the necessary laws of the intellect (_Nomology_, or\n_Primordial Logic_).\n\nThe _logical demonstration_ of the being of God commences with the\nanalysis of thought. It asks, What are the ideas which exist in the\nhuman intelligence? What are their actual characteristics, and what\ntheir primitive characteristics? What is their origin, and what their\nvalidity? Having, by this process, found that some of our ideas are\nsubjective, and some objective that some are derived from experience,\nand that some can not be derived from experience, but are inherent in\nthe very constitution of the mind itself, as _a priori_ ideas of reason;\nthat these are characterized as self-evident, universal, and necessary\nand that, as laws of thought, they govern the mind in all its\nconceptions of the universe; it has formulated these necessary\njudgments, and presented them as distinct and articulate propositions.\nThese _a priori_, necessary judgments constitute the major premise of\nthe Theistic syllogism, and, in view of the facts of the universe,\nnecessitate the affirmation of the existence of a God as the only valid\nexplanation of the facts.\n\nThe _natural_ or _chronological order_ in which the idea of God is\ndeveloped in the human intelligence, is the reverse process of the\nscientific or logical order, in which the demonstration of the being of\nGod is presented by philosophy; the latter is _reflective_ and\n_analytic_, the former is _spontaneous_ and _synthetic._ The natural\norder commences with the knowledge of the facts of the universe,\nmaterial and mental, as revealed by sensation and experience. In\npresence of these facts of the universe, the _a priori_ ideas of power,\ncause, reason, and end are evoked into consciousness with greater or\nless distinctness; and the judgment, by a natural and spontaneous logic,\nfree from all reflection, and consequently from all possibility of\nerror, affirms a necessary relation between the facts of experience and\nthe _a priori_ ideas of the reason. The result of this involuntary and\nalmost unconscious process of thought is that natural cognition of a God\nfound, with greater or less clearness and definiteness, in all rational\nminds. The _a posteriori_, or empirical knowledge of the phenomena of\nthe universe, in their relations to time and space, constitute the minor\npremise of the Theistic syllogism.\n\nThe Theistic argument is, therefore, necessarily composed of both\nexperiential and _a priori_ elements. An _a posteriori_ element exists\nas a condition of the logical demonstration The rational _a priori_\nelement is, however, the logical basis, the only valid foundation of the\nTheistic demonstration. The facts of the universe alone would never lead\nman to the recognition of a God, if the reason, in presence of these\nfacts, did not enounce certain necessary and universal principles which\nare the logical antecedents, and adequate explanation of the facts. Of\nwhat use would it be to point to the events and changes of the material\nuniverse as proofs of the existence of a _First Cause,_ unless we take\naccount of the universal and necessary truth that \"every change must\nhave an efficient cause;\" that all phenomena are an indication of\n_power_; and that \"there is an ultimate and sufficient reason why all\nthings exist, and are as they are, and not otherwise.\" There would be no\nlogical force in enumerating the facts of order and special adaptation\nwhich literally crowd the universe, as proofs of the existence of an\n_Intelligent Creator_, if the mind did not affirm the necessary\nprinciple that \"facts of order, having a commencement in time, suppose\nmind as their source and exponent.\" There is no logical conclusiveness\nin the assertion of Paley, \"that _experience_ teaches us that a designer\nmust be a person,\" because, as Hume justly remarks, our \"experience\" is\nnarrowed down to a mere point, \"and can not be a rule for a universe;\"\nbut there is an infinitude of force in that dictum of reason, that\n\"intelligence, self-consciousness, and self-determination necessarily\nconstitute personality.\" A multiplicity of different effects, of which\nexperience does not always reveal the connection, would not conduct to a\nsingle cause and to _one_ God, but rather to a plurality of causes and a\nplurality of gods, did not reason teach us that \"all plurality implies\nan ultimate indivisible unity,\" and therefore there must be a _First\nCause_ of all causes, a _First Principle_ of all principles, _the\nSubstance_ of all substances, _the Being_ of all beings--_a God_ \"of\nwhom, in whom, and to whom are all things\" (panta ek tou Theou, en to\nTheo eis ton Theon).\n\nThe conclusion, therefore, is, that, as the idea of God is a complex\nidea, so there are necessarily a number of simple _a priori_ principles,\nand a variety of experiential facts conspiring to its development in the\nhuman intelligence.\n\n(iii.) _The universe presents to the human mind an aggregation and\nhistory of phenomena which demands the idea of a God--a self-existent,\nintelligent, personal, righteous First Cause--as its adequate\nexplanation._\n\nThe attempt of Positivism to confine all human knowledge to the\nobservation and classification of phenomena, and arrest and foreclose\nall inquiry as to causes, efficient, final, and ultimate, is simply\nfutile and absurd. It were just as easy to arrest the course of the sun\nin mid-heaven as to prevent the human mind from seeking to pass beyond\nphenomena, and ascertain the ground, and reason, and cause of all\nphenomena. The history of speculative thought clearly attests that, in\nall ages, the inquiry after the Ultimate Cause and Reason of all\nexistence--the arche, or First Principle of all things--has been the\ninevitable and necessary tendency of the human mind; to resist which,\nskepticism and positivism have been utterly impotent. The first\nphilosophers, of the Ionian school, had just as strong a faith in the\nexistence of a Supreme Reality--an Ultimate Cause--as Leibnitz and\nCousin. But when, by reflective thought, they attempted to render an\naccount to themselves of this instinctive faith, they imagined that its\nobject must be in some way appreciable to sense, and they sought it in\nsome physical element, or under some visible and tangible shrine. Still,\nhowever imperfect and inadequate the method, and however unsatisfactory\nthe results, humanity has never lost its positive and ineradicable\nconfidence that the problem of existence could be solved. The resistless\ntide of spontaneous and necessary thought has always borne the race\nonward towards the recognition of a great First Cause; and though\nphilosophy may have erred, again and again, in tracing the logical order\nof this inevitable thought, and exhibiting the necessary nexus between\nthe premises and conclusion, yet the human mind has never wavered in the\nconfidence which it has reposed in the natural logic of thought, and man\nhas never ceased to believe in a God.\n\nWe readily grant that all our empirical knowledge is confined to\nphenomena in their orders of co-existence, succession, and resemblance.\n\"To our objective perception and comparison nothing is given but\nqualities and changes; to our inductive generalization nothing but the\nshifting and grouping of these in time and space.\" Were it, however, our\nimmediate concern to discuss the question, we could easily show that\nsensationalism has never succeeded in tracing the genetic origin of our\nideas of space and time to observation and experience; and, without the\n_a priori_ idea of _space_, as the place of bodies, and of _time_, as\nthe condition of succession, we can not conceive of phenomena at all.\nIf, therefore, we know any thing beyond phenomena and their mutual\nrelations; if we have any cognition of realities underlying phenomena,\nand of the relations of phenomena to their objective ground, it must be\ngiven by some faculty distinct from sense-perception, and in some\nprocess distinct from inductive generalization. The knowledge of real\nBeing and real Power, of an ultimate Reason and a personal Will, is\nderived from the apperception of pure reason, which affirms the\nnecessary existence of a Supreme Reality--an Uncreated Being beyond all\nphenomena, which is the ground and reason of the existence--the\ncontemporaneousness and succession--the likeness and unlikeness, of all\nphenomena.\n\nThe immediate presentation of phenomena to sensation is the _occasion_\nof the development in consciousness of these _a priori_ ideas of reason:\nthe possession of these ideas or the immanence of these ideas, in the\nhuman intellect, constitutes the original _power_ to know external\nphenomena. The ideas of space, time, power, law, reason, and end, are\nthe logical antecedents of the ideas of body, succession, event,\nconsecution, order, and adaptation. The latter can not be conceived as\ndistinct notions without the former. The former will not be revealed in\nthought without the presentation to sense, of resistance, movement,\nchange, uniformity, etc. All actual knowledge must, therefore, be\nimpure; that is, it must involve both _a priori_ and _a posteriori_\nelements; and between these elements there must be a necessary relation.\n\nThis necessary relation between the _a priori_ and _a posteriori_\nelements of knowledge is not a mere subjective law of thought. It is\nboth a law of thought and a law of things. Between the _a posteriori_\nfacts of the universe and the _a priori_ ideas of the reason there is an\nabsolute nexus, a universal and necessary correlation; so that the\ncognition of the latter is possible only on the cognition of the former;\nand the objective existence of the realities, represented by the ideas\nof reason, is the condition, _sine qua non_, of the existence of the\nphenomena presented to sense. If, in one indivisible act of\nconsciousness, we immediately perceive extended matter exterior to our\npercipient mind, then Extension exists objectively; and if Extension\nexists objectively, then Space, its _conditio sine qua non_, also exists\nobjectively. And if a definite body reveals to us the _Space_ in which\nit is contained, if a succession of pulsations or movements exhibit the\nuniform _Time_ beneath, so do the changeful phenomena of the universe\ndemand a living _Power_ behind, and the existing order and regular\nevolution of the universe presuppose _Thought_--prevision, and\npredetermination, by an intelligent mind.\n\nIf, then, the universe is a created effect, it must furnish some\nindications of the character of its cause. If, as Plato taught, the\nworld is a \"created image\" of the eternal archetypes which dwell in the\nuncreated Mind, and if the subjective ideas which dwell in the human\nreason, as the offspring of God, are \"copies\" of the ideas of the\nInfinite Reason--if the universe be \"the autobiography of the Infinite\nSpirit which has also repeated itself in miniature within our finite\nspirit,\" then may we decipher its symbols, and read its lessons straight\noff. Then every approach towards a scientific comprehension and\ngeneralization of the facts of the universe must carry us upward towards\nthe higher realities of reason. The more we can understand of Nature--of\nher comprehensive laws, of her archetypal forms, of her far-reaching\nplan spread through the almost infinite ages, and stretching through\nillimitable space--the more do we comprehend the divine Thought. The\ninductive generalization of science gradually _ascends_ towards the\nuniversal; the pure, essential, _a priori_ reason, with its universal\nand necessary ideas, _descends_ from above to meet it. The general\nconceptions of science are thus a kind of _ideoe umbratiles_--shadowy\nassimilations to those immutable ideas which dwell in essential reason,\nas possessed by the Supreme Intelligence, and which are participated in\nby rational man as the offspring and image of God.\n\nWithout making any pretension to profound scientific accuracy, we offer\nthe following tentative classification of the facts of the universe,\nmaterial and mental, which may be regarded as hints and adumbrations of\nthe ultimate ground, and reason, and cause, of the universe. We shall\nventure to classify these facts as indicative of some fundamental\nrelation; (i.) to Permanent Being or Reality; (ii.) to Reason and\nThought; (iii.) to Moral Ideas and Ends.\n\n(i.) _Facts of the universe which indicate some fundamental relation to\nPermanent Being or Reality_.\n\n1. _Qualitative_ Phenomena (properties, attributes, qualities)--the\npredicates of a _subject_; which phenomena, being characterized by\nlikeness and unlikeness, are capable of comparison and classification,\nand thus of revealing something as to the nature of the _subject_.\n\n2. _Dynamical_ Phenomena (protension, movement, succession)--events\ntranspiring in _time_, having beginning, succession, and end, which\npresent themselves to us as the expression of _power_, and throw back\ntheir distinctive characteristics on their _dynamic_ source.\n\n3. _Quantitative_ Phenomena (totality, multiplicity, relative unity)--a\nmultiplicity of objects having relative and composite unity, which\nsuggests some relation to an absolute and indivisible _unity_.\n\n4. _Statical_ Phenomena (extension, magnitude, divisibility)--bodies\nco-existing in _space_ which are limited, conditioned, relative,\ndependent, and indicate some relation to that which is self-existent,\nunconditioned, and absolute.\n\n(ii.) _Facts of the universe which indicate some fundamental relation to\nReason or Thought_.\n\n1. _Numerical and Geometrical Proportion_.--Definite proportion of\nelements (Chemistry), symmetrical arrangement of parts\n(Crystallography), numerical and geometrical relation of the forms and\nmovements of the heavenly bodies (Spherical Astronomy), all of which are\ncapable of exact mathematical expression.\n\n2. _Archetypal Forms_.--The uniform succession of new existences, and\nthe progressive evolution of new orders and species, conformable to\nfixed and definite ideal archetypes, the indication of a comprehensive\n_plan_(Morphological Botany, Comparative Anatomy).\n\n3. _Teleology of Organs_.--The adaptation of organs to the fulfillment\nof special functions, indicating _design_(Comparative Physiology).\n\n4. _Combination of Homotypes and Analogues_.--Diversified homologous\nforms made to fulfill analogous functions, or special purposes fulfilled\nwhilst maintaining a general plan, indicating _choice_ and\n_alternativity_.\n\n(iii.) _Facts of the universe which indicate some fundamental relation\nto Moral Ideas and Ends_.\n\n1. _Ethical Distinctions_.--The universal tendency to discriminate\nbetween voluntary acts as right or wrong, indicating some relation to an\n_immutable moral standard of right_.\n\n2. _Sense of Obligation_.--The universal consciousness of dependence and\nobligation, indicating some relation to Supreme _Power_, an Absolute\n_Authority_.\n\n3. _Feeling of Responsibility_.--The universal consciousness of\nliability to be required to give account for, and endure the\nconsequences of our action, indicating some relation to a Supreme\n_Judge_.\n\n4. _Retributive Issues_.--The pleasure and pain resulting from moral\naction in this life, and the universal anticipation of pleasure or pain\nin the future, as the consequence of present conduct, indicate an\n_absolute Justice_ ruling the world and man.\n\nNow, if the universe be a _created effect_, it must, in some degree at\nleast, reveal the character of its Author and cause. We are entitled to\nregard it as a created symbol and image of the Deity; it must bear the\nimpress of his _power_; it must reveal his infinite _presence_; it must\nexpress his _thoughts_; it must embody and realize his _ideals_, so far,\nat least, as material symbols will permit. Just as we see the power and\nthought of man revealed in his works, his energy and skill, his ideal\nand his taste expressed in his mechanical, artistic, and literary\ncreations, so we may see the mind and character of God displayed in his\nworks. The skill and contrivance of Watts, and Fulton, and Stephenson\nwere exhibited in their mechanical productions. The pure, the intense,\nthe visionary impersonation of the soul which the artist had conjured in\nhis own imagination was wrought out in Psyche. The colossal grandeur of\nMichael Angelo's ideals, the ethereal and saintly elegance of Raphael's\nwere realized upon the canvas. So he who is familiar with the ideal of\nthe sculptor or the painter can identify his creations even when the\nauthor's name is not affixed. And so the \"eternal Power\" of God is\n\"clearly seen\" in the mighty orbs which float in the illimitable space.\nThe vastness of the universe shadows forth the infinity of God. The\nindivisible unity of space and the ideal unity of the universe reflect\nthe unity of God. The material forms around us are symbols of divine\nideas, and the successive history of the universe is an expression of\nthe divine thought; whilst the ethical ideas and sentiments inherent in\nthe human mind are a reflection of the moral character of God.\n\nThe reader can not have failed to observe the form in which the Theistic\nargument is stated; \"_if_ the finite universe is a created effect, it\nmust reveal something as to the nature of its cause: _if_ the existing\norder and arrangement of the universe had a commencement in time, it\nmust have an ultimate and adequate cause.\" The question, therefore,\npresents itself in a definite form: \"_Is the universe finite or\ninfinite; had the order of the universe a beginning, or is it eternal_?\"\n\nIt will be seen at a glance that this is the central and vital question\nin the Theistic argument. If the order and arrangement of the universe\nis _eternal_, then that order is an inherent law of nature, and, as\neternal, does not imply a cause _ab extra:_ if it is not eternal, then\nthe ultimate cause of that order must be a power above and beyond\nnature. In the former case the minor premise of the Theistic syllogism\nis utterly invalidated; in the latter case it is abundantly sustained.\n\nSome Theistic writers--as Descartes, Pascal, Leibnitz, and Saisset--have\nmade the fatal admission that the universe is, in some sense, _infinite_\nand _eternal_. In making this admission they have unwittingly\nsurrendered the citadel of strength, and deprived the argument by which\nthey would prove the being of a God of all its logical force. That\nargument is thus presented by Saisset: \"The finite supposes the\ninfinite. Extension supposes first space, then immensity: duration\nsupposes first time, then eternity. A sudden and irresistible judgment\nrefers this to the necessary, infinite, perfect being.\"[215] But if \"the\nworld is infinite and eternal,\"[216] may not nature, or the totality of\nall existence (to pan), be the necessary, infinite, and perfect Being?\nAn infinite and eternal universe has the reason of its existence in\nitself, and the existence of such a universe can never prove to us the\nexistence of an infinite and eternal God.\n\n[Footnote 215: \"Modern Pantheism,\" vol. ii. p. 205.]\n\n[Footnote 216: Ibid, p. 123.]\n\nA closer examination of the statements and reasonings of Descartes,\nPascal, and Leibnitz, as furnished by Saisset, will show that these\ndistinguished mathematicans were misled by the false notion of\n\"_mathematical_ infinitude.\" Their infinite universe, after all, is not\nan \"absolute,\" but a \"relative\" infinite; that is, the indefinite. \"The\nuniverse must extend _indefinitely_ in time and space, in the infinite\ngreatness, and in the infinite littleness of its parts--in the infinite\nvariety of its species, of its forms, and of its degrees of existence.\nThe finite can not express the infinite but by being _multiplied_\ninfinitely. The finite, so far as it is finite, is not in any reasonable\nrelation, or in any intelligible proportion to the infinite. But the\nfinite, as _multiplied_ infinitely,[217] ages upon ages, spaces upon\nspaces, stars beyond stars, worlds beyond worlds, is a true expression\nof the Infinite Being. Does it follow, because the universe has no\nlimits,--that it must therefore be eternal, immense, infinite as God\nhimself? No; that is but a vain scruple, which springs from the\nimagination, and not from the reason. The imagination is always\nconfounding what reason should ever distinguish, eternity and time,\nimmensity and space, _relative_ infinity and _absolute_ infinity. The\nCreator alone is eternal, immense, absolutely infinite.\"[218]\n\n[Footnote 217: \"The infinite is distinct from the finite, and\nconsequently from the multiplication of the finite by itself; that is,\nfrom the _indefinite_. That which is not infinite, added as many times\nas you please to itself, will not become infinite.\"--Cousin, \"Hist, of\nPhilos.,\" vol. ii. p. 231.]\n\n[Footnote 218: Saisset, \"Modern Pantheism,\" vol. ii. pp. 127, 128.]\n\nThe introduction of the idea of \"the mathematical infinite\" into\nmetaphysical speculation, especially by Kant and Hamilton, with the\ndesign, it would seem, of transforming the idea of infinity into a\nsensuous conception, has generated innumerable paralogisms which\ndisfigure the pages of their philosophical writings. This procedure is\ngrounded in the common fallacy of supposing that _infinity_ and\n_quantity_ are compatible attributes, and susceptible of mathematical\nsynthesis. This insidious and plausible error is ably refuted by a\nwriter in the \"North American Review.\"[219] We can not do better than\ntransfer his argument to our pages in an abridged form.\n\n[Footnote 219: \"The Conditioned and the Unconditioned,\" No. CCV. art.\niii. (1864).]\n\nMathematics is conversant with quantities and quantitative relations.\nThe conception of quantity, therefore, if rigorously analyzed, will\nindicate _a priori_ the natural and impassable boundaries of the\nscience; while a subsequent examination of the quantities called\ninfinite in the mathematical sense, and of the algebraic symbol of\ninfinity, will be seen to verify the results of this _a priori_\nanalysis.\n\nQuantity is that attribute of things in virtue of which they are\nsusceptible of exact mensuration. The question _how much_, or _how many_\n(_quantus_), implies the answer, _so much_, or _so many_ (_tantus_); but\nthe answer is possible only through reference to some standard of\nmagnitude or multitude arbitrarily assumed. Every object, therefore, of\nwhich quantity, in the mathematical sense, is predicable, must be by its\nessential nature _mensurable._ Now mensurability implies the existence\nof actual, definite limits, since without them there could be no fixed\nrelation between the given object and the standard of measurement, and,\nconsequently, no possibility of exact mensuration. In fact, since\nquantification is the object of all mathematical operations, mathematics\nmay be not inaptly defined as _the science of the determinations of\nlimits_. It is evident, therefore, that the terms _quantity_ and\n_finitude_ express the same attribute, namely, _limitation_--the former\nrelatively, the latter absolutely; for quantity is limitation considered\nwith relation to some standard of measurement, and finitude is\nlimitation considered simply in itself. The sphere of quantity,\ntherefore, is absolutely identical with the sphere of the finite; and\nthe phrase _infinite quantity_, if strictly construed, is a\ncontradiction in terms.\n\nThe result thus attained by considering abstract quantity is\ncorroborated by considering concrete and discrete quantities. Such\nexpressions as _infinite sphere, radius, parallelogram, line,_ and so\nforth, are self-contradictory. A sphere is limited by its own periphery,\nand a radius by the centre and circumference of its circle. A\nparallelogram of infinite altitude is impossible, because the limit of\nits altitude is assigned in the side which must be parallel to its base\nin order to constitute it a parallelogram. In brief, all figuration is\nlimitation. The contradiction in the term _infinite line_ is not quite\nso obvious, but can readily be made apparent. Objectively, a line is\nonly the termination of a surface, and a surface the termination of a\nsolid; hence a line can not exist apart from an extended quantity, nor\nan infinite line apart from an infinite quantity. But as this term has\njust been shown to be self-contradictory, an infinite line can not exist\nobjectively at all. Again, every line is extension in one dimension;\nhence a mathematical quantity, hence mensurable, hence finite; you must\ntherefore, deny that a line is a quantity, or else affirm that it is\nfinite.\n\nThe same conclusion is forced upon us, if from geometry we turn to\narithmetic. The phrases _infinite number, infinite series, infinite\nprocess_, and so forth, are all contradictory when literally construed.\nNumber is a relation among separate unities or integers, which,\nconsidered objectively as independent of our cognitive powers, must\nconstitute an exact sum; and this exactitude, or synthetic totality, is\nlimitation. If considered subjectively in the mode of its cognition, a\nnumber is infinite only in the sense that it is beyond the power of our\nimagination or conception, which is an abuse of the term. In either case\nthe totality is fixed; that is, finite. So, too, of _series_ and\n_process_. Since every series involves a succession of terms or numbers,\nand every process a succession of steps or stages, the notion of series\nand process plainly involves that of _number_, and must be rigorously\ndissociated from the idea of infinity. At any one step, at any one term,\nthe number attained is determinate, hence finite. The fact that, by the\nlaw of the series or of the process, _we_ may continue the operation _as\nlong as we please_, does not justify the application of the term\ninfinite to the operation itself; if any thing is infinite, it is the\nwill which continues the operation, which is absurd if said of human\nwills.\n\nConsequently, the attribute of infinity is not predicable either of\n'diminution without limit,' 'augmentation without limit,' or 'endless\napproximation to a fixed limit,' for these mathematical processes\ncontinue only as we continue them, consist of steps successively\naccomplished, and are limited by the very fact of this serial\nincompletion.\n\n\"We can not forbear pointing out an important application of these\nresults to the Critical Philosophy. Kant bases each of his famous four\nantinomies on the demand of pure reason for unconditioned totality in a\nregressive series of conditions. This, he says, must be realized either\nin an absolute first of the series, conditioning all the other members,\nbut itself unconditioned, or else in the absolute infinity of the series\nwithout a first; but reason is utterly unable, on account of mutual\ncontradiction, to decide in which of the two alternatives the\nunconditioned is found. By the principles we have laid down, however,\nthe problem is solved. The absolute infinity of a series is a\ncontradiction _in adjecto_. As every number, although immeasurably and\ninconceivably great, is impossible unless _unity_ is given as its basis,\nso every series, being itself a number, is impossible unless a _first\nterm_ is given as a commencement. Through a first term alone is the\nunconditioned possible; that is, if it does not exist in a first term,\nit can not exist at all; of the two alternatives, therefore, one\naltogether disappears, and reason is freed from the dilemma of a\ncompulsory yet impossible decision. Even if it should be allowed that\nthe series has no first term, but has originated _ab aeterno_, it must\nalways at each instant have a _last term_; the series, as a whole, can\nnot be infinite, and hence can not, as Kant claims it can, realize in\nits wholeness unconditioned totality. Since countless terms forever\nremain unreached, the series is forever limited by them. Kant himself\nadmits that it _can never be completed_, and is only potentially\ninfinite; actually, therefore, by his own admission, it is finite. But a\nlast term implies a first, as absolutely as one end of a string implies\nthe other; the only possibility of an unconditioned lies in Kant's first\nalternative, and if, as he maintains Reason must demand it, she can not\nhesitate in her decisions. That _number is a limitation_ is no new\ntruth, and that every series involves number is self-evident; and it is\nsurprising that so radical a criticism on Kant's system should never\nhave suggested itself to his opponents. Even the so-called _moments_ of\ntime can not be regarded as constituting a real series, for a series can\nnot be real except through its divisibility into members whereas time is\nindivisible, and its partition into moments is a conventional fiction.\nExterior limitability and interior divisibility result equally from the\npossibility of discontinuity. Exterior illimitability and interior\nindivisibility are simple phases of the same attribute of _necessary\ncontinuity_ contemplated under different aspects. From this principle\nflows another upon which it is impossible to lay too much stress,\nnamely; _illimitability and indivisibility, infinity and unity,\nreciprocally necessitate each other_. Hence the Quantitative Infinites\nmust be also Units, and the division of space and time, implying\nabsolute contradiction, is not even cogitable as an hypothesis.[220]\n\n\"The word _infinite_, therefore, in mathematical usage, as applied to\n_process_ and to _quantity_, has a two-fold signification. An infinite\nprocess is one which we can continue _as long as we please_, but which\nexists solely in our continuance of it.[221] An infinite quantity is one\nwhich exceeds our powers of mensuration or of conception, but which,\nnevertheless, has bounds and limits in itself.[222] Hence the\npossibility of relation among infinite quantities, and of different\norders of infinities. If the words _infinite, infinity, infinitesimal_,\nshould be banished from mathematical treatises and replaced by the words\n_indefinite, indefinity,_ and _indefinitesimal_, mathematics would\nsuffer no loss, while, by removing a perpetual source of confusion,\nmetaphysics would get great gain.\"\n\n[Footnote 220: By the application of these principles the writer in the\n\"North American Review\" completely dissolves the antinomies by which\nHamilton seeks to sustain his \"Philosophy of the Conditioned.\" See\n\"North American Review,\" 1864, pp. 432-437.]\n\n[Footnote 221: De Morgan, \"Diff. and Integ. Calc.\" p. 9.]\n\n[Footnote 222: Id., ib., p. 25.]\n\nThe above must be regarded as a complete refutation of the position\ntaken by _Hume_, to wit, that the idea of nature eternally existing in a\nstate of order, without a cause other than the eternally inherent laws\nof nature, is no more self-contradictory than the idea of an\neternally-existing and infinite mind, who originated this order--a God\nexisting without a cause. The eternal and infinite Mind is indivisible\nand illimitable; nature, in its totality, as well as in its individual\nparts, has interior divisibility, and exterior limitability. The\ninfinity of God is not a _quantitative_, but a _qualitative_ infinity.\nThe miscalled eternity and infinity of nature is an _indefinite_\nextension and protension in time and space, and, as _quantitative_, must\nnecessarily be limited and measurable, therefore _finite_.\n\nThe universe of sense-perception and sensuous imagination is a\nphenomenal universe, a genesis, a perpetual becoming, an entrance into\nexistence, and an exit thence; the Theist is, therefore, perfectly\njustified in regarding it as disqualified for _self-existence_, and in\npassing behind it for the Supreme Entity that needs no cause. Phenomena\ndemand causation, entities dispense with it. No one asks for a cause of\nthe _space_ which contains the universe, or of the Eternity on the bosom\nof which it floats. Everywhere the line is necessarily drawn upon the\nsame principle; that entities _may_ have self-existence, phenomena\n_must_ have a cause.[223]\n\n[Footnote 223: \"Science, Nescience, and Faith,\" in Martineau's \"Essays,\"\np. 206.]\n\nIV. _Psychological analysis clearly attests that in the phenomena of\nconsciousness there are found elements or principles which, in their\nregular and normal development, transcend the limits of consciousness,\nand attain to the knowledge of Absolute Being, Absolute Reason, Absolute\nGood_, i.e., GOD.\n\nThe analysis of thought clearly reveals that the mind of man is in\npossession of ideas, notions, beliefs, principles (as _e.g._, the idea\nof space, duration, cause, substance, unity, infinity), which are not\nderived from sensation and experience, and which can not be drawn out of\nsensation and experience by any process of generalization. These ideas\nhave this incontestable peculiarity, as distinguished from all the\nphenomena of sensation, that, whilst the latter are particular,\ncontingent, and relative, the former are _universal_, _necessary_, and\n_absolute_. As an example, and a proof of the reality and validity of\nthis distinction, take the ideas of _body_ and of _space_, the former\nunquestionably derived from experience, the latter supplied by reason\nalone. \"I ask you, can not you conceive this book to be destroyed?\nWithout doubt you can. And can not you conceive the whole world to be\ndestroyed, and no matter whatever in existence? You can. For you,\nconstituted as you are, the supposition of the non-existence of bodies\nimplies no contradiction. And what do we call the idea of a thing which\nwe can conceive of as non-existing? We call it a _contingent_ and\n_relative_ idea. But if you can conceive this book to be destroyed, all\nbodies destroyed, can you suppose space to be destroyed? You can not. It\nis in the power of man's thought to conceive the non-existence of\nbodies; it is not in the power of man's thought to conceive the\nnon-existence of space. The idea of space is thus a _necessary_ and\n_absolute_ idea.\"[224]\n\n[Footnote 224: Cousin's \"Hist. of Philos.,\" vol. ii. p. 214.]\n\nTake, again, the ideas of _event_ and _cause_. The idea of an event is a\n_contingent_ idea; it is the idea of something which might or might not\nhave happened. There is no impossibility or contradiction in either\nsupposition. The idea of cause is a _necessary_ idea. An event being\ngiven, the idea of cause is necessarily implied. An uncaused event is an\nimpossible conception. The idea of cause is also a _universal_ idea\nextending to all events, actual or conceivable, and affirmed by all\nminds. It is a rational fact, attested by universal consciousness, that\nwe can not think of an event transpiring without a cause; of a thing\nbeing the author of its own existence; of something generated by and out\nof nothing. _Ex nihilo nihil_ is a universal law of thought and of\nthings. This universal \"law of causality\" is clearly distinguishable\nfrom a _general_ truth reached by induction. For example, it is a very\ngeneral truth that, during twenty-four hours, day is succeeded by night.\nBut this is not a necessary truth, neither is it a universal truth. It\ndoes not extend to all known lands, as, for example, to Nova Zembla. It\ndoes not hold true of the other planets. Nor does it extend to all\npossible lands. We can easily conceive of lands plunged in eternal\nnight, or rolling in eternal day. With another system of worlds, one can\nconceive other physics, but one can not conceive other metaphysics. It\nis impossible to imagine a world in which the law of causality does not\nreign. Here, then, we have one absolute principle (among others which\nmay be enumerated), the existence and reality of which is revealed, not\nby sensation, but by reason--a principle which transcends the limits of\nexperience, and which, in its regular and logical development, attains\nthe knowledge of the Absolute Cause--the First Cause of all causes--God.\n\nThus it is evident that the human mind is in possession of two distinct\norders of primitive cognitions,--one, contingent, relative, and\nphenomenal; the other universal, necessary, and absolute. These two\ndistinct orders of cognition presuppose the existence in man of two\ndistinct faculties or organs of knowledge--_sensation_, external and\ninternal, which perceives the contingent, relative, and phenomenal, and\n_reason_, which apprehends the universal, necessary, and absolute. The\nknowledge which is derived from sensation and experience is called\n_empirical_ knowledge, or knowledge _a posteriori_, because subsequent\nto, and consequent upon, the exercise of the faculties of observation.\nThe knowledge derived from reason is called _transcendental_ knowledge,\nor knowledge _a priori_, because it furnishes laws to, and governs the\nexercise of the faculties of observation and thought, and is not the\nresult of their exercise. The sensibility brings the mind into relation\nwith the _physical_ world, the reason puts mind in communication with\nthe _intelligible_ world--the sphere of _a priori_ principles, of\nnecessary and absolute truths, which depend upon neither the world nor\nthe conscious self, and which reveal to man the existence of the soul,\nnature, and God. Every distinct fact of consciousness is thus at once\n_psychological_ and _ontological_, and contains these three fundamental\nideas, which we can not go beyond, or cancel by any possible\nanalysis--the _soul_, with its faculties; _matter_, with its qualities;\n_God_, with his perfections.\n\nWe do not profess to be able to give a clear explication and complete\nenumeration of all the ideas of reason, and of the necessary and\nuniversal principles or axioms which are grounded on these ideas. This\nis still the grand desideratum of metaphysical science. Its achievement\nwill give us a primordial logic, which shall be as exact in its\nprocedure and as certain in its conclusions as the mathematical\nsciences. Meantime, it may be affirmed that philosophic analysis, in the\nperson of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Cousin, has succeeded in\ndisengaging such _a priori_ ideas, and formulating such principles and\nlaws of thought, as lead infallibly to the cognition of the _Absolute\nBeing_, the _Absolute Reason_, the _Absolute Good_, that is, GOD.\n\nIt would carry us too far beyond our present design were we to exhibit,\nin each instance, the process of _immediate abstraction_ by which the\ncontingent and relative element of knowledge is eliminated, and the\nnecessary and absolute principle is disengaged. We shall simply state\nthe method, and show its application by a single illustration.\n\nThere are unquestionably _two_ sorts of abstraction: 1. \"_Comparative_\nabstraction, operating upon several real objects, and seizing their\nresemblances in order to form an abstract idea, which is collective and\nmediate; collective, because different individuals concur in its\nformation; mediate, because it requires several intermediate\noperations.\" This is the method of the physical sciences, which\ncomprises comparison, abstraction, and generalization. The result in\nthis process is the attainment of a _general_ truth. 2. \"_Immediate_\nabstraction, not comparative; operating not upon several concretes, but\nupon a single one, eliminating and neglecting its individual and\nvariable part, and disengaging the absolute part, which it raises at\nonce to its pure form.\" The parts to be eliminated in a concrete\ncognition are, first, the quality of the object, and the circumstances\nunder which the absolute unfolds itself; and secondly, the quality of\nthe subject, which perceives but does not constitute it. The phenomena\nof the me and the not-me being eliminated, the absolute remains. This is\nthe process of rational psychology, and the result obtained is a\n_universal_ and _necessary_ truth.\n\n\"Let us take, as an example, the principle of cause. To be able to say\nthat the event I see must have a cause, it is not indispensable to have\nseen several events succeed each other. The principle which compels me\nto pronounce this judgment is already complete in the first as in the\nlast event; it can not change in respect to its object, it can not\nchange in itself; it neither increases nor decreases with the greater or\nless number of applications. The only difference that it is subject to\nin regard to us is that we apply it, whether we remark it or not,\nwhether we disengage it or not from its particular application. The\nquestion is not to eliminate the particularity of the phenomenon wherein\nit appears to us, whether it be the fall of a leaf or the murder of a\nman, in order immediately to conceive, in a general and abstract manner,\nthe necessity of a cause for every event that begins to exist. Here it\nis not because I am the same, or have been affected in the same manner\nin several different cases, that I have come to this general and\nabstract conception. A leaf falls; at the same moment I think, I\nbelieve, I declare that this falling of the leaf must have a cause. A\nman has been killed; at the same instant I believe, I proclaim that this\ndeath must have a cause. Each one of these facts contains particular and\nvariable circumstances, and something universal and necessary, to wit,\nboth of them can not but have a cause. Now I am perfectly able to\ndisengage the universal from the particular in regard to the first fact\nas well as in regard to the second fact, for the universal is in the\nfirst quite as well as in the second. In fact, if the principle of\ncausality is not universal in the first fact, neither will it be in the\nsecond, nor in the third, nor in the thousandth; for a thousandth is not\nnearer than the first to the infinite--to absolute universality. It is\nthe same, and still more evidently, with _necessity_. Pay particular\nattention to this point; if necessity is not in the first fact, it can\nnot be in any; for necessity can not be formed little by little, and by\nsuccessive increments. If, on the first murder I see, I do not exclaim\nthat this murder had necessarily a cause, at the thousandth murder,\nalthough it shall be proved that all the others had causes, I shall have\nthe right to think that this murder has, very probably, also a cause,\nbut I shall never have the right to say that it _necessarily_ had a\ncause. But when universality and necessity are already in a single case,\nthat case is sufficient to entitle me to deduce them from it,\"[225] and\nwe may add, also, to affirm them of every other event that may\ntranspire.\n\n[Footnote 225: Cousin, \"True, Beautiful, and Good,\" pp. 57, 58.]\n\nThe following _schema_ will exhibit the generally accepted results of\nthis method of analysis applied to the phenomena of thought:\n\n(i.) _Universal and necessary principles, or primitive judgments from\nwhence is derived the cognition of Absolute Being_.\n\n1. _The principle of Substance_; thus enounced--\"every quality supposes\na _subject_ or real being.\"\n\n2. _The principle of Causality_; \"every thing that begins to be supposes\na _power_ adequate to its production, _i.e._, an efficient cause.\"\n\n3. _The principle of Unity_; \"all differentiation and plurality supposes\nan incomposite unity; all diversity, an ultimate and indivisible\nidentity.\"\n\n4. _The principle of the Unconditioned_; \"the finite supposes the\ninfinite, the dependent supposes the self-existent, the temporal\nsupposes the eternal.\"\n\n(ii.) _Universal and necessary principles, or primitive judgments, from\nwhich is derived the cognition of the Absolute Reason_.\n\n1. _The principle of Ideality_; thus enounced, \"facts of order--definite\nproportion, symmetrical arrangement, numerical relation, geometrical\nform--having a commencement in time, present themselves to us as the\nexpression of _Ideas_, and refer us to _Mind_ as their analogon, and\nexponent, and source.\"\n\n2. _The principle of Consecution_; \"the uniform succession and\nprogressive evolution of new existences, according to fixed definite\narchetypes, suppose a unity of _thought_--a comprehensive _plan_\nembracing all existence.\"\n\n3. _The principle of Intentionality or Final Cause_; \"every means\nsupposes an _end_ contemplated, and a choice and adaptation of means to\nsecure the _end_.\"\n\n4. _The principle of Personality_; \"intelligent purpose and voluntary\nchoice imply a personal agent.\"\n\n(iii.) _Universal and necessary principles, or primitive judgments, from\nwhence is derived the cognition of the Absolute Good_.\n\n1. _The principle of Moral Law_; thus enounced, \"the action of a\nvoluntary agent necessarily characterized as _right_ or _wrong_,\nsupposes an immutable and universal standard of right--an absolute moral\nLaw.\"\n\n2. _The principle of Moral Obligation_; \"the feeling of obligation to\nobey a law of duty supposes a _Lawgiver_ by whose authority we are\nobliged.\"\n\n3. _The principle of Moral Desert_; \"the feeling of personal\naccountability and of moral desert supposes a _judge_ to whom we must\ngive account, and who shall determine our award.\"\n\n4. _The pnnciple of Retribution_; \"retributive issues in this life, and\nthe existence in all minds of an impersonal justice which demands that,\nin the final issue, every being shall receive his just deserts, suppose\na being of _absolute justice_ who shall render to every man according to\nhis works.\"\n\nA more profound and exhaustive analysis may perhaps resolve all these\nprimitive judgments into one universal principle or law, which Leibnitz\nhas designated \"_The principle or law of sufficient reason_,\" and which\nis thus enounced--there must be an ultimate and sufficient reason why\nany thing exists, and why it is, rather than otherwise; that is, if any\nthing begins to be, something else must be supposed as the adequate\nground, and reason, and cause of its existence; or again, to state the\nlaw in view of our present discussion, \"_if the finite universe, with\nits existing order and arrangement, had a beginning, there must be an\nultimate and sufficient reason why it exists, and why it is as it is,\nrather than otherwise_.\" In view of one particular class of phenomena,\nor special order of facts, this \"principle of sufficient reason\" may be\nvaried in the form of its statement, and denominated \"the principle of\nsubstance,\" \"the principle of causality,\" \"the principle of\nintentionality,\" etc.; and, it may be, these are but specific judgments\nunder the one fundamental and generic law of thought which constitutes\nthe _major_ premise of every Theistic syllogism.\n\nThese fundamental principles, primitive judgments, axioms, or necessary\nand determinate forms of thought, exist potentially or germinally in all\nhuman minds; they are spontaneously developed in presence of the\nphenomena of the universe, material and mental; they govern the original\nmovement of the mind, even when not appearing in consciousness in their\npure and abstract form; and they compel us to affirm _a permanent being_\nor _reality_ behind all phenomena--a _power_ adequate to the production\nof change, back of all events; a _personal Mind_, as the explanation of\nall the facts of order, and uniform succession, and regular evolution;\nand a _personal Lawgiver_ and _Righteous Judge_ as the ultimate ground\nand reason of all the phenomena of the moral world; in short, to affirm\n_an Unconditioned Cause of all finite and secondary causes; a First\nPrinciple of all principles; an Ultimate Reason of all reasons; an\nimmutable Uncreated Justice, the living light of conscience; a King\nimmortal, eternal, invisible, the only wise God, the ruler of the world\nand man_.\n\nOur position, then, is, that the idea of God is revealed to man in the\nnatural and spontaneous development of his intelligence, and that the\nexistence of a Supreme Reality corresponding to, and represented by this\nidea, is rationally and logically demonstrable, and therefore justly\nentitled to take rank as part of our legitimate, valid, and positive\n_knowledge_.\n\nAnd now from this position, which we regard as impregnable, we shall be\nprepared more deliberately and intelligibly to contemplate the various\nassaults which are openly or covertly made upon the doctrine that _God\nis cognizable by human reason_.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VI.\n\nTHE UNKNOWN GOD (_continued_).\n\nIS GOD COGNIZABLE BY REASON?\n\n\n\"The abnegation of reason is not the evidence of faith, but the\nconfession of despair.\"--LIGHTFOOT.\n\nAt the outset of this inquiry we attempted a hasty grouping of the\nvarious parties and schools which are arrayed against the doctrine that\nGod is cognizable by human reason, and in general terms we sought to\nindicate the ground they occupy.\n\nViewed from a philosophical stand-point, we found one party marshalled\nunder the standard of Idealism; another of Materialism and, again,\nanother of Natural Realism. Regarded in their theological aspects, some\nare positive Atheists; others, strange to say, are earnest Theists;\nwhilst others occupy a position of mere Indifferentism. Yet,\nnotwithstanding the remarkable diversity, and even antagonism of their\nphilosophical and theological opinions, they are all agreed in denying\nto reason any valid cognition of God.\n\nThe survey of Natural Theism we have completed in the previous chapter\nwill enable us still further to indicate the exact points against which\ntheir attacks are directed, and also to estimate the character and force\nof the weapons employed. With or without design, they are, each in their\nway, assailing one or other of the principles upon which we rest our\ndemonstration of the being of God. As we proceed, we shall find that\nMill and the Constructive Idealists are really engaged in undermining\n\"the _principle of substance_;\" their doctrine is a virtual denial of\nall objective realities answering to our subjective ideas of matter,\nmind, and God. The assaults of Comte and the Materialists of his school\nare mainly directed against \"_the principle of causality_\" and \"_the\nprinciple of intentionality_;\" they would deny to man all knowledge of\ncauses, efficient and final. The attacks of Hamilton and his school are\ndirected against \"the _principle of the unconditioned_,\" his philosophy\nof the conditioned is a plausible attempt to deprive man of all power to\nthink the Infinite and Perfect, to conceive the Unconditioned and\nUltimate Cause; whilst the Dogmatic Theologians are borrowing, and\nrecklessly brandishing, the weapons of all these antagonists, and, in\naddition to all this, are endeavoring to show the insufficiency of \"_the\nprinciple of unity_\" and the weakness and invalidity of \"the _moral\nprinciples_,\" which are regarded by us as relating man to a Moral\nPersonality, and as indicating to him the existence of a righteous God,\nthe ruler of the world. It is necessary, therefore, that we should\nconcentrate our attention yet more specifically on these separate lines\nof attack, and attempt a minuter examination of the positions assumed by\neach, and of the arguments by which they are seeking, directly or\nindirectly, to invalidate the fundamental principles of Natural Theism.\n\n(i.) _We commence with the Idealistic School_, of which John Stuart Mill\nmust be regarded as the ablest living representative.\n\nThe doctrine of this school is that all our knowledge is necessarily\nconfined to _mental_ phenomena; that is, \"to _feelings_ or states of\nconsciousness,\" and \"the succession and co-existence, the likeness and\nunlikeness between these feelings or states of consciousness.\"[226] All\nour general notions, all our abstract ideas, are generated out of these\nfeelings[227] by \"_inseparable association_,\" which registers their\ninter-relations of recurrence, co-existence, and resemblance. The\nresults of this inseparable association constitute at once the sum total\nand the absolute limit of all possible cognition.\n\n[Footnote 226: J. S. Mill, \"Logic,\" vol. i. p. 83 (English edition).]\n\n[Footnote 227: In the language of Mill, every thing of which we are\nconscious is called \"feeling.\" \"Feeling, in the proper sense of the\nterm, is a genus of which Sensation, Emotion, and Thought are the\nsubordinate species.\"--\"Logic,\" bk. i. ch. iii. Sec. 3.]\n\nIt is admitted by Mill that one _apparent_ element in this total result\nis the general conviction that our own existence is really distinct from\nthe external world, and that the personal _ego_ has an essential\nidentity distinct from the fleeting phenomena of sensation. But this\npersuasion is treated by him as a mere illusion--a leap beyond the\noriginal datum for which we have no authority. Of a real substance or\nsubstratum called Mind, of a real substance or substratum called Matter,\nunderlying the series of feelings--\"the thread of consciousness\"--we do\nknow and can know nothing; and in affirming the existence of such\nsubstrata we are making a supposition we can not possibly verify. The\nultimate datum of speculative philosophy is not \"_I think_,\" but simply\n\"_Thoughts or feelings are_.\" The belief in a permanent subject or\nsubstance, called matter, as the ground and plexus of physical\nphenomena, and of a permanent subject or substance, called mind, as the\nground and plexus of mental phenomena, is not a primitive and original\nintuition of reason. It is simply through the action of the principle of\nassociation among the ultimate phenomena, called feelings, that this\n(erroneous) separation of the phenomena into two orders or\naggregates--one called mind or self; the other matter, or not\nself--takes place; and without this curdling or associating process no\nsuch notion or belief could have been generated. \"The principle of\nsubstance,\" as an ultimate law of thought, is, therefore, to be regarded\nas a transcendental dream.\n\nBut now that the notion of _mind_ or _self_, and of _matter_ or not\n_self_, do exist as common convictions of our race, what is philosophy\nto make of them? After a great many qualifications and explanations, Mr.\nMill has, in his \"Logic,\" summed up his doctrine of Constructive\nIdealism in the following words: \"As body is the mysterious _something_\nwhich excites the mind to feel, so mind is the mysterious _something_\nwhich feels and thinks.\"[228] But what is this \"mysterious something?\"\nIs it a reality, an entity, a subject; or is it a shadow, an illusion, a\ndream? In his \"Examination of Sir Wm. Hamilton's Philosophy,\" where it\nmay be presumed, we have his maturest opinions, Mr. Mill, in still more\nabstract and idealistic phraseology, attempts an answer. Here he defines\nmatter as \"_a permanent possibility of sensation_,\"[229] and mind as \"_a\npermanent possibility of feeling_.\"[230] And \"the belief in these\npermanent possibilities,\" he assures us, \"includes all that is essential\nor characteristic in the belief in substance.\"[231] \"If I am asked,\"\nsays he, \"whether I believe in matter, I ask whether the questioner\naccepts this definition of it. If he does, I believe in matter: and so\ndo all Berkeleians. In any other sense than this, I do not. But I affirm\nwith confidence that this conception of matter includes the whole\nmeaning attached to it by the common world, apart from philosophical,\nand sometimes from theological theories. The reliance of mankind on the\nreal existence of visible and tangible objects, means reliance on the\nreality and permanence of possibilities of visual and tactual\nsensations, when no sensations are actually experienced.\"[232]\n\"Sensations,\" however, let it be borne in mind, are but a subordinate\nspecies of the genus feeling.[233] They are \"states of\nconsciousness\"--phenomena of mind, not of matter; and we are still\nwithin the impassable boundary of ideal phenomena; we have yet no\ncognition of an external world. The sole cosmical conception, for us, is\nstill a succession of sensations, or states of consciousness. This is\nthe one phenomenon which we can not transcend in knowledge, do what we\nwill; all else is hypothesis and illusion. The _non-ego_, after all,\nthen, may be but a mode in which the mind represents to itself the\npossible modifications of the _ego_.\n\n[Footnote 228: \"Logic,\" bk. i, ch. iii. Sec. 8.]\n\n[Footnote 229: \"Examination of Sir Wm. Hamilton's Philosophy,\" vol. i.\np. 243.]\n\n[Footnote 230: Ibid., vol. i. p. 253.]\n\n[Footnote 231: Ibid., vol. i. p. 246.]\n\n[Footnote 232: Ibid., vol. i. pp. 243, 244.]\n\n[Footnote 233: \"Logic,\" bk. i. ch. iii. Sec. 3.]\n\nAnd now that matter, as a real existence, has disappeared under Mr.\nMill's analysis, what shall be said of mind or self? Is there any\npermanent subject or real entity underlying the phenomena of feeling? In\nfeeling, is there a personal self that feels, thinks, and wills? It\nwould seem not. Mind, as well as matter, resolves itself into a \"series\nof feelings,\" varying and fugitive from moment to moment, in a sea of\npossibilities of feeling. \"My mind,\" says Mill, \"is but a series of\nfeelings, or, as it has been called, a thread of consciousness, however\nsupplemented by believed possibilities of consciousness, which are not,\nthough they might be, realized.\"[234]\n\n[Footnote 234: \"Examination of Sir Wm. Hamilton's Philosophy,\" vol. i.\np. 254.]\n\nThe ultimate fact of the phenomenal world, then, in the philosophy of\nMill, is neither matter nor mind, but feelings or states of\nconsciousness associated together by the relations, amongst themselves,\nof recurrence, co-existence, and resemblance. The existence of self,\nexcept as \"a series of feelings;\" the existence of any thing other than\nself, except as a feigned unknown cause of sensation, is rigorously\ndenied. Mr. Mill does not content himself with saying that we are\nignorant of the _nature_ of matter and mind, but he asserts we are\nignorant of the _existence_ of matter and mind as real entities.\n\nThe bearing of this doctrine of Idealism upon Theism and Theology will\nbe instantly apparent to the reader. If I am necessarily ignorant of the\nexistence of the external world, and of the personal _ego_, or real\nself, I must be equally ignorant of the existence of God. If one is a\nmere supposition, an illusion, so the other must be. Mr. Mill, however,\nis one of those courteous and affable writers who are always conscious,\nas it were, of the presence of their readers, and extremely careful not\nto shock their feelings or prejudices; besides, he has too much\nconscious self-respect to avow himself an atheist. As a speculative\nphilosopher, he would rather regard Theism and Theology as \"open\nquestions,\" and he satisfies himself with saying, if you believe in the\nexistence of God, or in Christianity, I do not interfere with you. \"As a\ntheory,\" he tells us that his doctrine leaves the evidence of the\nexistence of God exactly as it was before. Supposing me to believe that\nthe Divine mind is simply the series of the Divine thoughts and feelings\nprolonged through eternity, that would be, at any rate, believing God's\nexistence to be _as real as my own_[235]. And as for evidence, the\nargument of Paley's 'Natural Theology,' or, for that matter, of his\n'Evidences of Christianity,' would stand exactly as it does.\n\nThe design argument is drawn from the analogies of human experience.\nFrom the relation which human works bear to human thoughts and feelings,\nit infers a corresponding relation between works more or less similar,\nbut superhuman, and superhuman thoughts and feelings. _If_ it prove\nthese, nobody but a metaphysician needs care whether or not it proves a\nmysterious _substratum_ for them.[236] The argument from design, it\nseems to us, however, would have no validity if there be no external\nworld offering marks of design. If the external world is only a mode of\nfeeling, a series of mental states, then our notion of the Divine\nExistence may be only \"an association of feelings\"--a mode of Self. And\nif we have no positive knowledge of a real self as existing, and God's\nexistence is no more \"real than our own,\" then the Divine existence\nstands on a very dubious and uncertain foundation. It can have no very\nsecure hold upon the human mind, and certainly has no claim to be\nregarded as a fundamental and necessary belief. That it has a very\nprecarious hold upon the mind of Mr. Mill, is evident from the following\npassage in his article on \"_Later Speculations of A. Comte_.\"[237] \"We\nventure to think that a religion may exist without a belief in a God,\nand that a religion without a God may be, even to Christians, an\ninstructive and profitable object of contemplation.\"\n\nAnd now let us close Mr. Mill's book, and, introverting our mental gaze,\ninterrogate _consciousness_, the verdict of which, even Mr. Mill assures\nus, is admitted on all hands to be a decision without appeal.[238]\n\n[Footnote 235: \"Examination of Sir Wm. Hamilton's Philosophy,\" vol. i.\np. 254.]\n\n[Footnote 236: \"Examination of Sir Wm. Hamilton's Philosophy,\" vol. i.\np. 259.]\n\n[Footnote 237: Westminster Review, July, 1835 (American edition), p. 3.]\n\n[Footnote 238: \"Examination of Sir Wm. Hamilton's Philosophy,\" vol. i.\np. 161.]\n\n1. We have an ineradicable, and, as it would seem, an intuitive faith in\nthe real existence of an external world distinct from our sensations,\nand also of a personal self, which we call \"I,\" \"myself,\" as distinct\nfrom \"my sensations,\" and \"my feelings.\" We find, also, that this is\nconfessedly the common belief of mankind. There have been a few\nphilosophers who have affected to treat this belief as a \"mere\nprejudice,\" an \"illusion;\" but they have never been able, practically,\nso to regard and treat it. Their language, just as plainly as the\nlanguage of the common people, betrays their instinctive faith in an\nouter world, and proves their utter inability to emancipate themselves\nfrom this \"prejudice,\" if such it may please them to call it. In view of\nthis acknowledged fact, we ask--Does the term \"_permanent possibility of\nsensations_\" exhaust all that is contained in this conception of an\nexternal world? This evening I _remember_ that at noonday I beheld the\nsun, and experienced a sensation of warmth whilst exposing myself to his\nrays; and I _expect_ that to-morrow, under the same conditions, I shall\nexperience the same sensations. I now _remember_ that last evening I\nextinguished my light and attempted to leave my study, but, coming in\ncontact with the closed door, experienced a sense of resistance to my\nmuscular effort, by a solid and extended body exterior to myself; and I\n_expect_ that this evening, under the same circumstances, I shall\nexperience the same sensations. Now, does a belief in \"a permanent\npossibility of sensations\" explain all these experiences? does it\naccount for that immediate knowledge of an _external_ object which I had\non looking at the sun, or that presentative knowledge of _resistance_\nand _extension_, and of an extended, resisting _substance_, I had when\nin contact with the door of my study? Mr. Mill very confidently affirms\nthat this belief includes all; and this phrase expresses all the meaning\nattached to extended \"matter\" and resisting \"substance\" by the common\nworld.[239] We as confidently affirm that it does no such thing; and as\n\"the common world\" must be supposed to understand the language of\nconsciousness as well as the philosopher, we are perfectly willing to\nleave the decision of that question to the common consciousness of our\nrace. If all men do not believe in a permanent _reality_--a substance\nwhich is external to themselves, a substance which offers resistance to\ntheir muscular effort, and which produces in them the sensations of\nsolidity, extension, resistance, etc.--they believe nothing and know\nnothing at all about the matter.\n\n[Footnote 239: \"Examination of Sir Wm. Hamilton's Philosophy,\" vol. i.\np. 243.]\n\nStill less does the phrase \"_a permanent possibility of feelings\"_\nexhaust all our conception of a personal self. Recurring to the\nexperiences of yesterday, I _remember_ the feelings I experienced on\nbeholding the sun, and also on pressing against the closed door, and I\nconfidently _expect_ the recurrence, under the same circumstances, of\nthe same feelings. Does the belief in \"a permanent possibility of\nfeelings\" explain the act of memory by which I recall the past event,\nand the act of prevision by which I anticipate the recurrence of the\nlike experience in the future? Who or what is the \"I\" that remembers and\nthe \"I\" that anticipates? The \"ego,\" the personal mind, is, according to\nMill, a mere \"series of feelings,\" or, more correctly, a flash of\n\"_present_ feelings\" on \"a background of possibilities of present\nfeelings.\"[240] If, then, there be no permanent substance or reality\nwhich is the subject of the present feeling, which receives and retains\nthe impress of the past feeling, and which anticipates the recurrence of\nlike feelings in the future, how can the _past_ be recalled, how\ndistinguished from the present? and how, without a knowledge of the past\nas distinguished from the present, can the _future_ be forecast? Mr.\nMill feels the pressure of this difficulty, and frankly acknowledges it.\nHe admits that, on the hypothesis that mind is simply \"a series of\nfeelings,\" the phenomena of memory and expectation are \"inexplicable\"\nand \"incomprehensible.\"[241] He is, therefore, under the necessity of\ncompleting his definition of mind by adding that it is a series of\nfeelings which \"_is aware of itself as a series_;\" and, still further,\nof supplementing this definition by the conjecture that \"_something\nwhich has ceased to exist, or is not yet in existence, can still, in a\nmanner, be present_.\"[242] Now he who can understand how a series of\nfeelings can flow on in time, and from moment to moment drop out of the\npresent into non-existence, and yet be _present_ and _conscious of\nitself as a series_, may be accorded the honor of understanding Mr.\nMill's definition of mind or self, and may be permitted to rank himself\nas a distinguished disciple of the Idealist school; for ourselves, we\nacknowledge we are destitute of the capacity to do the one, and of all\nambition to be the other. And he who can conceive how the _past_ feeling\nof yesterday and the _possible_ feeling of to-morrow can be in any\nmanner _present_ to-day; or, in other words, how any thing which has\nceased to exist, or which never had an existence, can _now_ exist, may\nbe permitted to believe that a thing can be and not be at the same\nmoment, that a part is greater than the whole, and that two and two make\nfive; but we are not ashamed to confess our inability to believe a\ncontradiction. To our understanding, \"possibilities of feeling\" are not\nactualities. They may or may not be realized, and until realized in\nconsciousness, they have no real being. If there be no other background\nof mental phenomena save mere \"possibilities of feeling,\" then present\nfeelings are the only existences, the only reality, and a loss of\nimmediate consciousness, as in narcosis and coma, is the loss of all\npersonality, all self-hood, and of all real being.\n\n[Footnote 240: \"Exam. of Hamilton,\" vol. i. p. 260.]\n\n[Footnote 241: Ibid, p. 262.]\n\n[Footnote 242: Ibid.]\n\n2. What, then, is the verdict of consciousness as to the existence of a\npermanent substance, an abiding existence which is the subject of all\nthe varying phenomena? Of what are we really conscious when we say \"I\nthink,\" \"I feel,\" \"I will?\" Are we simply conscious of thought, feeling,\nand volition, or of a self, a person, which thinks, feels, and wills?\nThe man who honestly and unreservedly accepts the testimony of\nconsciousness in all its integrity must answer at once, _we have an\nimmediate consciousness, not merely of the phenomena of mind, but of a\npersonal self as passively or actively related to the phenomena_. We are\nconscious not merely of the act of volition, but of a self, a power,\nproducing the volition. We are conscious not merely of feeling, but of a\nbeing who is the subject of the feeling. We are conscious not simply of\nthought, but of a real entity that thinks. \"It is clearly a flat\ncontradiction to maintain that I am not immediately conscious of myself,\nbut only of my sensations or volitions. Who, then, is that _I_ that is\nconscious, and how can I be conscious of such states as _mine?_\"[243]\n\n[Footnote 243: Mansel, \"Prolegomena Logica,\" p. 122, and note E, p.\n281.]\n\nThe testimony of consciousness, then, is indubitable that we have a\ndirect, immediate cognition of _self_--I know myself as a distinctly\nexisting being. This permanent self, to which I refer the earlier and\nlater stages of consciousness, the past as well as the present feeling,\nand which I know abides the same under all phenomenal changes,\nconstitutes my personal identity. It is this abiding self which unites\nthe past and the present, and, from the present stretches onward to the\nfuture. We know self immediately, as existing, as in active operation,\nand as having permanence--or, in other words, as a \"_substance_.\" This\none immediately presented substance, myself, may be regarded as\nfurnishing a positive basis for that other notion of substance, which is\nrepresentatively thought, as the subject of all sensible qualities.\n\n3. We may now inquire what is the testimony of consciousness as to the\nexistence of the extra-mental world? Are we conscious of perceiving\nexternal objects immediately and in themselves, or only mediately\nthrough some vicarious image or representative idea to which we\nfictitiously ascribe an objective reality?\n\nThe answer of common sense is that we are immediately conscious, in\nperception, of an _ego_ and a _non-ego_ known together, and known in\ncontrast to each other; we are conscious of a perceiving subject, and of\nan external reality, as the object perceived.[244] To state this\ndoctrine of natural realism still more explicitly we add, that we are\nconscious of the immediate perception of certain essential attributes of\nmatter objectively existing. Of these primary qualities, which are\nimmediately perceived as real and objectively existing, we mention\n_extension_ in space and _resistance_ to muscular effort, with which is\nindissolubly associated the idea of _externality_. It is true that\nextension and resistance are only qualities, but it is equally true that\nthey are qualities of something, and of something which is external to\nourselves. Let any one attempt to conceive of extension without\nsomething which is extended, or of resistance apart from something which\noffers resistance, and he will be convinced that we can never know\nqualities without knowing substance, just as we can not know substance\nwithout knowing qualities. This, indeed, is admitted by Mr. Mill.[245]\nAnd if this be admitted, it must certainly be absurd to speak of\nsubstance as something \"unknown.\" Substance is known just as much as\nquality is known, no less and no more.\n\n[Footnote 244: Hamilton, \"Lectures,\" vol. 1. p. 288.]\n\n[Footnote 245: \"Logic,\" bk. i. ch. iii. Sec. 6.]\n\nWe remark, in conclusion, that if the testimony of consciousness is not\naccepted in all its integrity, we are necessarily involved in the\nNihilism of Hume and Fichte; the phenomena of mind and matter are, on\nanalysis, resolved into an absolute nothingness--\"a play of phantasms in\na void.\"[246]\n\n(ii.) We turn, secondly, to the _Materialistic School_ as represented by\nAug. Comte.\n\nThe doctrine of this school is that all knowledge is limited to\n_material_ phenomena--that is, to appearances _perceptible to sense_. We\ndo not know the essence of any object, nor the real mode of procedure of\nany event, but simply its relations to other events, as similar or\ndissimilar, co-existent or successive. These relations are constant;\nunder the same conditions, they are always the same. The constant\nresemblances which link phenomena together, and the constant sequences\nwhich unite them, as antecedent and consequent, are termed _laws_. The\nlaws of phenomena are all we know respecting them. Their essential\nnature and their ultimate causes, _efficient_ or _final_, are unknown\nand inscrutable to us.[247]\n\n[Footnote 246: Masson, \"Recent British Philos.,\" p. 62.]\n\n[Footnote 247: See art. \"Positive Philos. of A. Comte,\" _Westminster\nReview_, April, 1865, p. 162, Am. ed.]\n\nIt is not our intention to review the system of philosophy propounded by\nAug. Comte; we are now chiefly concerned with his denial of all\ncausation.\n\n1. _As to Efficient Causes_.--Had Comte contented himself with the\nassertion that causes lie beyond the field of sensible observation, and\nthat inductive science can not carry us beyond the relations of\nco-existence and succession among phenomena, he would have stated an\nimportant truth, but certainly not a new truth. It had already been\nannounced by distinguished mental philosophers, as, for example, M. de\nBiran and Victor Cousin.[248] The senses give us only the succession of\none phenomenon to another. I hold a piece of wax to the fire and it\nmelts. Here my senses inform me of two successive phenomena--the\nproximity of fire and the melting of wax. It is now agreed among all\nschools of philosophy that this is all the knowledge the senses can\npossibly supply. The observation of a great number of like cases assures\nus that this relation is uniform. The highest scientific generalization\ndoes not carry us one step beyond this fact. Induction, therefore, gives\nus no access to causes beyond phenomena. Still, this does not justify\nComte in the assertion that causes are to us absolutely _unknown_. The\nquestion would still arise whether we have not some faculty of\nknowledge, distinct from sensation, which is adequate to furnish a valid\ncognition of cause. It does not by any means follow that, because the\nidea of causation is not given as a \"physical quaesitum\" at the end of a\nprocess of scientific generalization, it should not be a \"metaphysical\ndatum\" posited at the very beginning of scientific inquiry, as the\nindispensable condition of our being able to cognize phenomena at all,\nand as the law under which all thought, and all conception of the system\nof nature, is alone possible.\n\n[Footnote 248: \"It is now universally admitted that we have no\nperception of the causal nexus in the material world.\"--Hamilton,\n\"Discussions,\" p. 522.]\n\nNow we affirm that the human mind has just as direct, immediate, and\npositive knowledge of _cause_ as it has of _effect._ The idea of cause,\nthe intuition _power_, is given in the immediate consciousness of _mind\nas determining its own_ operations. Our first, and, in fact, our only\npresentation of power or cause, is that of _self as willing_. In every\nact of volition I am fully conscious that it is in my power to form a\nresolution or to refrain from it, to determine on this course of action\nor that; and this constitutes the immediate presentative knowledge of\npower.[249] The will is a power, a power in action, a productive power,\nand, consequently, a cause. This doctrine is stated with remarkable\nclearness and accuracy by Cousin: \"If we seek the notion of cause in the\naction of one ball upon another, as was previously done by Hume, or in\nthe action of the hand upon the ball, or the primary muscles upon the\nextremities, or even in the action of the will upon the muscles, as was\ndone by M. Maine de Biran, we shall find it in none of these cases, not\neven in the last; for it is possible there should be a paralysis of the\nmuscles which deprives the will of power over them, makes it\nunproductive, incapable of being a cause, and, consequently, of\nsuggesting the notion of one. But what no paralysis can prevent is the\naction of the will upon itself, the production of a resolution; that is\nto say, the act of causation entirely mental, the primitive type of all\ncausality, of which all external movements are only symbols more or less\nimperfect. The first cause for us, is, therefore, the _will_, of which\nthe first effect is volition. This is at once the highest and the purest\nsource of the notion of cause, which thus becomes identical with that of\npersonality. And it is the taking possession, so to speak, of the cause,\nas revealed in will and personality, which is the condition for us of\nthe ulterior or simultaneous conception of external, impersonal\ncauses.\"[250]\n\n[Footnote 249: \"It is our _immediate consciousness of effort_, when we\nexert force to put matter in motion, or to oppose and neutralize force,\nwhich gives us this internal conviction of _power_ and _causation_, so\nfar as it refers to the material world, and compels us to believe that\nwhenever we see material objects put in motion from a state of rest, or\ndeflected from their rectilinear paths and changed in their velocities\nif already in motion, it is in consequence of such an _effort_ somehow\nexerted.\"--Herschel's \"Outlines of Astronomy,\" p. 234; see Mansel's\n\"Prolegomena,\" p. 133.]\n\n[Footnote 250: \"Philosophical Fragments,\" Preface to first edition.]\n\nThus much for the origin of the idea of cause. We have the same direct\nintuitive knowledge of cause that we have of effect; but we have not yet\nrendered a full and adequate account of the _principle of causality_. We\nhave simply attained the notion of our personal causality, and we can\nnot arbitrarily substitute our personal causality for all the causes of\nthe universe, and erect our own experience as a law of the entire\nuniverse. We have, however, already seen (Chap. V.) that the belief in\nexterior causation is _necessary_ and _universal_. When a change takes\nplace, when a new phenomenon presents itself to our senses, we can not\navoid the conviction that it must have a cause. We can not even express\nin language the relations of phenomena in time and space, without\nspeaking of causes. And there is not a rational being on the face of the\nglobe--a child, a savage, or a philosopher--who does not instinctively\nand spontaneously affirm that every movement, every change, every new\nexistence, _must_ have a cause. Now what account can philosophy render\nof this universal belief? One answer, and only one, is possible. The\n_reason_ of man (that power of which Comte takes no account) is in fixed\nand changeless relation to the principle of causation, just as _sense_\nis in fixed and changeless relation to exterior phenomena, so that we\ncan not know the external world, can not think or speak of phenomenal\nexistence, except as _effects_. In the expressive and forcible language\nof Jas. Martineau: \"By an irresistible law of thought _all phenomena\npresent themselves to us as the expression of power_, and refer us to a\ncausal ground whence they issue. This dynamic source we neither see, nor\nhear, nor feel; it is given in _thought_, supplied by the spontaneous\nactivity of mind as the correlative prefix to the phenomena\nobserved.\"[251] Unless, then, we are prepared to deny the validity of\nall our rational intuitions, we can not avoid accepting \"this subjective\npostulate as a valid law for objective nature.\" If the intuitions of our\nreason are pronounced deceptive and mendacious, so also must the\nintuitions of the senses be pronounced illusory and false. Our whole\nintellectual constitution is built up on false and erroneous principles,\nand all knowledge of whatever kind must perish by \"the contagion of\nuncertainty.\"\n\n[Footnote 251: \"Essays,\" p. 47.]\n\nComte, however, is determined to treat the idea of causation as an\nillusion, whether under its psychological form, as _will_, or under its\nscientific form, as _force_. He feels that Theology is inevitable if we\npermit the inquiry into causes;[252] and he is more anxious that\ntheology should perish than that truth should prevail. The human will\nmust, therefore, be robbed of all semblance of freedom, lest it should\nsuggest the idea of a Supreme Will governing nature; and human action,\nlike all other phenomena, must be reduced to uniform and necessary law.\nAll feelings, ideas, and principles guaranteed to us by consciousness\nare to be cast out of the account. Psychology, resting on\nself-observation, is pronounced a delusion. The immediate consciousness\nof freedom is a dream. Such a procedure, to say the least of it, is\nhighly unphilosophical; to say the truth about it, it is obviously\ndishonest. Every fact of human nature, just as much as every fact of\nphysical nature, must be accepted in all its integrity, or all must be\nalike rejected. The phenomena of mind can no more be disregarded than\nthe phenomena of matter. Rational intuitions, necessary and universal\nbeliefs, can no more be ignored than the uniform facts of\nsense-perception, without rendering a system of knowledge necessarily\nincomplete, and a system of truth utterly impossible. Every one truth is\nconnected with every other truth in the universe. And yet Comte demands\nthat a large class of facts, the most immediate and direct of all our\ncognitions, shall be rejected because they are not in harmony with the\nfundamental assumption of the positive philosophy that all knowledge is\nconfined to _phenomena perceptible to sense_. Now it were just as easy\nto cast the Alps into the Mediterranean as to obliterate from the human\nintelligence the primary cognitions of immediate consciousness, or to\nrelegate the human reason from the necessary laws of thought. Comte\nhimself can not emancipate his own mind from a belief in the validity of\nthe testimony of consciousness. How can he know himself as distinct from\nnature, as a living person, as the same being he was ten years ago, or\neven yesterday, except by an appeal to consciousness? Despite his\nearnestly-avowed opinions as to the inutility and fallaciousness of all\npsychological inquiries, he is compelled to admit that \"the phenomena of\nlife\" are \"_known by immediate consciousness_.\"[253] Now the knowledge\nof our personal freedom rests on precisely the same grounds as the\nknowledge of our personal existence. The same \"immediate consciousness\"\nwhich attests that I exist, attests also, with equal distinctness and\ndirectness, that I am self-determined and free.\n\n[Footnote 252: \"The _inevitable tendency_ of our intelligence is towards\na philosophy radically theological, so often as we seek to penetrate, on\nwhatever pretext, into the intimate nature of phenomena\" (vol. iv. p.\n664).]\n\n[Footnote 253: \"Positive Philos,\" vol. ii. p. 648.]\n\nIn common with most atheistical writers, Comte is involved in the fatal\ncontradiction of at one time assuming, and at another of denying the\nfreedom of the will, to serve the exigencies of his theory. To prove\nthat the order of the universe can not be the product of a Supreme\nIntelligence, he assumes that the products of mind must be characterized\nby freedom and variety--the phenomena of mind must not be subject to\nuniform and necessary laws; and inasmuch as the phenomena presented by\nexternal nature are subject to uniform and changeless laws, they can not\nbe the product of mind. \"Look at the whole frame of things,\" says he;\n\"how can it be the product of mind--of a supernatural Will? Is it not\nsubject to regular laws, and do we not actually obtain _prevision_ of\nits phenomena? If it were the product of mind, its order would be\nvariable and free.\" Here, then, it is admitted that _freedom is an\nessential characteristic of mind_. And this admission is no doubt a\nthoughtless, unconscious betrayal of the innate belief of all minds in\nthe freedom of the will. But when Comte comes to deal with this freedom\nas an objective question of philosophy, when he directs his attention to\nthe only will of which we have a direct and immediate knowledge, he\ndenies freedom and variety, and asserts in the most arbitrary manner\nthat the movements of the mind, like all the phenomena of nature, must\nbe subject to uniform, changeless, and necessary laws. And if we have\nnot yet been able to reduce the movements of mind, like the movements of\nthe planets, to statistics, and have not already obtained accurate\nprevision of its successions or sequences as we have of physical\nphenomena, it is simply the consequence of our inattention to, or\nignorance of, all the facts. We answer, there are no facts so directly\nand intuitively known as the facts of consciousness; and, therefore, an\nargument based upon our supposed ignorance of these facts is not likely\nto have much weight against our immediate consciousness of personal\nfreedom. There is not any thing we know so immediately, so certainly, so\npositively, as this fact--_we are free_.\n\nThe word \"force,\" representing as it does a subtile menial conception,\nand not a phenomenon of sense, must also be banished from the domains of\nPositive Science as an intruder, lest its presence should lend any\ncountenance to the idea of causation. \"Forces in mechanics are only\n_movements_, produced, or tending to be produced.\" In order to \"cancel\naltogether the old metaphysical notion of force,\" another form of\nexpression is demanded. It is claimed that all we do know or can\npossibly know is the successions of phenomena in time. What, then, is\nthe term which henceforth, in our dynamics, shall take the place of\n\"force?\" Is it \"Time-succession?\" Then let any one attempt to express\nthe various forms and intensities of movement and change presented to\nthe senses (as _e.g._, the phenomena of heat, electricity, galvanism,\nmagnetism, muscular and nervous action, etc.) in terms of\nTime-succession, and he will at once become conscious of the utter\nhopelessness of physics, without the hyperphysical idea of force, to\nrender itself intelligible.[254] What account can be rendered of\nplanetary motion if the terms \"centrifugal force\" and \"centripetal\nforce\" are abandoned? \"From the two great conditions of every Newtonian\nsolution, viz., projectile impulse and centripetal tendency, eject the\nidea of _force_, and what remains? The entire conception is simply made\nup of this, and has not the faintest existence without it. It is useless\nto give it notice to quit, and pretend that it is gone when you have\nonly put a new name upon the door. We must not call it 'attraction,'\nlest there should seem to be a _power_ within; we are to speak of it\nonly as 'gravitation,' because that is only 'weight,' which is nothing\nbut a 'fact,' as if it were not a fact that holds a power, a true\ndynamic affair, which no imagination can chop into incoherent\nsuccessions.[255] Nor is the evasion more successful when we try the\nphrase, 'tendency of bodies to mutual approach.' The approach itself may\nbe called a phenomenon; but the 'tendency' is no phenomenon, and can not\nbe attributed by us to the bodies without regarding them as the\nresidence of force. And what are we to say of the _projectile impulse_\nin the case of the planets? Is that also a phenomenon? Who witnessed and\nreported it? Is it not evident that the whole scheme of physical\nastronomy is a resolution of observed facts into dynamic equivalents,\nand that the hypothesis posits for its calculations not phenomena, but\nproper forces? Its logic is this: _If_ an impulse of certain intensity\nwere given, and _if_ such and such mutual attractions were constantly\npresent, then the sort of motions which we observe in the bodies of our\nsystem _would follow_. So, however, they also would _if_ willed by an\nOmnipotent Intelligence.\"[256] It is thus clearly evident that human\nscience is unable to offer any explanation of the existing order of the\nuniverse except in terms expressive of Power or Force; that, in fact,\nall explanations are utterly unintelligible without the idea of\ncausation. The language of universal rational intuition is, \"all\nphenomena are the expression of power;\" the language of science is,\n\"every law implies a force.\"\n\n[Footnote 254: See Grote's \"Essay on Correlation of Physical Forces,\"\npp. 18-20; and Martineau's \"Essays,\" p. 135.]\n\n[Footnote 255: \"Gravity is a real _power_ of whose agency we have daily\nexperience.\"--Herschel, \"Outlines of Astronomy,\" p. 236.]\n\n[Footnote 256: Martineau's \"Essays,\" p. 56.]\n\nIt is furthermore worthy of being noted that, in the modern doctrine of\nthe Correlation and Conservation of Forces, science is inevitably\napproaching the idea that all kinds of force are but forms or\nmanifestations of some _one_ central force issuing from some _one_\nfountain-head of power. Dr. Carpenter, perhaps the greatest living\nphysiologist, teaches that \"the form of force _which may be taken as the\ntype of all the rest_\" is the consciousness of living effort in\nvolition.[257] All force, then, is of one type, and that type is mind;\nin its last analysis external causation may be resolved into Divine\nenergy. Sir John Herschel does not hesitate to say that \"it is\nreasonable to regard the force of gravitation as the direct or indirect\nresult of a consciousness or will exerted somewhere.\"[258] The humble\nChristian may, therefore, feel himself amply justified in still\nbelieving that \"power belongs to God;\" that it is through the Divine\nenergy \"all things are, and are upheld;\" and that \"in God we live, and\nmove, and have our being;\" he is the Great First Cause, the\nFountain-head of all power.\n\n[Footnote 257: \"Human Physiology,\" p. 542.]\n\n[Footnote 258: \"Outlines of Astronomy,\" p. 234.]\n\n2. _As to Final Causes_--that is, reasons, purposes, or ends _for_ which\nthings exist--these, we are told by Comte, are all \"disproved\" by\nPositive Science, which rigidly limits us to \"the history of _what is_,\"\nand forbids all inquiry into reasons _why it is_. The question whether\nthere be any intelligent purpose in the order and arrangement of the\nuniverse, is not a subject of scientific inquiry at all; and whenever it\nhas been permitted to obtrude itself, it has thrown a false light over\nthe facts, and led the inquirer astray.\n\nThe discoveries of modern astronomy are specially instanced by Comte as\ncompletely overthrowing the notion of any conscious design or\nintelligent purpose in the universe. The order and stability of the\nsolar system are found to be the _necessary_ consequences of\ngravitation, and are adequately explained without any reference to\npurposes or ends to be fulfilled in the disposition and arrangement of\nthe heavenly bodies. \"With persons unused to the study of the celestial\nbodies, though very likely informed on other parts of natural\nphilosophy, astronomy has still the reputation of being a science\neminently religious, as if the famous words, 'The heavens declare the\nglory of God, had lost none of their truth... No science has given more\nterrible shocks to the doctrine of _final causes_ than astronomy.[259]\nThe simple knowledge of the movement of the earth must have destroyed\nthe original and real foundation of this doctrine--the idea of the\nuniverse subordinated to the earth, and consequently to man. Besides,\nthe accurate exploration of the solar system could not fail to dispel\nthat blind and unlimited admiration which the general order of nature\ninspires, by showing in the most sensible manner, and in a great number\nof different respects, that the orbs were certainly not disposed in the\nmost advantageous manner, and that science permits us easily to conceive\na better arrangement, by the development of true celestial mechanism,\nsince Newton. All the theological philosophy, even the most perfect, has\nbeen henceforth deprived of its principal intellectual function, the\nmost regular order being thus consigned as necessarily established and\nmaintained in our world, and even in the whole universe, _by the simple\nmutual gravity of its several parts_.\"[260]\n\nThe task of \"conceiving a better arrangement\" of the celestial orbs, and\nimproving the system of the universe generally, we shall leave to those\nwho imagine themselves possessed of that omniscience which comprehends\nall the facts and relations of the actual universe, and foreknows all\nthe details and relations of all possible universes so accurately as to\nbe able to pronounce upon their relative \"advantages.\" The arrogance of\nthese critics is certainly in startling and ludicrous contrast with the\naffected modesty which, on other occasions, restrains them from\n\"imputing any intentions to nature.\" It is quite enough for our purpose\nto know that the tracing of evidences of _design_ in those parts of\nnature accessible to our observation is an essentially different thing\nfrom the construction of a scheme of _optimism_ on _a priori_ grounds\nwhich shall embrace a universe the larger portion of which is virtually\nbeyond the field of observation. We are conscious of possessing some\nrational data and some mental equipment for the former task, but for the\nlatter we feel utterly incompetent.[261]\n\n[Footnote 259: In a foot-note Comte adds: \"Nowadays, to minds\nfamiliarized betimes with the true astronomical philosophy, the heavens\ndeclare no other glory than that of Hipparchus, Kepler, Newton, and all\nthose who have contributed to the ascertainment of their laws.\" It seems\nremarkable that the great men who _ascertained_ these laws did not see\nthat the saying of the Psalmist was emptied of all meaning by their\ndiscoveries. No persons seem to have been more willing than these very\nmen named to ascribe all the glory to Him who _established_ these laws.\nKepler says: \"The astronomer, to whom God has given to see more clearly\nwith his inward eye, from what he has discovered, both can and will\nglorify God;\" and Newton says: \"This beautiful system of sun, planets,\ncomets could have its origin in no other way than by the purpose and\ncommand of an intelligent and powerful Being. We admire him on account\nof his perfections, we venerate and worship him on account of his\ngovernment.\"--Whewell's \"Astronomy and Physics,\" pp. 197, 198.]\n\n[Footnote 260: \"Positive Philosophy,\" vol. ii. pp. 36-38; Tulloch,\n\"Theism,\" p. 115.]\n\n[Footnote 261: Chalmers's \"Institutes of Theology,\" vol. i. pp. 117,\n118.]\n\nThe only plausible argument in the above quotation from Comte is, that\nthe whole phenomena of the solar system are adequately explained by the\nlaw of gravitation, without the intervention of any intelligent purpose.\nLet it be borne in mind that it is a fundamental principle of the\nPositive philosophy that all human knowledge is necessarily confined to\nphenomena _perceptible to sense_, and that the fast and highest\nachievement of human science is to observe and record \"the invariable\nrelations of resemblance and succession among phenomena.\" We can not\npossibly know any thing of even the existence of \"causes\" or \"forces\"\nlying back of phenomena, nor of \"reasons\" or \"purposes\" determining the\nrelations of phenomena. The \"law of gravitation\" must, therefore, be\nsimply the statement of a fact, the expression of an observed order of\nphenomena. But the simple statement of a fact is no _explanation_ of the\nfact. The formal expression of an observed order of succession among\nphenomena is no _explanation_ of that order. For what do we mean by an\nexplanation? Is it not a \"making plain\" to the understanding? It is, in\nshort, a complete answer to the questions _how_ is it so? and _why_ is\nit so? Now, if Comte denies to himself and to us all knowledge of\nefficient and final causation, if we are in utter ignorance of \"forces\"\noperating in nature, and of \"reasons\" for which things exist in nature,\nhe can not answer either question, and consequently nothing is\nexplained.\n\nPractically, however, Comte regards gravitation as a force. The order of\nthe solar system has been established and is still maintained by the\nmutual gravity of its several parts. We shall not stop here to note the\ninconsistency of his denying to us the knowledge of, even the existence\nof, force, and yet at the same time assuming to treat gravitation as a\nforce really adequate to the explanation of the _how_ and _why_ of the\nphenomena of the universe, without any reference to a supernatural will\nor an intelligent mind. The question with which we are immediately\nconcerned is whether gravitation _alone_ is adequate to the explanation\nof the phenomena of the heavens? A review _in extenso_ of Comte's answer\nto this question would lead us into all the inextricable mazes of the\nnebular hypothesis, and involve us in a more extended discussion than\nour space permits and our limited scientific knowledge justifies. For\nthe masses of the people the whole question of cosmical development\nresolves itself into \"a balancing of authorities;\" they are not in a\nposition to verify the reasonings for and against this theory by actual\nobservation of astral phenomena, and the application of mathematical\ncalculus; they are, therefore, guided by balancing in their own minds\nthe statements of the distinguished astronomers who, by the united\nsuffrages of the scientific world, are regarded as \"authorities.\" For\nus, at present, it is enough that the nebular hypothesis is rejected by\nsome of the greatest astronomers that have lived. We need only mention\nthe names of Sir William Herschel, Sir John Herschel, Prof. Nichol, Earl\nRosse, Sir David Brewster, and Prof. Whewell.\n\nBut if we grant that the nebular hypothesis is entitled to take rank as\nan established theory of the development of the solar system, it by no\nmeans proves that the solar system was formed without the intervention\nof intelligence and design. On this point we shall content ourselves\nwith quoting the words of one whose encyclopaedian knowledge was\nconfessedly equal to that of Comte, and who in candor and accuracy was\ncertainly his superior. Prof. Whewell, in his \"Astronomy and Physics,\"\nsays: \"This hypothesis by no means proves that the solar system was\nformed without the intervention of intelligence and design. It only\ntransfers our view of the skill exercised and the means employed to\nanother part of the work; for how came the sun and its atmosphere to\nhave such materials, such motions, such a constitution, and these\nconsequences followed from their primordial condition? How came the\nparent vapor thus to be capable of coherence, separation, contraction,\nsolidification? How came the laws of its motion, attraction, repulsion,\ncondensation, to be so fixed as to lead to a beautiful and harmonious\nsystem in the end? How came it to be neither too fluid nor too\ntenacious, to contract neither too quickly nor too slowly for the\nsuccessive formation of the several planetary bodies? How came that\nsubstance, which at one time was a luminous vapor, to be at a subsequent\nperiod solids and fluids of many various kinds? What but design and\nintelligence prepared and tempered this previously-existing element, so\nthat it should, by its natural changes, produce such an orderly\nsystem\"?[262] \"_The laws of motion alone will not produce the regularity\nwhich we admire in the motion of the heavenly bodies_. There must be an\noriginal adjustment of the system on which these laws are to act; a\nselection of the arbitrary quantities which they are to involve; a\nprimitive cause which shall dispose the elements in due relation to each\nother, in order that regular recurrence may accompany constant change,\nand that perpetual motion may be combined with perpetual\nstability.\"[263]\n\n[Footnote 262: \"Astronomy and Physics,\" p. 109.]\n\n[Footnote 263: Chalmers's \"Institutes of Theology,\" vol. i. p. 119.]\n\nThe harmony of the solar system in all its phenomena does not depend\nupon the operation of any _one_ law, but from the special adjustment of\nseveral laws. There are certain agents operating throughout the entire\nsystem which have different properties, and which require special\nadjustment to each other, in order to their beneficial operation. 1st.\nThere is _Gravitation,_ prevailing apparently through all space. But it\ndoes not prevail alone. It is a force whose function is to balance other\nforces of which we know little, except that these, again, are needed to\nbalance the force of gravitation. Each force, if left to itself, would\nbe the destruction of the universe. Were it not for the force of\ngravitation, the centrifugal forces which impel the planets would fling\nthem off into space. Were it not for these centrifugal forces, the force\nof gravitation would dash them against the sun. The ultimate fact of\nastronomical science, therefore, is not the law of gravitation, but the\n_adjustment_ between this law and other laws, so as to produce and\nmaintain the existing order.[264] 2d. There is _Light_, flowing from\nnumberless luminaries; and _Heat_, radiating everywhere from the warmer\nto the colder regions; and there are a number of adjustments needed in\norder to the beneficial operation of these agents. Suppose we grant that\nby merely mechanical causes the sun became the centre of our system, how\ndid it become also the _source of its vivifying influences_? \"How was\nthe fire deposited on this hearth? How was the candle placed on this\ncandlestick?\" 3d. There is an all-pervading _Ether_, through which light\nis transmitted, which offers resistance to the movement of the planetary\nand cometary bodies, and tends to a dissipation of mechanical energy,\nand which needs to be counter-balanced by well-adjusted arrangements to\nsecure the stability of the solar system. All this balancing of opposite\nproperties and forces carries our minds upward towards Him who holds the\nbalances in his hands, and to a Supreme Intelligence on whose\nadjustments and collocations the harmony and stability of the universe\ndepends.[265]\n\n[Footnote 264: Duke of Argyll, \"Reign of Law,\" pp. 91, 92.]\n\n[Footnote 265: M'Cosh, \"Typical Forms and Special Ends,\" ch. xiii.]\n\nThe recognition of all teleology of organs in vegetable and animal\nphysiology is also persistently repudiated by this school. When Cuvier\nspeaks of the combination of organs in such order as to adapt the animal\nto the part which it has to play in nature, Geoffroy Saint Hilaire\nreplies, \"I know nothing of animals which have to play a part in\nnature.\" \"I have read, concerning fishes, that, because they live in a\nmedium which resists more than air, their motive forces are calculated\nso as to give them the power of progression under these circumstances.\nBy this mode of reasoning, you would say of a man who makes use of\ncrutches, that he was originally destined to the misfortune of having a\nleg paralyzed or amputated.[266] \"With a modesty which savors of\naffectation, he says, \"I ascribe no intentions to God, for I mistrust\nthe feeble powers of my reason. I observe facts merely, and go no\nfarther. I only pretend to the character of the historian of _what is_.\"\n\"I can not make Nature an intelligent being who does nothing in vain,\nwho acts by the shortest mode, who does all for the best.\"[267] All the\nsupposed consorting of means to ends which has hitherto been regarded as\nevidencing Intelligence is simply the result of \"the elective affinities\nof organic elements\" and \"the differentiation of organs\" consequent\nmainly upon exterior conditions. \"_Functions are a result, not an end_.\nThe animal undergoes the kind of life that his organs impose, and\nsubmits to the imperfections of his organization. The naturalist studies\nthe play of his apparatus, and if he has the right of admiring most of\nits parts, he has likewise that of showing the imperfection of other\nparts, and the practical uselessness of those which fulfill no\nfunctions.\"[268] And it is further claimed that there are a great many\nstructures which are clearly useless; that is, they fulfill no purpose\nat all. Thus there are monkeys, which have no thumbs for use, but only\nrudimental thumb-bones hid beneath the skin; the wingless bird of New\nZealand (Apteryx) has wing-bones similarly developed, which serve no\npurpose; young whalebone whales are born with teeth that never cut the\ngums, and are afterwards absorbed; and some sheep have horns turned\nabout their ears which fulfill no end. And inasmuch as there are some\norganisms in nature which serve no purpose of utility, it is argued\nthere is no design in nature; things are _used_ because there are\nantecedent conditions favorable for _use_, but that use is not the _end_\nfor which the organ exists. The true naturalist will never say, \"Birds\nhave wings given them _in order_ to fly;\" he will rather say, \"Birds fly\n_because_ they have wings.\" The doctrine of final causes must,\ntherefore, be abandoned.\n\n[Footnote 266: Whewell, \"History of Inductive Sciences,\" vol. ii. p.\n486.]\n\n[Footnote 267: Id., ib., vol. ii. p. 490.]\n\n[Footnote 268: Martin's \"Organic Unity in Animals and Vegetables,\" in M.\nQ. Review, January, 1863.]\n\nIt is hardly worth while to reply to the lame argument of Geoffroy,\nwhich needs a \"crutch\" for its support. The very illustration,\nundignified and irrelevant as it is, tells altogether against its\nauthor. For, first, the crutch is certainly a _contrivance_ designed for\nlocomotion; secondly, the length and strength and lightness of the\ncrutch are all matters of calculation and _adjustment_; and, thirdly,\nall the adaptations of the crutch are well-considered, in order to\nenable the lame man to walk; the function of the crutch is the final\ncause of its creation. This crutch is clearly out of place in Geoffroy's\nargument, and utterly breaks down. It is in its place in the\nteleological argument, and stands well, though it may not behave as well\nas the living limb. The understanding of a child can perceive that the\ndesign-argument does not assert that men were intended to have amputated\nlimbs, but that crutches are designed for those whose limbs are\nparalyzed or amputated.\n\nThe existence of useless members, of rudimentary and abortive limbs,\ndoes seem, at first sight, to be unfavorable to the idea of supremacy of\npurpose and all-pervading design. It should be remarked, however, that\nthis is an argument based upon our ignorance, and not upon our\nknowledge. It does not by any means follow that because we have\ndiscovered no reasons for their existence, therefore there are no\nreasons. Science, in enlarging its conquests of nature, is perpetually\ndiscovering the usefulness of arrangements of which our fathers were\nignorant, and the reasons of things which to their minds, were\nconcealed; and it ill becomes the men who so far \"mistrust their own\nfeeble powers\" as to be afraid of ascribing any intention to God or\nnature, to dogmatically affirm there is no purpose in the existence of\nany thing. And then we may ask, what right have these men to set up the\nidea of \"utility\" as the only standard to which the Creator must\nconform? How came they to know that God is a mere \"utilitarian;\" or, if\nthey do not believe in God, that nature is a miserable \"Benthamite?\" Why\nmay not the idea of beauty, of symmetry, of order, be a standard for the\nuniverse, as much as the idea of utility, or mere subordination to some\npractical end? May not conformity to one grand and comprehensive plan,\nsweeping over all nature, be perfectly compatible with the adaptation of\nindividual existences to the fulfillment of special ends? In civil\narchitecture we have conformity to a general plan; we have embellishment\nand ornament, and we have adaptation to a special purpose, all combined;\nwhy may not these all be combined in the architecture of the universe?\nThe presence of any one of these is sufficient to prove design, for mere\nornament or beauty is itself a purpose, an object, and an end. The\nconcurrence of all these is an overwhelming evidence of design. Wherever\nfound, they are universally recognized as the product of intelligence;\nthey address themselves at once to the intelligence of man, and they\nplace him in immediate relation to and in deepest sympathy with the\nIntelligence which gave them birth. He that formed the eye of man to\nsee, and the heart of man to admire beauty, shall He not delight in it?\nHe that gave the hand of man its cunning to create beauty, shall He not\nhimself work for it? And if man can and does combine both \"ornament\" and\n\"use\" in one and the same implement or machine, why should not the\nCreator of the world do the same? \"When the savage carves the handle of\nhis war-club, the immediate purpose of his carving is to give his own\nhand a firmer hold. But any shapeless scratches would be enough for\nthis. When he carves it in an elaborate pattern, he does so for the love\nof ornament, and to satisfy the sense of beauty.\" And so \"the harmonies,\non which all beauty depends, are so connected in nature that _use_ and\n_ornament_ may often both arise out of the same conditions.\"[269]\n\n[Footnote 269: Duke of Argyll, \"Reign of Law,\" p. 203.]\n\nThe \"true naturalist,\" therefore, recognizes two great principles\npervading the universe--_a principle of order_--a unity of plan, and _a\nprinciple of special adaptation_, by which each object, though\nconstructed upon a general plan, is at the same time accommodated to the\nplace it has to occupy and the purpose it has to serve. In other words,\nthere is _homology of structure_ and _analogy of function_, conformity\nto _archetypal forms_ and _Teleology of organs_, in wonderful\ncombination. Now, in the Materialistic school, it has been the prevalent\npractice to set up the unity of plan in animal structures, in opposition\nto the principle of Final Causes: Morphology has been opposed to\nTeleology. But in nature there is no such opposition; on the contrary,\nthere is a beautiful co-ordination. The same bones, in different\nanimals, are made subservient to the widest possible diversity of\nfunctions. The same limbs are converted into fins, paddles, wings, legs,\nand arms. \"No comparative anatomist has the slightest hesitation in\nadmitting that the pectoral fin of a fish, the wing of a bird, the\npaddle of the dolphin, the fore-leg of a deer, the wing of a bat, and\nthe arm of a man, are the same organs, notwithstanding that their forms\nare so varied, and the uses to which they are applied so unlike each\nother.\"[270] All these are homologous in structure--they are formed\nafter an ideal archetype or model, but that model or type is variously\nmodified to adapt the animal to the sphere of life in which it is\ndestined to move, and the organ itself to the functions it has to\nperform, whether swimming, flying, walking, or burrowing, or that varied\nmanipulation of which the human hand is capable. These varied\nmodifications of the vertebrated type, for special purposes, are\nunmistakable examples of final causation. Whilst the silent members, the\nrudimental limbs instanced by Oken, Martins, and others--as fulfilling\nno purpose, and serving no end, exist in conformity to an ideal\narchetype on which the bony skeletons of all vertebrated animals are\nformed,[271] and which has never been departed from since time began.\nThis type, or model, or plan, is, however, itself an evidence of\n_design_ as much as the plan of a house. For to what standard are we\nreferring when we say that two limbs are morphologically the same? Is it\nnot an _ideal_ plan, a _mental_ pattern, a metaphysical conception? Now\nan _ideal_ implies a mind which preconceived the idea, and in which\nalone it really exists. It is only as \"an _order of Divine thought_\"\nthat the doctrine of animal homologies is at all intelligible; and\nHomology is, therefore, the science which traces the outward embodiment\nof a Divine Idea.[272] The principle of intentionality or final\ncausation, then, is not in any sense invalidated by the discovery of \"a\nunity of plan\" sweeping through the entire universe.\n\n[Footnote 270: Carpenter's \"Comparative Physiology,\" p. 37.]\n\n[Footnote 271: Agassiz, \"Essay on Classification,\" p. 10.]\n\n[Footnote 272: Whewell's \"History of Inductive Sciences,\" vol. i. p.\n644; \"The Reign of Law,\" p. 208; Agassiz, \"Essay on Classification,\" pp.\n9-11.]\n\nWe conclude that we are justly entitled to regard \"the principle of\nintentionality\" as a primary and necessary law of thought, under which\nwe can not avoid conceiving and describing the facts of the\nuniverse--_the special adaptation of means to ends necessarily implies\nmind_. Whenever and wherever we observe the adaptation of an organism to\nthe fulfillment of a special end, we can not avoid conceiving of that\n_end_ as foreseen and premeditated, the _means_ as selected and adjusted\nwith a view to that end, and creative energy put forth to secure the\nend--all which is the work of intelligence and will.[273] And we can not\ndescribe these facts of nature, so as to render that account\nintelligible to other minds, without using such terms as \"contrivance,\"\n\"purpose,\" \"adaptation,\" \"design.\" A striking illustration of this may\nbe found in Darwin's volume \"On the Fertilization of Orchids.\" We select\nfrom his volume with all the more pleasure because he is one of the\nwriters who enjoins \"caution in ascribing intentions to nature.\" In one\nsentence he says: \"The _Labellum_ is developed into a long nectary, _in\norder_ to attract _Lepidoptera_; and we shall presently give reasons for\nsuspecting the nectar is _purposely_ so lodged that it can be sucked\nonly slowly, _in order_ to give time for the curious chemical quality of\nthe viscid matter settling hard and dry\" (p. 29). Of one particular\nstructure he says: \"This _contrivance_ of the guiding ridges may be\ncompared to the little instrument sometimes used for guiding a thread\ninto the eye of a needle.\" The notion that every organism has a use or\npurpose seems to have guided him in his discoveries. \"The strange\nposition of the _Labellum_, perched on the summit of the column, ought\nto have shown me that here was the place for experiment. I ought to have\nscorned the notion that the _Labellum_ was thus placed _for no good\npurpose_. I neglected this plain guide, and for a long time completely\nfailed to understand the flower\" (p. 262).[274]\n\n[Footnote 273: Carpenter's \"Principles of Comparative Physiology,\" p.\n723.]\n\n[Footnote 274: Edinburgh Review, October, 1862; article, \"The\nSupernatural.\"]\n\nSo that the assumption of final causes has not, as Bacon affirms, \"led\nmen astray\" and \"prejudiced further discovery;\" on the contrary, it has\nhad a large share in every discovery in anatomy and physiology, zoology\nand botany. The use of every organ has been discovered by starting from\nthe assumption _that it must have some use_. The belief in a creative\npurpose led Harvey to discover the circulation of the blood. He says:\n\"When I took notice that the valves in the veins of so many parts of the\nbody were so placed that they gave a free passage to the blood towards\nthe heart, but opposed the passage of the venal blood the contrary way,\nI was incited to imagine that so provident a cause as Nature has not\nplaced so many valves _without design_, and no design seemed more\nprobable than the circulation of the blood.\"[275] The wonderful\ndiscoveries in Zoology which have immortalized the name of Cuvier were\nmade under the guidance of this principle. He proceeds on the\nsupposition not only that animal forms have _some_ plan, _some_ purpose,\nbut that they have an intelligible plan, a discoverable purpose. At the\noutset of his \"_Regne Animal_\" he says: \"Zoology has a principle of\nreasoning which is peculiar to it, and which it employs to advantage on\nmany occasions; that is, the principle of the conditions of existence,\ncommonly called final causes.\"[276] The application of this principle\nenabled him to understand and arrange the structures of animals with\nastonishing clearness and completeness of order; and to restore the\nforms of extinct animals which are found in the rocks, in a manner which\nexcited universal admiration, and has commanded universal assent.\nIndeed, as Professor Whewell remarks, at the conclusion of his \"History\nof the Inductive Sciences,\" \"those who have been discoverers in science\nhave generally had minds, the disposition of which was to believe in an\n_intelligent Maker_ of the universe, and that the scientific\nspeculations which produced an opposite tendency were generally those\nwhich, though they might deal familiarly with known physical truths, and\nconjecture boldly with regard to unknown, do not add to the number of\nsolid generalizations.\"[277]\n\n[Footnote 275: \"History of Inductive Science,\" vol. ii. p. 449.]\n\n[Footnote 276: \"History of Inductive Science,\" vol. ii. p. 2, Eng. ed.]\n\n[Footnote 277: Ibid., vol. ii. p. 491. A list of the \"great discoverers\"\nis given in his \"Astronomy and Physics,\" bk. iii. ch. v.]\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VII.\n\nTHE UNKNOWN GOD (_continued_).\n\nIS GOD COGNIZABLE BY REASON? (_continued_).\n\n\n      \"The faith which can not stand unless buttressed by\n      contradictions is built upon the sand. The profoundest faith\n      is faith in the unity of truth. If there is found any\n      conflict in the results of a right reason, no appeal to\n      practical interests, or traditionary authority, or\n      intuitional or theological faith, can stay the flood of\n      skepticism.\"--ABBOT.\n\nIn the previous chapter we have considered the answers to this question\nwhich are given by the Idealistic and Materialistic schools; it devolves\nupon us now to review (iii.) the position of the school of _Natural\nRealism_ or _Natural Dualism_, at the head of which stands Sir William\nHamilton.\n\nIt is admitted by this school that philosophic knowledge is \"the\nknowledge of effects as dependent on their causes,\"[278] and \"of\nqualities as inherent in substances.\"[279]\n\n[Footnote 278: \"Lectures on Metaphysics,\" vol. i. p. 58.]\n\n[Footnote 279: Ibid., vol. i. p. 138.]\n\n1. _As to Events and Causes_.--\"Events do not occur isolated, apart, by\nthemselves; they occur and are conceived by us only in connection. Our\nobservation affords us no example of a phenomenon which is not an\neffect; nay, our thought can not even realize to itself the possibility\nof a phenomenon without a cause. By the necessity we are under of\nthinking some cause for every phenomenon, and by our original ignorance\nof what particular causes belong to what particular effects, it is\nrendered impossible for us to acquiesce in the mere knowledge of the\nfact of the phenomenon; on the contrary, we are determined, we are\nnecessitated to regard each phenomenon as _only partially known until we\ndiscover the causes_ on which it depends for its existence.[280]\nPhilosophic knowledge is thus, in its widest acceptation, the knowledge\nof effects as dependent on causes. Now what does this imply? In the\nfirst place, as every cause to which we can ascend is only an effect, it\nfollows that it is the scope, that is, the aim, of philosophy to trace\nup the series of effects and causes until we arrive at _causes which are\nnot in themselves effects_,\"[281]--that is, to ultimate and final\ncauses. And then, finally, \"Philosophy, as the knowledge of effects in\ntheir causes, necessarily tends, not towards a plurality of ultimate or\nfinal causes, but towards _one_ alone.\"[282]\n\n[Footnote 280: Ibid., vol. i. p. 56.]\n\n[Footnote 281: \"Lectures on Metaphysics,\" vol. i. p. 58.]\n\n[Footnote 282: Ibid., vol. i. p. 60.]\n\n2. _As to Qualities and Substance, or Phenomena and Reality_.--As\nphenomena appear only in conjunction, we are compelled, by the\nconstitution of our nature, to think them conjoined in and by something;\nand as they are phenomena, we can not think them phenomena of nothing,\nbut must regard them as properties or qualities of something.[283] Now\nthat which manifests its qualities--in other words, that in which the\nappearing causes inhere, that to which they belong--is called their\n_subject_, or _substance_, or _substratum_.[284] The subject of one\ngrand series of phenomena (as, _e.g._, extension, solidity, figure,\netc.) is called _matter_, or _material substance_. The subject of the\nother grand series of phenomena (as, _e.g._, thought, feeling, volition,\netc.) is termed _mind_, or _mental substance_. We may, therefore, lay it\ndown as an undisputed truth that consciousness gives, as an ultimate\nfact, a primitive duality--a knowledge of the _ego_ in relation and\ncontrast to the _non-ego_, and a knowledge of the _non-ego_ in relation\nand contrast to the _ego_[285] Natural Dualism thus establishes the\nexistence of two worlds of _mind_ and _matter_ on the immediate\nknowledge we possess of both series of phenomena; whilst the Cosmothetic\nIdealists discredit the veracity of consciousness as to our immediate\nknowledge of material phenomena, and, consequently, our _immediate\nknowledge of the existence of matter_.[286]\n\n[Footnote 283: Ibid., vol. i. p. 137.]\n\n[Footnote 284: Ibid., vol. i. p. 137.]\n\n[Footnote 285: Ibid., vol. i. p. 292.]\n\n[Footnote 286: Ibid., vol. i. pp. 292, 295.]\n\nThe obvious doctrine of the above quotations is, that we have an\nimmediate knowledge of the \"_existence_ of matter\" as well as of \"the\n_phenomena_ of matter;\" that is, we know \"_substance_\" as immediately\nand directly as we know \"_qualities_.\" Phenomena are known only as\ninherent in substance; substance is known only as manifesting its\nqualities. We never know qualities without knowing substance, and we can\nnever know substance without knowing qualities. Both are known in one\nconcrete act; substance is known quite as much as quality; quality is\nknown no more than substance. That we have a direct, immediate,\npresentative \"face to face\" knowledge of matter and mind in every act of\nconsciousness is asserted again and again by Hamilton, in his\n\"Philosophy of Perception.\"[287] In the course of the discussion he\nstarts the question, \"_Is the knowledge of mind and matter equally\nimmediate?_\" His answer to this question may be condensed in the\nfollowing sentences. In regard to the immediate knowledge of _mind_\nthere is no difficulty; it is admitted to be direct and immediate. The\nproblem, therefore, exclusively regards the intuitive perception of the\nqualities of _matter_. Now, says Hamilton, \"if we interrogate\nconsciousness concerning the point in question, the response is\ncategorical and clear. In the simplest act of perception I am conscious\nof _myself_ as a perceiving _subject_, and of an external _reality_ as\nthe object perceived; and I am conscious of both existences in the same\nindivisible amount of intuition.\"[288] Again he says, \"I have frequently\nasserted that in perception we are conscious of the external object,\nimmediately and _in itself_.\" \"If, then, the veracity of consciousness\nbe unconditionally admitted--_if the intuitive knowledge of matter and\nmind_, and the consequent reality of their antithesis, be taken as\ntruths,\" the doctrine of Natural Realism is established, and, \"without\nany hypothesis or demonstration, the _reality of mind_ and the _reality\nof matter_.\"[289]\n\n[Footnote 287: Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton, part ii.]\n\n[Footnote 288: Ibid., p. 181.]\n\n[Footnote 289: Ibid., pp. 34, 182.]\n\nNow, after these explicit statements that we have an intuitive knowledge\nof matter and mind--a direct and immediate consciousness of self as a\nreal, \"self-subsisting entity,\" and a knowledge of \"an external reality,\nimmediately and _in itself_,\" it seems unaccountably strange that\nHamilton should assert \"_that all human knowledge, consequently all\nhuman philosophy, is only of the Relative or Phenomenal_;\"[290] and that\n\"_of existence absolutely and in itself we know nothing_.\"[291] Whilst\nteaching that the proper sphere and aim of philosophy is to trace\nsecondary causes up to ultimate or first causes, and that it\n_necessarily tends_ towards one First and Ultimate Cause, he at the same\ntime asserts that \"first causes do not lie within the reach of\nphilosophy,\"[292] and that it can never attain to the knowledge of the\nFirst Cause.[293] \"The Infinite God can not, by us, be comprehended,\nconceived, or thought.\"[294] God, as First Cause, as infinite, as\nunconditioned, as eternal, is to us absolutely \"_The Unknown_.\" The\nscience of Real Being--of Being _in se_--of self-subsisting entities, is\ndeclared to be impossible. All science is only of the phenomenal, the\nconditioned, the relative. Ontology is a delusive dream. Thus, after\npages of explanations and qualifications, of affirmations and denials,\nwe find Hamilton virtually assuming the same position as Comte and\nMill--_all human knowledge is necessarily confined to phenomena_.\n\n[Footnote 290: \"Lectures on Metaphysics,\" vol. i. p. 136]\n\n[Footnote 291: Ibid., vol. i. p. 138.]\n\n[Footnote 292: Ibid., vol. i. p. 58.]\n\n[Footnote 293: Ibid., vol. i. p. 60.]\n\n[Footnote 294: Ibid., vol. ii. p. 375.]\n\nIt has been supposed that the chief glory of Sir William Hamilton rested\nupon his able exposition and defense of the doctrine of Natural Realism.\nThere are, however, indications in his writings that he regarded \"the\nPhilosophy of the Conditioned\" as his grand achievement. The Law of the\nConditioned had \"not been generalized by any previous philosopher;\" and,\nin laying down that law, he felt that he had made a new and important\ncontribution to speculative thought.\n\nThe principles upon which this philosophy is based are:\n\n1. _The Relativity of all Human Knowledge._--Existence is not cognized\nabsolutely and in itself, but only under special modes which are related\nto our faculties, and, in fact, determined by these faculties\nthemselves. All knowledge, therefore, is _relative_--that is, it is of\nphenomena only, and of phenomena \"under modifications determined by our\nown faculties.\" Now, as the Absolute is that which exists out of all\nrelation either to phenomena or to our faculties of knowledge, it can\nnot possibly be _known_.\n\n2. _The Conditionality of all Thinking_.--Thought necessarily supposes\nconditions. \"To think is to condition; and conditional limitation is the\nfundamental law of the possibility of thought. As the eagle can not\nout-soar the atmosphere in which he floats, and by which alone he is\nsupported, so the mind can not transcend the sphere of limitation within\nand through which the possibility of thought is realized. Thought is\nonly of the conditioned, because, as we have said, to think is to\ncondition.\"[295] Now the Infinite is the unlimited, the unconditioned,\nand as such can not possibly be _thought_.\n\n3. _The notion of the Infinite--the Absolute, as entertained by man, is\na mere \"negation of thought._\"--By this Hamilton does not mean that the\nidea of the Infinite is a negative idea. \"The Infinite and the Absolute\nare _only_ the names of two counter _imbecilities_ of the human\nmind\"[296]--that is, a mental inability to conceive an absolute\nlimitation, or an infinite illimitation; an absolute commencement, or an\ninfinite non-commencement. In other words, of the absolute and infinite\nwe have no conception at all, and, consequently, no knowledge.[297]\n\nThe grand law which Hamilton generalizes from the above is, \"_that the\nconceivable is in every relation bounded by the inconceivable_.\" Or,\nagain, \"The conditioned or the thinkable lies between two extremes or\npoles; and these extremes or poles are each of them unconditioned, each\nof them inconceivable, each of them exclusive or contradictory of the\nother.\"[298] This is the celebrated \"Law of the Conditioned.\"\n\n[Footnote 295: \"Discussions,\" p. 21.]\n\n[Footnote 296: Ibid., p. 28.]\n\n[Footnote 297: \"Lectures on Metaphysics,\" vol. ii. pp. 368, 373.]\n\n[Footnote 298: Ibid., vol. ii. p. 373.]\n\nIn attempting a brief criticism of \"the Philosophy of the Conditioned,\"\nwe may commence by inquiring:\n\nI. _What is the real import and significance of the doctrine \"that all\nhuman knowledge is only of the relative or phenomenal_?\"\n\nHamilton calls this \"the great axiom\" of philosophy. That we may\ndistinctly comprehend its meaning, and understand its bearing on the\nsubject under discussion, we must ascertain the sense in which he uses\nthe words \"_phenomenal_\" and \"_relative._\" The importance of an exact\nterminology is fully appreciated by our author; and accordingly, in\nthree Lectures (VIII., IX., X.), he has given a full explication of the\nterms most commonly employed in philosophic discussions. Here the word\n\"_phenomenon_\" is set down as the necessary \"_correlative_\" of the word\n\"_subject_\" or \"_substance_.\" \"These terms can not be explained apart,\nfor each is correlative of the other, each can be comprehended only in\nand through its correlative. The term '_subject_' is used to denote the\nunknown (?) basis which lies under the various _phenomena_ or properties\nof which we become aware, whether in our external or internal\nexperience.\"[299] \"The term '_relative_' is _opposed_ to the term\n'_absolute_;' therefore, in saying that we know only the relative, I\nvirtually assert that we know nothing absolutely, that is, _in and for\nitself, and without relation to us and our faculties_.\"[300] Now, in the\nphilosophy of Sir William Hamilton, \"the absolute\" is defined as \"that\nwhich is aloof from relation\"--\"that which is out of all relation.\"[301]\nThe _absolute_ can not, therefore, be \"_the correlative_\" of the\nconditioned--can not stand in any relation to the phenomenal. The\n_subject,_ however, is the necessary correlative of the phenomenal, and,\nconsequently, the subject and the absolute are not identical.\nFurthermore, Hamilton tells us the subject _may be comprehended_ in and\nthrough its correlative--the phenomenon; but the absolute, being aloof\nfrom all relation, can not be comprehended or conceived at all. \"The\nsubject\" and \"the absolute\" are, therefore, not synonymous terms; and,\nif they are not synonymous, then their antithetical terms, \"phenomenal\"\nand \"relative,\" can not be synonymous.\n\n[Footnote 299: \"Lectures on Metaphysics,\" vol. i. p. 148.]\n\n[Footnote 300: Ibid., vol. i. p. 137.]\n\n[Footnote 301: \"Discussions,\" p. 21.]\n\nIt is manifest, however, that Hamilton does employ these terms as\nsynonymous, and this we apprehend is the first false step in his\nphilosophy of the conditioned. \"All our knowledge is of the relative\n_or_ phenomenal.\" Throughout the whole of Lectures VIII. and IX., in\nwhich he explains the doctrine of the relativity of human knowledge,\nthese terms are used as precisely analogous. Now, in opposition to this,\nwe maintain that the relative is not always the phenomenal. A thing may\nbe \"in relation\" and yet not be a phenomenon. \"The subject or substance\"\nmay be, and really is, on the admission of Hamilton himself,\n_correlated_ to the phenomenon. The ego, \"the conscious _subject_\"[302]\nas a \"_self-subsisting entity_\" is necessarily related to the phenomena\nof thought, feeling, etc.; but no one would repudiate the idea that the\nconscious subject is a mere phenomenon, or \"series of phenomena,\" with\nmore indignation than Hamilton. Notwithstanding the contradictory\nassertion, \"that the _subject_ is unknown,\" he still teaches, with equal\npositiveness, \"that in every act of perception I am conscious of self,\nas a perceiving _subject.\"_ And still more explicitly he says: \"As\nclearly as I am conscious of existing, so clearly am I conscious, at\nevery moment of my existence, that the conscious Ego is not itself a\nmere modification [a phenomenon], nor a series of modifications\n[phenomena], but that it is itself different from all its modifications,\nand a _self-subsisting entity_.\"[303] Again: \"Thought is possible only\nin and through the consciousness of Self. The Self, the I, is recognized\nin every act of intelligence as the _subject_ to which the act belongs.\nIt is I that perceive, I that imagine, I that remember, etc.; these\nspecial modes are all only the phenomena of the I.\"[304] We are,\ntherefore, conscious of the _subject_ in the most immediate, and direct,\nand intuitive manner, and the subject of which we are conscious can not\nbe \"_unknown_.\" We regret that so distinguished a philosophy should deal\nin such palpable contradictions; but it is the inevitable consequence of\nviolating that fundamental principle of philosophy on which Hamilton so\nfrequently and earnestly insists, viz., \"that the testimony of\nconsciousness must be accepted in all its integrity\".\n\n[Footnote 302: Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton (edited by O.W.\nWight), p. 181.]\n\n[Footnote 303: \"Lectures on Metaphysics,\" vol. i. p. 373.]\n\n[Footnote 304: Ibid., vol. i. p. 166.]\n\nIt is thus obvious that, with proper qualifications, we may admit _the\nrelativity of human knowledge_, and yet at the same time reject the\ndoctrine of Hamilton, _that all human knowledge is only of the\nphenomenal_.\n\n\"The relativity of human knowledge,\" like most other phrases into which\nthe word \"relative\" enters, is vague, and admits of a variety of\nmeanings. If by this phrase is meant \"that we can not know objects\nexcept as related to our faculties, or as our faculties are related to\nthem,\" we accept the statement, but regard it as a mere truism leading\nto no consequences, and hardly worth stating in words. It is simply\nanother way of saying that, in order to an object's being known, it must\ncome within the range of our intellectual vision, and that we can only\nknow as much as we are capable of knowing. Or, if by this phrase is\nmeant \"that we can only know things by and through the phenomena they\npresent,\" we admit this also, for we can no more know substances apart\nfrom their properties, than we can know qualities apart from the\nsubstances in which they inhere. Substances can be known only in and\nthrough their phenomena. Take away the properties, and the thing has no\nlonger any existence. Eliminate extension, form, density, etc., from\nmatter, and what have you left? \"The thing in itself,\" apart from its\nqualities, is nothing. Or, again, if by the relativity of knowledge is\nmeant \"that all consciousness, all thought are relative,\" we accept this\nstatement also. To conceive, to reflect, to know, is to deal with\ndifference and relation; the relation of subject and object; the\nrelation of objects among themselves; the relation of phenomena to\nreality, of becoming to being. The reason of man is unquestionably\ncorrelated to that which is beyond phenomena; it is able to apprehend\nthe necessary relation between phenomena and being, extension and space,\nsuccession and time, event and cause, the finite and the infinite. We\nmay thus admit the _relative character of human thought_, and at the\nsame time deny that it is an ontological disqualification.[305]\n\nIt is not, however, in any of these precise forms that Hamilton holds\nthe doctrine of the relativity of knowledge. He assumes a middle place\nbetween Reid and Kant, and endeavors to blend the subjective idealism of\nthe latter with the realism of the former. \"He identifies the\n_phenomenon_ of the German with the _quality_ of the British\nphilosophy,\"[306] and asserts, as a regulative law of thought, that the\nquality implies the substance, and the phenomenon the noumenon, but\nmakes the substratum or noumenon (the object in itself) unknown and\nunknowable. The \"phenomenon\" of Kant was, however, something essentially\ndifferent from the \"quality\" of Reid. In the philosophy of Kant,\n_phenomenon_ means an object as we envisage or represent it to\nourselves, in opposition to the _noumenon_, or a thing as it is in\nitself. The phenomenon is composed, in part, of subjective elements\nsupplied by the mind itself; as regards intuition, the forms of space\nand time; as regards thought, the categories of Quantity, Quality,\nRelation, and Modality. To perceive a thing in itself would be to\nperceive it neither in space nor in time. To think a thing in itself\nwould be not to think it under any of the categories. The phenomenal is\nthus the product of the inherent laws of our own constitution, and, as\nsuch, is the sum and limit of all our knowledge.[307]\n\n[Footnote 305: Martineau's \"Essays,\" p. 234.]\n\n[Footnote 306: M'Cosh's \"Defense of Fundamental Truth,\" p. 106.]\n\n[Footnote 307: Mansel's \"Lectures on the Philosophy of Kant,\" pp. 21,\n22.]\n\nThis, in its main features, is evidently the doctrine propounded by\nHamilton. The special modes in which existence is cognizable\" are\npresented to, and known by, the mind _under modifications determined by\nthe faculties themselves_.\"[308] This doctrine he illustrates by the\nfollowing supposition: \"Suppose the total object of consciousness in\nperception is=12; and suppose that the external reality contributes 6,\nthe material sense 3, and the mind 3; this may enable you to form some\nrude conjecture of the nature of the object of perception.\"[309] The\nconclusion at which Hamilton arrives, therefore, is that things are not\nknown to us as they exist, but simply as they appear, and as our minds\nare capable of perceiving them.\n\n[Footnote 308: Hamilton's \"Lectures on Metaphysics,\" vol. i. p. 148.]\n\n[Footnote 309: Hamilton's \"Lectures on Metaphysics,\" vol. ii. p. 129;\nand also vol. i. p. 147.]\n\nLet us test the validity of this majestic deliverance. No man is\njustified in making this assertion unless, 1. He knows things as they\nexist; 2. He knows things not only as they exist but as they appear; 3.\nHe is able to compare things as they exist with the same things as they\nappear. Now, inasmuch as Sir William Hamilton affirms we do not know\nthings as they exist, but only as they appear, how can he know that\nthere is any difference between things as they exist and as they appear?\nWhat is this \"_thing in itself_\" about which Hamilton has so much to\nsay, and yet about which he professes to know nothing? We readily\nunderstand what is meant by the _thing_; it is the object as existing--a\nsubstance manifesting certain characteristic qualities. But what is\nmeant by _in itself_? There can be no _in itself_ besides or beyond the\n_thing_. If Hamilton means that \"the thing itself\" is the thing apart\nfrom all relation, and devoid of all properties or qualities, we do not\nacknowledge any such thing. A thing apart from all relation, and devoid\nof all qualities, is simply pure nothing, if such a solecism may be\npermitted. With such a definition of Being _in se_, the logic of Hegel\nis invincible, \"Being and Nothing are identical.\"\n\nAnd now, if \"the thing in itself\" be, as Hamilton says it is, absolutely\n_unknown_, how can he affirm or deny any thing in regard to it? By what\nright does he prejudge a hidden reality, and give or refuse its\npredicates; as, for example, that it is conditioned or unconditioned, in\nrelation or aloof from relation, finite or infinite? Is it not plain\nthat, in declaring a thing in its inmost nature or essence to be\ninscrutable, it is assumed to be partially _known_? And it is obvious,\nnotwithstanding some unguarded expressions to the contrary, that\nHamilton does regard \"the thing in itself\" as partially known. \"The\nexternal reality\" is, at least, six elements out of twelve in the \"total\nobject of consciousness.\"[310] The primary qualities of matter are known\nas in the things themselves; \"they develop themselves with rigid\nnecessity out of the simple datum of _substance occupying space_.\"[311]\n\"The Primary Qualities are apprehended as they are in bodies\"--\"they are\nthe attributes of _body as body_,\" and as such \"are known immediately in\nthemselves,\"[312] as well as mediately by their effects upon us. So that\nwe not only know by direct consciousness certain properties of things as\nthey exist in things themselves, but we can also deduce them in an _a\npriori_ manner. \"The bare notion of matter being given, the Primary\nQualities may be deduced _a priori_; they being, in fact, only\nevolutions of the conditions which that notion necessarily implies.\" If,\nthen, we know the qualities of things as \"in the things themselves,\"\n\"the things themselves\" must also be, at least, partially known; and\nHamilton can not consistently assert the relativity of _all_ knowledge.\nEven if it be granted that our cognitions of objects are only in part\ndependent on the objects themselves, and in part on elements superadded\nby our organism, or by our minds, it can not warrant the assertion that\nall our knowledge, but only the part so added, is relative. \"The\nadmixture of the relative element not only does not take away the\nabsolute character of the remainder, but does not even (if our author is\nright) prevent us from recognizing it. The confusion, according to him,\nis not inextricable. It is for us 'to analyze and distinguish what\nelements,' in an 'act of knowledge,' are contributed by the object, and\nwhat by the organs or by the mind.\"[313]\n\n[Footnote 310: \"Lectures on Metaphysics,\" vol. ii. p. 129.]\n\n[Footnote 311: Philosophy of Sir Wm. Hamilton, p. 357]\n\n[Footnote 312: Ibid., pp. 377, 378.]\n\n[Footnote 313: Mill's \"Examination of Hamilton's Philosophy,\" vol. i. p.\n44.]\n\nAdmitting the relative character of human thought as a psychological\nfact, Mr. Martineau has conclusively shown that this law, instead of\nvisiting us with disability to transcend phenomena, _operates as a\nrevelation of what exists beyond_. \"The finite body cut out before our\nvisual perception, or embraced by the hands, lies as an island in the\nemptiness around, and without comparative reference to this can not be\nrepresented: the same experience which gives us the definite object\ngives us also the infinite space; and both terms--the limited appearance\nand the unlimited ground--are apprehended with equal certitude and\nclearness, and furnished with names equally susceptible of distinct use\nin predication and reasoning. The transient successions, for instance,\nthe strokes of a clock, which we count, present themselves to us as\ndotted out upon a line of permanent duration; of which, without them, we\nshould have no apprehension, but which as their condition, is\nunreservedly known.\"[314]\n\n\"What we have said with regard to space and time applies equally to the\ncase of Causation. Here, too, the finite offered to perception\nintroduces to an Infinite supplied by thought. As a definite body\nreveals also the space around, and an interrupted succession exhibits\nthe uniform time beneath, so does the passing phenomenon demand for\nitself a power beneath. The space, and time, and power, not being part\nof the thing perceived, but its conditions, are guaranteed to us,\ntherefore, on the warrant, not of sense, but of intellect.\"[315]\n\n\"We conclude, then, on reviewing these examples of Space, and Time, and\nCausation, that ontological ideas introducing us to certain fixed\nentities belong no less to our knowledge than scientific ideas of\nphenomenal disposition and succession.\"[316] In these instances of\nrelation between a phenomenon given in perception and an entity as a\nlogical condition, the correlatives are on a perfect equality of\nintellectual validity, and the relative character of human thought is\nnot an ontological disqualification, but a cognitive power.\n\n[Footnote 314: \"Essays,\" pp. 193,194.]\n\n[Footnote 315: Ibid., p. 197.]\n\n[Footnote 316: Ibid., p. 195.]\n\nThere is a thread of fallacy running through the whole of Hamilton's\nreasonings, consequent upon a false definition of the Absolute at the\noutset. The Absolute is defined as _that which exists in and by itself,\naloof from and out of all relation_. An absolute, as thus defined, does\nnot and can not exist; it is a pure abstraction, and, in fact, a pure\nnon-entity. \"The Absolute expresses perfect independence both in being\nand in action, and is applicable to God as self-existent.\"[317] It may\nmean the absence of all _necessary_ relation, but it does not mean the\nabsence of _all_ relation. If God can not _voluntarily_ call a finite\nexistence into being, and thus stand in the relation of cause, He is\ncertainly under the severest limitation. But surely that is not a limit\nwhich substitutes choice for necessity. To be unable to know God out of\nall relation--that is, apart from his attributes, apart from his created\nuniverse, is not felt by us to be any privation at all. A God without\nattributes, and out of all relations, is for us no God at all. God as a\nbeing of unlimited perfection, as infinitely wise and good, as the\nunconditioned cause of all finite being, and, consequently, as\nvoluntarily related to nature and humanity, we can and do know; this is\nthe living and true God. The God of a false philosophy is not the true\nGod; the pure abstractions of Hegel and Hamilton are negations, and not\nrealities.\n\n2. We proceed to consider the second fundamental principle of Hamilton's\nphilosophy of the conditioned, viz., that \"conditional limitation is the\nfundamental law of the possibility of thought,\" and that thought\nnecessarily imposes conditions on its object.\n\n\"Thought,\" says Hamilton, \"can not transcend consciousness:\nconsciousness is only possible under the antithesis of a subject and an\nobject known only in correlation, and _mutually limiting each\nother_\"[318] Thought necessarily supposes conditions; \"to think is\nsimply to condition,\" that is, to predicate limits; and as the infinite\nis the unlimited, it can not be thought. The very attempt to think the\ninfinite renders it finite; therefore there can be no infinite _in\nthought_, and, consequently, the infinite can not be known.\n\n[Footnote 317: Calderwood's \"Philosophy of the Infinite,\" p. 179.]\n\n[Footnote 318: \"Discussions,\" p. 21.]\n\nIf by \"the infinite in thought\" is here meant the infinite compassed or\ncontained in thought, we readily grant that the finite can not contain\nthe infinite; it is a simple truism which no one has ever been so\nfoolish as to deny. Even Cousin is not so unwise as to assert the\nabsolutely comprehensibility of God. \"In order absolutely to comprehend\nthe Infinite, it is necessary to have an infinite power of\ncomprehension, and this is not granted to us.\"[319] A finite mind can\nnot have \"an infinite thought.\" But it by no means follows that, because\nwe can not have infinite thought, we can have no clear and definite\nthought of or concerning the Infinite. We have a precise and definite\nidea of infinitude; we can define the idea; we can set it apart without\ndanger of being confounded with another, and we can reason concerning\nit. There is nothing we more certainly and intuitively know than that\nspace is infinite, and yet we can not comprehend or grasp within the\ncompass of our thought the infinite space. We can not form an _image_ of\ninfinite space, can not traverse it in perception, or represent it by\nany combination of numbers; but we can have the _thought_ of it as an\nidea of Reason, and can argue concerning it with precision and\naccuracy.[320] Hamilton has an idea of the Infinite; he defines it; he\nreasons concerning it; he says \"we must believe in the infinity of God.\"\nBut how can he define the Infinite unless he possesses some knowledge,\nhowever limited, of the infinite Being? How can he believe in the\ninfinity of God if he has no definite idea of infinitude? He can not\nreason about, can not affirm or deny any thing concerning, that of which\nhe knows absolutely nothing.\n\n[Footnote 319: \"Lectures on History of Philosophy,\" vol. i. p. 104.]\n\n[Footnote 320: \"To form an _image_ of any infinitude--be it of time or\nspace [or power]; to go mentally through it by successive steps of\nrepresentation--is indeed impossible; not less so than to traverse it in\nour finite perception and experience. But to have the _thought_ of it as\nan idea of the reason, not of the phantasy, and assign that thought a\nconstituent place in valid beliefs and consistent reasonings, appears to\nus as not only possible, but inevitable.\"--Martineau's \"Essays,\" p.\n205.]\n\nThe grand logical barrier which Hamilton perpetually interposes to all\npossible cognition of God _as infinite_ is, that to think is to\ncondition--to limit; and as the Infinite is the unconditioned, the\nunlimited, therefore \"the Infinite can not be _thought_.\" We grant at\nonce that all human thought is limited and finite, but, at the same\ntime, we emphatically deny that the limitation of our thought imposes\nany conditions or limits upon the object of thought. No such affirmation\ncan be consistently made, except on the Hegelian hypothesis that\n\"Thought and Being are identical;\" and this is a maxim which Hamilton\nhimself repudiates. Our thought does not create, neither does it impose\nconditions upon, any thing.\n\nThere is a lurking sophism in the whole phraseology of Hamilton in\nregard to this subject. He is perpetually talking about \"thinking a\nthing\"--\"thinking the Infinite.\" Now we do not think a thing, but we\nthink _of_ or _concerning_ a thing. We do not think a man, neither does\nour thought impose any conditions upon the man, so that he must be as\nour thought conceives or represents him; but our thought is of the man,\nconcerning or about the man, and is only so far true and valid as it\nconforms to the objective reality. And so we do not \"think the\nInfinite;\" that is, our thought neither contains nor conditions the\nInfinite Being, but our thoughts are _about_ the Infinite One; and if we\ndo not think of Him as a being of infinite perfection, our thought is\nneither worthy, nor just, nor true.[321]\n\n[Footnote 321: Calderwood's \"Philosophy of the Infinite,\" pp. 255, 256.]\n\nBut we are told the law of all thought and of all being is\ndetermination; consequently, negation of some quality or some\npotentiality; whereas the Infinite is \"_the One and the All_\" (ti En kai\nPyn),[322] or, as Dr. Mansel, the disciple and annotator of Hamilton,\naffirms, \"the sum of all reality,\" and \"the sum of all possible modes of\nbeing.\"[323] The Infinite, as thus defined, must include in itself all\nbeing, and all modes of being, actual and possible, not even excepting\nevil. And this, let it be observed, Dr. Mansel has the hardihood to\naffirm. \"If the Absolute and the Infinite is an object of human\nconception at all, this, and none other, is the conception\nrequired.\"[324] \"The Infinite Whole,\" as thus defined, can not be\nthought, and therefore it is argued the Infinite God can not be known.\nSuch a doctrine shocks our moral sense, and we shrink from the thought\nof an Infinite which includes evil. There is certainly a moral\nimpropriety, if not a logical impossibility, in such a conception of\nGod.\n\n[Footnote 322: Hamilton's \"Lectures on Metaphysics,\" Appendix, vol. ii.\np. 531.]\n\n[Footnote 323: \"Limits of Religious Thought,\" p. 76.]\n\n[Footnote 324: Ibid.]\n\nThe fallacy of this reasoning consists in confounding a _supposed_\nQuantitative Infinite with _the_ Qualitative Infinite--the totality of\nexistence with the infinitely perfect One. \"Qualitative infinity is a\nsecondary predicate; that is, the attribute of an attribute, and is\nexpressed by the adverb _infinitely_ rather than the adjective\n_infinite_. For instance, it is a strict use of language to say, that\nspace is infinite, but it is an elliptical use of language to say, God\nis infinite. Precision of language would require us to say, God is\ninfinitely good, wise, and great; or God is good, and his goodness is\ninfinite. The distinction may seem trivial, but it is based upon an\nimportant difference between the infinity of space and time on the one\nhand, and the infinity of God on the other. Neither philosophy nor\ntheology can afford to disregard the difference. Quantitative Infinity\nis illimitation by _quantity_. Qualitative Infinity is illimitation by\n_degree_. Quantity and degree alike imply finitude, and are categories\nof the finite alone. The danger of arguing from the former kind of\ninfinitude to the latter can not be overstated. God alone possesses\nQualitative Infinity, which is strictly synonymous with _absolute\nperfection_; and the neglect of the distinction between this and\nQuantitative Infinity, leads irresistibly to pantheistic and\nmaterialistic notions. Spinozism is possible only by the elevation of\n'infinite extension' to the dignity of a divine attribute. Dr. Samuel\nClarke's identification of God's immensity with space has been shown by\nMartin to ultimate in Pantheism. From ratiocinations concerning the\nincomprehensibility of infinite space and time, Hamilton and Mansel pass\nat once to conclusions concerning the incomprehensibility of God. The\ninconsequence of all such arguments is absolute; and if philosophy\ntolerates the transference of spatial or temporal analogies to the\nnature of God, she must reconcile herself to the negation of his\npersonality and spirituality.\"[325] An Infinite Being, quite remote from\nthe notion of _quantity_, may and does exist; which, on the one hand,\ndoes not include finite existence, and, on the other hand, does not\nrender the finite impossible to thought. Without contradiction they may\ncoexist, and be correlated.\n\nThe thought will have already suggested itself to the mind of the reader\nthat for Hamilton to assert that the Infinite, as thus defined (the One\nand the All), is absolutely unknown, is certainly the greatest\nabsurdity, for in that case nothing can be known. This Infinite must be\nat least partially known, or all human knowledge is reduced to zero. To\nthe all-inclusive Infinite every thing affirmative belongs, not only to\nbe, but to be known. To claim it for being, yet deny it to thought, is\nthus impossible. The Infinite, which includes all real existence, is\ncertainly possible to cognition.\n\nThe whole argument as regards the conditionating nature of all thought\nis condensed into four words by Spinoza--\"_Omnis determinatio est\nnegatio_;\" all determination is negation. Nothing can be more arbitrary\nor more fallacious than this principle. It arises from the confusion of\ntwo things essentially different--_the limits of a being_, and _its\ndeterminate and distinguishing characteristics_. The limit of a being is\nits imperfection; the determination of a being is its perfection. The\nless a thing is determined, the more it sinks in the scale of being; the\nmost determinate being is the most perfect being. \"In this sense God is\nthe only being absolutely determined. For there must be something\nindetermined in all finite beings, since they have all imperfect powers\nwhich tend towards their development after an indefinite manner. God\nalone, the complete Being in whom all powers are actualized, escapes by\nHis own perfection from all progress, and development, and\nindetermination.\"[326]\n\n[Footnote 325: North American Review, October, 1864, article, \"The\nConditioned and the Unconditioned,\" pp. 422, 423. See also Young's\n\"Province of Reason,\" p. 72; and Calderwood's \"Philosophy of the\nInfinite,\" p. 183.]\n\n[Footnote 326: Saisset, \"Modern Pantheism,\" vol. ii. p. 71.]\n\nAll real being must be determined; only pure Nothing can be\nundetermined. _Determination_ is, however, one thing; and _limitation_\nis essentially another thing. \"Even space and time, though cognized\nsolely by negative characteristics, are determined in so far as\ndifferentiated from the existences they contain; but this\ndifferentiation involves no limitation of their infinity.\" If all\ndistinction is determination, and if all determination is negation, that\nis (as here used), limitation, then the infinite, as distinguished from\nthe finite, loses its own infinity, and either becomes identical with\nthe finite, or else vanishes into pure nothing. If Hamilton will persist\nin affirming that all determination is limitation, he has no other\nalternatives but to accept the doctrine of Absolute Nihilism, or of\nAbsolute Identity. If the Absolute is the indeterminate--that is, no\nattributes, no consciousness, no relations--it is pure non-being. If the\nInfinite is \"the One and All,\" then there is but one substance, one\nabsolute entity.\n\nHerbert Spencer professes to be carrying out, a step farther, the\ndoctrine put into shape by Hamilton and Mansel, viz., \"the philosophy of\nthe Unconditioned.\" In other words, he carries that doctrine forward to\nits rigidly logical consequences, and utters the last word which\nHamilton and Mansel dare not utter--\"Apprehensible by us there is no\nGod.\" The Ultimate Reality is absolutely unknown; it can not be\napprehended by the human intellect, and it can not present itself to the\nintellect at all. This Ultimate Reality can not be _intelligent_,\nbecause to think is to condition, and the Absolute is the unconditioned;\ncan not be _conscious_, because all consciousness is of plurality and\ndifference, and the Absolute is one; can not be _personal_, because\npersonality is determination or limitation, and the Infinite is the\nillimitable. It is \"audacious,\" \"irreverent,\" \"impious,\" to apply any of\nthese predicates to it; to regard it as Mind, or speak of it as\nRighteous.[327] The ultimate goal of the philosophy of the Unconditioned\nis a purely subjective Atheism.\n\n[Footnote 327: \"First Principles,\" pp. 111, 112.]\n\nAnd yet of this Primary Existence--inscrutable, and absolutely\nunknown--Spencer knows something; knows as much as he pleases to know.\nHe knows that this \"ultimate of ultimates is _Force_,\"[328] an\n\"_Omnipresent Power_,\"[329] is \"_One_\" and \"_Eternal_.\"[330] He knows\nalso that it can not be intelligent, self-conscious, and a\npersonality.[331] This is a great deal to affirm and deny of an\nexistence \"absolutely unknown.\" May we not be permitted to affirm of\nthis hidden and unknown something that it is _conscious Mind_,\nespecially as Mind is admitted to be the only analogon of Power; and\n\"the _force_ by which we produce change, and which serves to symbolize\nthe causes of changes in general, is the final disclosure of\nanalysis.\"[332]\n\n[Footnote 328: \"First Principles,\" p. 235.]\n\n[Footnote 329: Ibid., p. 99.]\n\n[Footnote 330: Ibid., p. 81.]\n\n[Footnote 331: Ibid., pp. 108-112.]\n\n[Footnote 332: Ibid., p. 235.]\n\n3. We advance to the review of the third fundamental principle of\nHamilton's philosophy of the Unconditioned, viz., that the terms\ninfinite and absolute are names for a \"mere negation of thought\"--a\n\"mental impotence\" to think, or, in other words, the absence of all the\nconditions under which thought is possible.\n\nThis principle is based upon a distinction between \"positive\" and\n\"negative\" thought, which is made with an air of wonderful precision and\naccuracy in \"the Alphabet of Human Thought.\"[333] \"Thinking is\n_positive_ when existence is predicated of an object.\" \"Thinking is\n_negative_ when existence is not attributed to an object.\" \"Negative\nthinking,\" therefore, is not the thinking of an object as devoid of this\nor that particular attribute, but as devoid of all attributes, and thus\nof all existence; that is, it is \"the negation of all\nthought\"--_nothing_. \"When we think a thing, that is done by conceiving\nit as possessed of certain modes of being or qualities, _and the sum of\nthese qualities constitutes its concept or notion_.\" \"When we perform an\nact of negative thought, this is done by thinking _something_ as _not_\nexisting in this or that determinate mode; and when we think it as\nexisting in no determinate mode, _we cease to think at all--it becomes a\nnothing_.\"[334] Now the Infinite, according to Hamilton, can not be\nthought in any determinate mode; therefore we do not think it at all,\nand therefore it is for us \"a logical Non-entity.\"\n\n[Footnote 333: \"Discussions,\" Appendix I. p. 567.]\n\n[Footnote 334: \"Logic,\" pp. 54, 55.]\n\nIt is barely conceivable that Hamilton might imagine himself possessed\nof this singular power of \"performing an act of negative thought\"--that\nis, of thinking and not thinking at once, or of \"thinking something\"\nthat \"becomes nothing;\" we are not conscious of any such power. To think\nwithout an object of thought, or to think of something without any\nqualities, or to think \"something\" which in the act of thought melts\naway into \"nothing,\" is an absurdity and a contradiction. We can not\nthink about nothing. All thought must have an object, and every object\nmust have some predicate. Even space has some predicates--as\nreceptivity, unity, and infinity. Thought can only be realized by\nthinking something existing, and existing in a determinate manner; and\nwhen we cease to think something having predicates, we cease to think at\nall. This is emphatically asserted by Hamilton himself.[335] \"Negative\nthinking\" is, therefore, a meaningless phrase, a contradiction in terms;\nit is no thought at all. We are cautioned, however, against regarding\n\"the negation of thought\" as \"a negation of all mental ability.\" It is,\nwe are told, \"an attempt to think, and a failure in the attempt.\" An\nattempt to think about _what_? Surely it must be about some object, and\nan object which is _known_ by some sign, else there can be no thought.\nLet any one make the attempt to think without something to think about,\nand he will find that both the process and the result are blank\nnothingness. All thought, therefore, as Calderwood has amply shown, is,\nmust be, _positive_. \"Thought is nothing else than the comparison of\nobjects known; and as knowledge is always positive, so must our thought\nbe. All knowledge implies an object _known_; and so all thought involves\nan object about which we think, and must, therefore, be positive--that\nis, it must embrace within itself the conception of certain qualities as\nbelonging to the object.\"[336]\n\n[Footnote 335: \"Logic,\" p. 55.]\n\n[Footnote 336: \"Philosophy of the Infinite,\" p. 272.]\n\nThe conclusion of Hamilton's reasoning in regard to \"negative thinking\"\nis, that we can form no notion of the Infinite Being. We have no\npositive idea of such a Being. We can think of him only by \"the thinking\naway of every characteristic\" which can be conceived, and thus \"ceasing\nto think at all.\" We can only form a \"negative concept,\" which, we are\ntold, \"is in fact no concept at all.\" We can form only a \"negative\nnotion,\" which, we are informed, \"is only the negation of a notion.\"\nThis is the impenetrable abyss of total gloom and emptiness into which\nthe philosophy of the conditions leads us at last.[337]\n\n[Footnote 337: Whilst Spencer accepts the general doctrine of Hamilton,\nthat the Ultimate Reality is inscrutable, he argues earnestly against\nhis assertion that the Absolute is a \"mere negation of thought.\"\n\n\"Every one of the arguments by which the relativity of our knowledge is\ndemonstrated distinctly postulates the _positive existence_ of something\nbeyond the relative. To say we can not know the Absolute is, by\nimplication, to affirm there _is_ an Absolute. In the very denial of our\npower to learn _what_ the Absolute is, there lies hidden the assumption\n_that_ it is; and the making of this assumption proves that the Absolute\nhas been present to the mind, not as nothing, but as _something_. And so\nwith every step in the reasoning by which the doctrine is upheld, the\nNoumenon, everywhere named as the antithesis of the Phenomenon, is\nthroughout thought as actuality. It is rigorously impossible to conceive\nthat our knowledge is a knowledge of appearances only, without, at the\nsame time, conceiving a Reality of which these are appearances, for\nappearances without reality are unthinkable.\n\n\"Truly to represent or realize in thought any one of the propositions of\nwhich the argument consists, the unconditioned must be represented as\n_positive_, and not negative. How, then, can it be a legitimate\nconclusion from the argument that our consciousness of it is negative?\nAn argument, the very construction of which assigns to a certain term a\ncertain meaning, but which ends in showing that this term has no\nmeaning, is simply an elaborate suicide. Clearly, then, the very\ndemonstration that a definite consciousness [comprehension] of the\nAbsolute is impossible, unavoidably presupposes an indefinite\nconsciousness of it [an apprehension].\"--\"First Principles,\" p. 88.]\n\nStill we have the word _infinite_, and we have _the notion_ which the\nword expresses. This, at least, is spared to us by Sir William Hamilton.\nHe who says we have no such notion asks the question _how we have it?_\nHere it may be asked, how have we, then, the word infinite? How have we\nthe notion which this word expresses? The answer to this question is\ncontained in the distinction of positive and negative thought.\n\nWe have a positive concept of a thing when we think of it by the\nqualities of which it is the complement. But as the attribution of\nqualities is an affirmation, as affirmation and negation are relatives,\nand as relatives _are known only in and through each other_, we can not,\ntherefore, have a _consciousness_ of the affirmation of any quality\nwithout having, at the same time, the _correlative consciousness_ of its\nnegation. Now the one consciousness is a positive, the other\nconsciousness is a negative notion; and as all language is the reflex of\nthought, the positive and negative notions are expressed by positive and\nnegative names. Thus it is with the Infinite.[338] Now let us carefully\nscrutinize the above deliverance. We are told that \"relatives are known\nonly in and through each other;\" that is, such relatives as _finite_ and\n_infinite_ are known necessarily in the same act of thought. The\nknowledge of one is as necessary as the knowledge of the other. We can\nnot have a consciousness of the one without the correlative\nconsciousness of the other. \"For,\" says Hamilton, \"a relation is, in\ntruth, a thought, one and indivisible; and while the thinking a relation\n_necessarily involves the thought of its two terms,_, so it is, with\nequal necessity, itself involved in the thought of either.\" If, then, we\nare _conscious_ of the two terms of the relation in the same \"one and\nindivisible\" mental act--if we can not have \"the consciousness of the\none without the consciousness of the other\"--if space and position, time\nand succession, substance and quality, infinite and finite, are given to\nus in pairs, then 'the _knowledge of one is as necessary as the\nknowledge of the other,_' and they must stand or fall together. The\nfinite is known no more positively than the infinite; the infinite is\nknown as positively as the finite. The one can not be taken and the\nother left. The infinite, discharged from all relation to the finite,\ncould never come into apprehension; and the finite, discharged of all\nrelation to the infinite, is incognizable too. \"There can be no\nobjection to call the one 'positive' and the other 'negative,' provided\nit be understood that _each_ is so with regard to the other, and that\nthe relation is convertible; the finite, for instance, being the\nnegative of the infinite, not less than the infinite of the\nfinite.\"[339]\n\n[Footnote 338: _Logic,_ p. 73.]\n\n[Footnote 339: Martineau's \"Essays,\" p. 237.]\n\nTo say that the finite is comprehensible in and by itself, and the\ninfinite is incomprehensible in and by itself, is to make an assertion\nutterly at variance both with psychology and logic. The finite is no\nmore comprehensible _in itself_ than the infinite. \"Relatives are known\nonly in and through each other.\"[340] \"The conception of one term of a\nrelation necessarily implies that of the other, it being the very nature\nof a relative to be thinkable only through the conjunct thought of its\ncorrelative.\" We comprehend nothing more completely than the infinite;\n\"for the idea of illimitation is as clear, precise, and intelligible as\nthe idea of limitability, which is its basis. The propositions \"A is X\"\n\"A is not X,\" are equally comprehensible; the conceptions A and X are in\nboth cases positive data of experience, while the affirmation and\nnegation consist solely in the copulative or disjunctive nature of the\npredication. Consequently, if X is comprehensible, so is not--X; if the\nfinite is comprehensible, so is the infinite.\"[341]\n\nWhilst denying that the infinite can by us be _known_, Hamilton tells us\nhe is \"far from denying that it is, must, and ought to be\n_believed_.\"[342] \"We must believe in the infinity of God.\"\n\"Faith--belief--is the organ by which we apprehend what is beyond\nknowledge.\"[343] We heartily assent to the doctrine that the Infinite\nBeing is the object of faith, but we earnestly deny that the Infinite\nBeing is not an object of knowledge. May not knowledge be grounded upon\nfaith, and does not faith imply knowledge? Can we not obtain knowledge\nthrough faith? Is not the belief in the Infinite Being implied in our\nknowledge of finite existence? If so, then God as the infinite and\nperfect, God as the unconditioned Cause, is not absolutely \"the\nunknown.\"\n\n[Footnote 340: Hamilton's \"Logic,\" p. 73.]\n\n[Footnote 341: North American Review, October, 1864, article\n\"Conditioned and the Unconditioned,\" pp. 441, 442.]\n\n[Footnote 342: Letter to Calderwood, Appendix, vol. ii. p. 530.]\n\n[Footnote 343: \"Lectures on Metaphysics,\" vol. ii. p. 374.]\n\nA full exposition of Sir William Hamilton's views of _Faith_ in its\nconnection with Philosophy would have been deeply interesting to us, and\nit would have filled up a gap in the interpretation of his system. The\nquestion naturally presents itself, how would he have discriminated\nbetween faith and knowledge, so as to assign to each its province? If\nour notion of the Infinite Being rests entirely upon faith, then upon\nwhat ultimate ground does faith itself rest? On the authority of\nScripture, of the Church, or of reason? The only explicit statement of\nhis view which has fallen in our way is a note in his edition of\nReid.[344] \"We _know_ what rests upon reason; we _believe_ what rests\nupon authority. But reason itself must rest at last upon authority; for\nthe original data of reason do not rest upon reason, but are necessarily\naccepted by reason on the authority of what is beyond itself. These data\nare, therefore, in rigid propriety, Beliefs or Trusts. Thus it is that,\nin the last resort, we must, per force, philosophically admit that\nbelief is the primary condition of reason, and not reason the ultimate\nground of belief.\"\n\n[Footnote 344: P. 760; also Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton, p. 61.]\n\nHere we have, first, an attempted distinction between faith and\nknowledge. \"We _know_ what rests upon reason;\" that is, whatever we\nobtain by deduction or induction, whatever is capable of explication and\nproof, is _knowledge_. \"We _believe_ what rests upon authority;\" that\nis, whatever we obtain by intellectual intuition or pure apperception,\nand is incapable of explication and of proof, is \"a _belief or trust_.\"\nThese instinctive beliefs, which are, as it were, the first principles\nupon which all knowledge rests, are, however, indiscriminately called by\nHamilton \"cognitions,\" \"beliefs,\" \"judgments.\" He declares most\nexplicitly \"that the principles of our knowledge must themselves be\n_knowledges_;\"[345] and these first principles, which are \"the primary\ncondition of reason,\" are elsewhere called \"_a priori cognitions_;\" also\n\"native, pure, or transcendental _knowledge_,\" in contradistinction to\n\"_a posteriori cognitions_,\" or that knowledge which is obtained in the\nexercise of reason.[346] All this confusion results from an attempt to\nput asunder what God has joined together. As Clemens of Alexandria has\nsaid, \"Neither is faith without knowledge, nor knowledge without faith.\"\nAll faith implies knowledge, and all knowledge implies faith. They are\nmingled in the one operation of the human mind, by which we apprehend\nfirst principles or ultimate truths. These have their light and dark\nside, as Hamilton has remarked. They afford enough light to show _that_\nthey are and must be, and thus communicate knowledge; they furnish no\nlight to show _how_ they are and _why_ they are, and under that aspect\ndemand the exercise of faith. There must, therefore, first be something\n_known_ before there can be any _faith_.[347]\n\n[Footnote 345: Ibid., p. 69.]\n\n[Footnote 346: \"Lectures on Metaphysics,\" vol. ii. p. 26.]\n\n[Footnote 347: M'Cosh, \"Intuitions,\" pp. 197, 198; Calderwood,\n\"Philosophy of the Infinite,\" p. 24.]\n\nAnd now we seem to have penetrated to the centre of Hamilton's\nphilosophy, and the vital point may be touched by one crucial question,\n_Upon what ultimate ground does faith itself rest?_ Hamilton says, \"we\nbelieve what rests upon _authority_.\" But what is that authority? I. It\nis not the authority of Divine Revelation, because beliefs are called\n\"instinctive,\" \"native,\" \"innate,\" \"common,\" \"catholic,\"[348] all which\nterms seem to indicate that this \"authority\" lies within the sphere of\nthe human mind; at any rate, this faith does not rest on the authority\nof Scripture. Neither is it the authority of Reason. \"The original data\nof reason [the first principles of knowledge] do not rest upon the\nauthority of reason, but _on the authority of what is beyond itself_.\"\nThe question thus recurs, what is this ultimate ground beyond reason\nupon which faith rests? Does it rest upon any thing, or nothing?\n\n[Footnote 348: Philosophy of Sir Wm. Hamilton, pp. 68, 69.]\n\nThe answer to this question is given in the so-called \"Law of the\nConditioned,\" which is thus laid down: \"_All that is conceivable in\nthought lies between two extremes, which, as contradictory of each\nother, can not both be true, but of which, as mutual contradictories,\none must_.\" For example, we conceive _space_, but we can not conceive it\nas absolutely bounded or infinitely unbounded. We can conceive _time_,\nbut we can not conceive it as having an absolute commencement or an\ninfinite non-commencement. We can conceive of _degree_, but we can not\nconceive it as absolutely limited or as infinitely unlimited. We can\nconceive of _existence_, but not as an absolute part or an infinite\nwhole. Therefore, \"the Conditioned is that which is alone conceivable or\ncogitable; the Unconditioned, that which is inconceivable or\nincogitable. The conditioned, or the thinkable, lies between two\nextremes or poles; and each of these extremes or poles are\nunconditioned, each of them inconceivable, each of them exclusive or\ncontradictory of the other. Of these two repugnant opposites, the one is\nthat of Unconditional or Absolute Limitation; the other that of\nUnconditional or Infinite Illimitation, or, more simply, the Absolute\nand the Infinite; the term _absolute_ expressing that which is finished\nor complete, the term _infinite_ that which can not be terminated or\nconcluded.\"[349]\n\n\"The conditioned is the mean between two extremes--two inconditionates,\nexclusive of each other, neither of which _can be conceived as\npossible_, but of which, on the principle of contradiction, and excluded\nmiddle, _one must be admitted as necessary_. We are thus warned from\nrecognizing the domain of our knowledge as necessarily co-extensive with\nthe horizon of our faith. And by a _wonderful revelation_, we are thus,\nin the very consciousness of our inability to conceive aught above the\nrelative and the finite, _inspired with a belief in_ the existence of\nsomething unconditioned beyond the sphere of all comprehensible\nreality.\"[350] Here, then, we have found the ultimate ground of our\nfaith in the Infinite God. It is built upon a \"mental imbecility,\" and\nbuttressed up by \"contradictions!\"[351]\n\n[Footnote 349: \"Lectures on Metaphysics,\" vol. ii. pp. 368, 374. With\nHamilton, the Unconditioned is a genus, of which the Infinite and\nAbsolute are species.]\n\n[Footnote 350: \"Discussions on Philosophy,\" p. 22.]\n\n[Footnote 351: The warmest admirers of Sir William Hamilton hesitate to\napply the doctrine of the unconditioned to Cause and Free-will. See\n\"Mansel's Prolegom.,\" Note C, p. 265.]\n\nSuch a faith, however, is built upon the clouds, and the whole structure\nof this philosophy is \"a castle in the air\"--an attempt to organize\nNescience into Science, and evoke something out of nothing. To pretend\nto believe in that respecting which I can form no notion is in reality\nnot to believe at all. The nature which compels me to believe in the\nInfinite must supply me some object upon which my belief can take hold.\nWe can not believe in contradictions. Our faith must be a rational\nbelief--a faith in the ultimate harmony and unity of all truth, in the\nveracity and integrity of human reason as the organ of truth; and, above\nall, a faith in the veracity of God, who is the author and illuminator\nof our mental constitution. \"We can not suppose that we are created\ncapable of intelligence in order to be made victims of delusion--that\nGod is a deceiver, and the root of our nature a lie.\"[352] We close our\nreview of Hamilton by remarking:\n\n[Footnote 352: Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton, p. 21.]\n\n1. \"The Law of the Conditioned,\" as enounced by Hamilton, is\ncontradictory. It predicates contradiction of two extremes, which are\nasserted to be equally incomprehensible and incognizable. If they are\nutterly incognizable, how does Hamilton _know_ that they are\ncontradictory? The mutual _relation_ of two objects is said to be known,\nbut the objects themselves are absolutely unknown. But how can we know\nany relation except by an act of comparison, and how can we compare two\nobjects so as to affirm their relation, if the objects are absolutely\nunknown? \"The Infinite is defined as Unconditional Illimitation; the\nAbsolute as Conditional Limitation. Yet almost in the same breath we are\ntold that each is utterly inconceivable, each the mere negation of\nthought. On the one hand, we are told they _differ_; on the other, we\nare told they do _not differ_. Now which does Hamilton mean? If he\ninsist upon the definitions as yielding a ground of conceivable\ndifference, he must abandon the inconceivability; but if he insist upon\nthe inconceivability, he must abandon the definition as sheer verbiage,\ndevoid of all conceivable meaning. There is no possible escape from this\ndilemma. Further, two negations can never contradict; for contradiction\nis the asserting and the denying of the same proposition; two denials\ncan not conflict. If Illimitation is negative, Limitation, its\ncontradictory, is positive, whether conditional or unconditional. In\nbrief, if the Infinite and Absolute are wholly incomprehensible, they\nare not distinguishable; but if they are distinguishable, they are not\nwholly incomprehensible. If they are indistinguishable, they are to us\nidentical; and identity precludes contradiction. But if they are\ndistinguishable, distinction is made by difference, which involves\npositive cognition; hence one, at least, must be conceivable. It\nfollows, therefore, by inexorable logic, that either the contradiction\nor the inconceivability must be abandoned.\"[353]\n\n[Footnote 353: North American Review, October, 1864, pp. 407, 408.]\n\n2. \"The Law of the Conditioned,\" as a ground of faith in the Infinite\nBeing, is utterly void, meaningless, and ineffectual. Let us re-state it\nin Hamilton's own words: \"The conditioned is the _mean_ between two\nextremes, two inconditionates exclusive of each other, neither of which\n_can be conceived as possible_, but of which, on the principle of\nContradiction and Excluded Middle, _one must be admitted as necessary_.\"\nIt is scarcely needful to explain to the intelligent reader the above\nlogical principles; that they may, however, be clearly before the mind\nin this connection, we state that the principle of Contradiction is\nthis: \"A thing can not at the same time be and not be; _A is_, _A is\nnot_, are propositions which can not both be true at once.\" The\nprinciple of Excluded Middle is this: \"A thing either is or is not--_A\neither is or is not B_; there is no _medium_.\"[354] Now, to mention the\nlaw of Excluded Middle and two contradictories with a _mean_ between\nthem, in the same sentence, is really astounding. \"If the two\ncontradictory extremes are equally incogitable, yet include a cogitable\nmean, why insist upon the necessity of accepting either extreme? This\nnecessity of accepting one of the contradictories is wholly based upon\nthe supposed impossibility of a _mean_; if a mean exists, _that_ may be\ntrue, and both contradictories together false. But if a mean between two\ncontradictories be both impossible and absurd, Hamilton's 'conditioned'\nentirely vanishes.\"[355] If both contradictories are equally unknown and\nequally unthinkable, we can not discover _why_, on his principles, we\nare bound to believe _either_.\n\n[Footnote 354: Hamilton's \"Logic,\" pp. 58, 59; \"Metaphysics,\" vol. ii.\np. 368.]\n\n[Footnote 355: North British Review, October, 1864, pp. 415, 416.]\n\n3. The whole of this confusion in thought and expression results from\nthe habit of confounding the sensuous imagination with the non-sensuous\nreason, and the consequent co-ordination of an imageable conception with\nan abstract idea. The objects of sense and the sensuous imagination may\nbe characterized as extension, limitation, figure, position, etc.; the\nobjects of the non-sensuous reason may be characterized as universality,\neternity, infinity. I can form an _image_ of an extended and figured\nobject, but I can not form an _image_ of space, time, or God; neither,\nindeed, can I form an image of Goodness, Justice, or Truth. But I can\nhave a clear and precise idea of space, and time, and God, as I can of\nJustice, Goodness, and Truth. There are many things which I can most\nsurely _know_ that I can not possibly _comprehend_, if to comprehend is\nto form a mental image of a thing. There is nothing which I more\ncertainly know than that space is infinite, and eternity unbeginning and\nendless; but I can not comprehend the infinity of space or the\nillimitability of eternity. I know that God is, that he is a being of\ninfinite perfection, but I can not throw my thoughts around and\ncomprehend the infinity of God.\n\n(iv.) We come, lastly, to consider the position of the _Dogmatic\nTheologians_.[356] In their zeal to demonstrate the necessity of Divine\nRevelation, and to vindicate for it the honor of supplying to us all our\nknowledge of God, they assail every fundamental principle of reason,\noften by the very weapons which are supplied by an Atheistical\nphilosophy. As a succinct presentation of the views of this school, we\nselect the \"_Theological Institutes_\" of R. Watson.\n\n[Footnote 356: Ellis, Leland, Locke, and Horsley, whose writings are\nextensively quoted in Watson's \"Institutes of Theology\" (reprinted by\nCarlton & Lanahan, New York).]\n\n1st. The invalidity of \"_the principle of causality_\" is asserted by\nthis author. \"We allow that the argument which proves that the _effects_\nwith which we are surrounded have been _caused_, and thus leads us up\nthrough a chain of subordinate causes to one First Cause, has a\nsimplicity, an obviousness, and a force which, when we are previously\nfurnished with the idea of God, makes it, at first sight, difficult to\nconceive that men, under any degree of cultivation, should be inadequate\nto it; yet if ever the human mind commenced such an inquiry at all, it\nis highly probable that it would rest in the notion of an _eternal\nsuccession of causes and effects_, rather than acquire the ideas of\ncreation, in the proper sense, and of a Supreme Creator.\"[357] \"We feel\nthat our reason rests with full satisfaction in the doctrine that all\nthings are created by one eternal and self-existent Being; but the Greek\nphilosophers held that matter was eternally co-existent with God. This\nwas the opinion of Plato, who has been called the Moses of\nphilosophy.\"[358]\n\nFor a defense of \"the principle of causality\" we must refer the reader\nto our remarks on the philosophy of Comte. We shall now only remark on\none or two peculiarities in the above statement which betray an utter\nmisapprehension of the nature of the argument. We need scarcely direct\nattention to the unfortunate and, indeed, absurd phrase, \"an eternal\nsuccession of causes and effects.\" An \"eternal succession\" is a\n_contradictio in adjecto_, and as such inconceivable and unthinkable. No\nhuman mind can \"rest\" in any such thing, because an eternal succession\nis no rest at all. All \"succession\" is finite and temporal, capable of\nnumeration, and therefore can not be eternal.[359] Again, in attaining\nthe conception of a First Cause the human mind does not pass up \"through\na chain of subordinate causes,\" either definite or indefinite, \"to one\nFirst Cause.\"\n\n[Footnote 357: Watson's \"Institutes of Theology,\" vol. i. p. 273.]\n\n[Footnote 358: Id., ib., vol. i. p. 21.]\n\n[Footnote 359: See _ante_, pp. 181, 182, ch. v.]\n\nLet us re-state the principle of causality as a universal and necessary\nlaw of thought. \"_All phenomena present themselves to us as the\nexpression of_ POWER, and refer us to a causal ground whence they\nissue.\" That \"power\" is intuitively and spontaneously apprehended by the\nhuman mind as Supreme and Ultimate--\"the causal ground\" is a personal\nGod. All the phenomena of nature present themselves to us as \"effects,\"\nand we know nothing of \"subordinate causes\" except as modes of the\nDivine Efficiency.[360] The principle of causality compels us to think\ncausation behind nature, and under causation to think of Volition.\n\"Other forces we have no sort of ground for believing; or, except by\nartifices of abstraction, even power of conceiving. The dynamic idea is\neither this or nothing; and the logical alternative assuredly is that\nnature is either a mere Time-march of phenomena or an expression of\nMind.\"[361] The true doctrine of philosophy, of science, and of\nrevelation is not simply that God did create \"in the beginning,\" but\nthat he still creates. All the operations of Nature are the operations\nof the Divine Mind. \"Thou takest away their breath, they die, and return\nto their dust. Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created; and thou\nrenewest the face of the earth.\"[362]\n\n[Footnote 360: The modern doctrine of the Correlation and Homogenity of\nall Forces clearly proves that they are not many, but _one_--\"a dynamic\nself-identity masked by transmigration.\"--Martineau's \"Essays,\" pp.\n134-144.]\n\n[Footnote 361: Martineau's \"Essays,\" pp. 140, 141.]\n\n[Footnote 362: Psalm civ.]\n\nThe assertion that Plato taught \"the eternity of matter,\" and that\nconsequently he did not arrive at the idea of a Supreme and Ultimate\nCause, is incapable of proof. The term yle=matter does not occur in the\nwritings of Plato, or, indeed, of any of his predecessors, and is\npeculiarly Aristotelian. The ground of the world of sense is called by\nPlato \"the receptacle\" (ypodoche), \"the nurse\" (tithene) of all that is\nproduced, and was apparently identified, in his mind, with _pure\nspace_--a logical rather than a physical entity--the mere negative\ncondition and medium of Divine manifestation. He never regards it as a\n\"cause,\" or ascribes to it any efficiency. We grant that he places this\nvery indefinite something (opoionoun ti) out of the sphere of temporal\norigination; but it must be borne in mind that he speaks of \"creation in\neternity\" as well as of \"creation in time;\" and of time itself, though\ncreated, as \"an eternal image of the generating Father.\"[363] This one\nthing, at any rate, can not be denied, that Plato recognizes creation in\nits fullest sense as the act of God.\n\nThe admission that something has always existed besides the Deity, as a\nmere logical condition of the exercise of divine power (_e.g._, space),\nwould not invalidate the argument for the existence of God. The proof of\nthe Divine Existence, as Chalmers has shown, does not rest on the\nexistence of matter, but on the orderly arrangement of matter; and the\ngrand question of Theism is not whether the _matter of the world_, but\nwhether the _present order of the world_ had a commencement.[364]\n\n2d. Doubt is cast by our author upon the validity of \"_the principle of\nthe Unconditioned or the Infinite_.\" \"Supposing it were conceded that\nsome faint glimmering of this great truth [the existence of a First\nCause] might, by induction, have been discovered by contemplative minds,\nby what means could they have _demonstrated_ to themselves that he is\neternal, self-existent, immortal, and independent?\"[365] \"Between things\nvisible and invisible, time and eternity, beings finite and beings\ninfinite, objects of sense and objects of faith, _the connection is not\nperceptible_ to human observation. Though we push our researches,\ntherefore, to the extreme point whither the light of nature can carry\nus, they will in the end be abruptly terminated, and we must stop short\nat an immeasurable distance between the creature and the Creator.\"[366]\n\n[Footnote 363: Plato, \"Timaeus,\" Sec. xiv.]\n\n[Footnote 364: Chalmers's \"Natural Theology,\" bk. i. ch. v.; also\nMahan's \"Natural Theology,\" pp. 21-23.]\n\n[Footnote 365: Watson's \"Institutes of Theol.,\" vol. i. p. 274.]\n\n[Footnote 366: Id., ib., vol. i. p. 273.]\n\nTo this assertion that the connection of things visible and things\ninvisible, finite and infinite, objects of sense and objects of faith,\nis utterly imperceptible to human thought, we might reply by quoting the\nwords of that Sacred Book whose supreme authority our author is seeking,\nby this argument, to establish. \"The _invisible_ things of God, even his\neternal power and god-head, from the creation, are clearly _seen_, being\n_understood by the things which are made_.\" We may also point to the\nfact that in every age and in every land the human mind has\nspontaneously and instinctively recognized the existence of an invisible\nPower and Presence pervading nature and controlling the destinies of\nman, and that religious worship--prayer, and praise, and\nsacrifice--offered to that unseen yet omnipresent Power is an universal\nfact of human nature. The recognition of an _immediate_ and a\n_necessary_ \"connection\" between the visible and the invisible, the\nobjects of sense and the objects of faith, is one of the most obvious\nfacts of consciousness--of universal consciousness as revealed in\nhistory, and of individual consciousness as developed in every rational\nmind.\n\nThat this connection is \"not perceptible to human observation,\" if by\nthis our author means \"not perceptible to sense,\" we readily admit. No\none ever asserted it was perceptible to human observation. We say that\nthis connection is perceptible to human _reason_, and is revealed in\nevery attempt to think about, and seek an explanation of, the phenomenal\nworld. The Phenomenal and the Real, Genesis and Being, Space and\nExtension, Succession and Duration, Time and Eternity, the Finite and\nthe Infinite, are correlatives which are given in one and the same\nindivisible act of thought. \"The conception of one term of a relation\nnecessarily implies that of the other; it being the very nature of a\ncorrelative to be thinkable only through the conjunct thought of its\ncorrelative; for a relation is, in truth, a thought one and indivisible;\nand whilst the thinking of one relation necessarily involves the thought\nof its two terms, so it is, with equal necessity, itself involved in the\nthought of either.\"[367] Finite, dependent, contingent, temporal\nexistence, therefore, necessarily supposes infinite, self-existent,\nindependent, eternal Being; the Conditioned and Relative implies the\nUnconditioned and Absolute--one is known only in and through the other.\nBut inasmuch as the unconditioned is cognized solely _a priori_, and the\nconditioned solely _a posteriori_, the recognition by the human mind of\ntheir necessary correlation becomes the bridge whereby the chasm between\nthe subjective and the objective may be spanned, and whereby Thought may\nbe brought face to face with Existence.\n\n[Footnote 367: Hamilton's \"Metaphysics,\" vol. ii. pp. 536, 537.]\n\nThe reverence which, from boyhood, we have entertained for the\ndistinguished author of the \"Institutes\" restrains us from speaking in\nadequate terms of reprobation of the statement that \"the _First Cause_\"\nmay be known, and yet not conceived \"as eternal, self-existent,\nimmortal, and independent\". Surely that which is the ground and reason\nof all existence must have the ground and reason of its own existence in\nitself. That which is _first_ in the order of existence, and in the\nlogical order of thought, can have nothing prior to itself. If the\nsupposed First Cause is not necessarily self-existent and independent,\nit is not the _first_; if it has a dependent existence, there must be a\nprior being on which it depends. If the First Cause is not eternal, then\nprior to this Ultimate Cause there was nothingness and vacuity, and pure\nnothing, by its own act, became something. But \"_Ex nihilo nihil_\" is a\nuniversal law of thought. To ask the question whether the First Cause be\nself-existent and eternal, is, in effect, to ask the question \"who made\nGod?\" and this is not the question of an adult theologian, but of a\nlittle child. Surely Mr. Watson must have penned the above passage\nwithout any reflection on its real import[368].\n\n[Footnote 368: In an article on \"the Impending Revolution in Anglo-Saxon\nTheology\" Methodist Quarterly Review, (July, 1863), Dr. Warren seems to\ntake it for granted that the \"aiteological\" and \"teleological\" arguments\nfor the existence of God are utterly invalidated by the Dynamical theory\nof matter. \"Once admit that _real power_ can and does reside in matter,\nand all these reasonings fail. If inherent forces of matter are\ncompetent to the production of all the innumerable miracles of movement\nin the natural world, what is there in the natural world which they can\nnot produce. If all _the exertions of power_ in the universe can be\naccounted for without resort to something back of, and superior to,\nnature, what is there which can force the mind to such a resort?\" (p.\n463). \"Having granted that _power_, or _self-activity_, is a natural\nattribute of all matter, what right have we to deny it _intelligence_?\"\n(p. 465). \"_Self-moving matter must have thought and design_\" (p. 469).\n\nIt is not our intention to offer an extended criticism of the above\npositions in this note. We shall discuss \"the Dynamical theory\" more\nfully in a subsequent work. If the theory apparently accepted by Dr.\nWarren be true, that \"_the ultimate atoms of matter are as uniformly\nefficient as minds_, and that we have the same ground to regard the\nforce exerted by the one _innate_ and _natural_ as that exerted by the\nother\" (p. 464), then we grant that the conclusions of Dr. Warren, as\nabove stated, are unavoidable. We proceed one step farther, and boldly\nassert that the existence of God is, on this hypothesis, incapable of\nproof, and the only logical position Dr. Warren can occupy is that of\nspiritualistic Pantheism.\n\nDr. Warren asserts that \"the Dynamical theory of matter\" is now\ngenerally accepted by \"Anglo-Saxon _naturalists_.\" \"One can scarcely\nopen a scientific treatise without observing the altered stand-point\"\n(p. 160). We confess that we are disappointed with Dr. Warren's\ntreatment of this simple question of fact. On so fundamental an issue,\nthe Doctor ought to have given the name of at least _one_ \"naturalist\"\nwho asserts that \"the ultimate atoms of matter are as uniformly\nefficient as minds.\" Leibnitz, Morrell, Ulrici, Hickok, the authorities\nquoted by him, are metaphysicians and idealists of the extremest school.\nAt present we shall, therefore, content ourselves with a general denial\nof this wholesale statement of Dr. Warren; and we shall sustain that\ndenial by a selection from the many authorities we shall hereafter\npresent. \"No particle of matter possesses within itself the power of\nchanging its existing state of motion or of rest. Matter has no\nspontaneous power either of rest or motion, but is equally susceptible\nto each as it may be acted on by _external_ causes\" (Silliman's\n\"Principles of Physics,\" p. 13). The above proposition is \"a truth on\nwhich the whole science of mechanical philosophy ultimately depends\"\n(Encyclopaedia Britannica, art. \"Dynamics,\" vol. viii. p. 326). \"A\nmaterial substance existing alone in the universe could not produce any\neffects. There is not, so far as we know, a self-acting material\nsubstance in the universe\" (M'Cosh, \"Divine Government, Physical and\nMoral,\" p. 78). \"Perhaps the only true indication of matter is\n_inertia_.\" \"The cause of gravitation is _not resident_ in the particles\nof matter merely,\" but also \"_in all space_\" (Dr. Faraday on\n\"Conservation of Force,\" in \"Correlation and Conservation of Force.\" (p.\n368). He also quotes with approbation the words of Newton, \"That gravity\nshould be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, is so great an\nabsurdity, that I believe no man who has in philosophic matters a\ncompetent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it\" p. 368). \"The\n'force of gravity' is an improper expression\" (p. 340). \"Forces are\ntransformable, indestructible, and, _in contradistinction from matter_,\nimponderable\" (p. 346). \"The first cause of things is Deity\" (Dr. Mayer,\nin \"Correlation and Conservation of Force,\" p. 341). \"Although the word\n_cause_ may be used in a secondary and subordinate sense, as meaning\nantecedent forces, yet in an abstract sense it is totally inapplicable;\nwe can not predicate of any physical agent that it is abstractedly the\ncause of another\" (p. 15). \"Causation is the _will_,\" \"creation is the\nact, of God\" Grove on \"Correlation of Physical Forces,\" (p. 199).\n\"Between gravity and motion it is impossible to establish the equation\nrequired for a rightly-conceived _causal_ relation\" (\"Correlation and\nConservation of Force,\" p. 253). See also Herschel's \"Outlines of\nAstronomy,\" p. 234.\n\nIt certainly must have required a wonderful effort of imagination on the\npart of Dr. Warren to transform \"weight\" and \"density,\" mere passive\naffections of matter, into self-activity, intelligence, thought, and\ndesign. Weight or density are merely relative terms. Supposing one\nparticle or mass of matter to exist alone, and there can be no\nattractive or gravitating force. There must be a cause of gravity which\nis distinct from matter.]\n\n3d. The validity of \"_the principle of unity_\" is also discredited by\nWatson. \"If, however, it were conceded that some glimmerings of this\ngreat truth, the existence of a First Cause, might, by induction, have\nbeen discovered, by what means could they have demonstrated to\nthemselves that the great collection of bodies which we call the world\nhad but _one_ Creator.\"[369]\n\n[Footnote 369: \"Institutes of Theology,\" vol. i. p. 275.]\n\nWe might answer directly, and at once, that the oneness or unity of God\nis necessarily contained in \"the very notion of a First Cause\"--a\n_first_ cause is not many causes, but _one_. By a First Cause we do not,\nhowever, understand the first of a numerical series, but an arche--a\nprinciple, itself unbeginning, which is the source of all beginning. Our\ncategorical answer, therefore, must be that the unity of God is a\nsublime deliverance of reason--God is one God. It is a first principle\nof reason that all differentiation and plurality supposes an incomposite\nunity, all diversity implies an indivisible identity. The sensuous\nperception of a plurality of parts supposes the rational idea of an\nabsolute unity, which has no parts, as its necessary correlative. For\nexample, extension is a congeries of indefinitesimal parts; the\ncontinuity of matter, as _empirically_ known by us, is never absolute.\nSpace is absolutely continuous, incapable of division into integral\nparts, illimitable, and, as _rationally_ known by us, an absolute unity.\nThe cognition of limited extension, which is the subject of quantitative\nmeasurement, involves the conception of unlimited space, which is the\nnegation of all plurality and complexity of parts. And so the cognition\nof a phenomenal universe in which we see only difference, plurality, and\nchange, implies the existence of a Being who is absolutely unchangeable,\nidentical, and one.\n\nThis law of thought lies at the basis of that universal desire of unity,\nand that universal effort to reduce all our knowledge to unity, which\nhas revealed itself in the history of philosophy, and also of inductive\nscience. \"Reason, intellect, nous, concatenating thoughts and objects\ninto system, and tending upward from particular facts to general laws,\nfrom general laws to universal principles, is never satisfied in its\nascent till it comprehends all laws in a single formula, and consummates\nall conditional knowledge in the unity of unconditional existence.\" \"The\nhistory of philosophy is only the history of this tendency, and\nphilosophers have borne ample testimony to its reality. 'The mind,' says\nAnaxagoras, 'only knows when it subdues its objects, when it reduces the\nmany to the one.' 'The end of philosophy,' says Plato, 'is the intuition\nof unity.' 'All knowledge,' say the Platonists, 'is the gathering up\ninto one, and the indivisible apprehension of this unity by the knowing\nmind.'\"[370]\n\n[Footnote 370: Hamilton's \"Metaphysics,\" vol. i. pp. 68, 69.]\n\nThis law has been the guiding principle of the Inductive Sciences, and\nhas led to some of its most important discoveries. The unity which has\nbeen attained in physical science is not, however, the absolute unity of\na material substratum, but a unity of _Will_ and of _Thought_. The late\ndiscovery of the monogenesis, reciprocal convertibility, and\nindestructibility of all Forces in nature, leads us upward towards the\nrecognition of one Omnipresent and Omnipotent Will, which, like a mighty\ntide, sweeps through the universe and effects all its changes. The\nuniversal prevalence of the same physical laws and numerical relations\nthroughout all space, and of the same archetypal forms and teleology of\norgans throughout all past time, reveals to us a Unity of Thought which\ngrasps the entire details of the universe in one comprehensive\nplan.[371] The positive _a priori_ intuitions of reason and the _a\nposteriori_ inductions of science equally attest _that God is one_.\n\n[Footnote 371: We refer with pleasure to the articles of Dr. Winchell,\nin the North-western Christian Advocate, in which the _a posteriori_\nproof of \"the Unity of God\" is forcibly exhibited, and take occasion to\nexpress the hope they will soon be presented to the public in a more\npermanent form.]\n\n4th. By denying that man has any intuitive cognitions of right and\nwrong, or any native and original feeling of obligation, Mr. Watson\ninvalidates \"the moral argument\" for the existence of a Righteous God.\n\n\"As far as man's reason has applied itself to the discovery of truth or\n_duty_ it has generally gone astray.\"[372] \"Questions of morals do not,\nfor the most part, lie level to the minds of the populace.\"[373] \"Their\nconclusions have no _authority_, and place them under no\n_obligation_.\"[374] And, indeed, man without a revelation \"is without\n_moral control_, without _principles of justice_, except such as may be\nslowly elaborated from those relations which concern the grosser\ninterests of life, without _conscience_, without hope or fear in another\nlife.\"[375]\n\n[Footnote 372: \"Institutes of Theology,\" vol. ii. p. 470.]\n\n[Footnote 373: Ibid., vol. i. p. 15.]\n\n[Footnote 374: Ibid., vol. i. p. 228.]\n\n[Footnote 375: Ibid., vol. ii. p. 271.]\n\nNow we shall not occupy our space in the elaboration of the proposition\nthat the universal consciousness of our race, as revealed in human\nhistory, languages, legislations, and sentiments, bears testimony to the\nfact that the ideas of right, duty, and responsibility are native to the\nhuman mind; we shall simply make our appeal to those Sacred Writings\nwhose verdict must be final with all theologians. That the fundamental\nprinciples of the moral law do exist, subjectively, in all human minds\nis distinctly affirmed by Paul, in a passage which deserves to be\nregarded as the chief corner-stone of moral science. \"The Gentiles\n(ephne, heathen), which have not the written law, do by the guidance of\nnature (reason or conscience) the works enjoined by the revealed law;\nthese, having no written law, are a law unto themselves; who show\nplainly the works of the law written on their hearts, their conscience\nbearing witness, and also their reasonings one with another, when they\naccuse, or else excuse, each other.\"[376] To deny this is to relegate\nthe heathen from all responsibility. For Mr. Watson admits \"that the\nwill of a superior is not in justice binding unless it be in some mode\nsufficiently declared.\" Now in the righteous adjudgments of revelation\nthe heathen are \"without excuse.\" The will of God must, therefore, be\n\"sufficiently declared\" to constitute them accountable. Who will presume\nto say that the shadowy, uncertain, variable, easily and unavoidably\ncorrupted medium of tradition running through forty muddy centuries is a\n\"sufficient declaration of the will of God?\" The law is \"written on the\nheart\" of every man, or all men are not accountable.\n\n[Footnote 376: Romans, ch. ii. ver. 14-15.]\n\nNow this \"law written within the heart\" immediately and naturally\nsuggests the idea of a Lawgiver who is over us. This felt presence of\nConscience, approving or condemning our conduct, suggests, as with the\nspeed of the lightning-flash, the notion of a Judge who will finally\ncall us to account. This \"accusing or excusing of each other,\" this\nrecognition of good or ill desert, points us to, and constrains us to\nrecognize, a future Retribution; so that some hope or fear of another\nlife has been in all ages a universal phenomenon of humanity.\n\nIt is affirmed, however, that whilst this capacity to know God may have\nbeen an original endowment of human nature, yet, in consequence of the\nfall, \"the understanding and reason are weakened by the deterioration of\nhis whole intellectual nature.\"[377] \"Without some degree of education,\nman is _wholly_ the creature of appetite. Labor, feasting, and sleeping\ndivide his time, and wholly occupy his thoughts.\"[378]\n\n[Footnote 377: \"Institutes of Theology,\" vol. i. p. 15.]\n\n[Footnote 378: Ibid., vol. i. p. 271.]\n\nWe reverently and believingly accept the teaching of Scripture as to the\ndepravity of man. We acknowledge that \"the understanding is darkened\" by\nsin. At the same time, we earnestly maintain that the Scriptures do not\nteach that the fundamental laws of mind, the first principles of reason,\nare utterly traversed and obliterated by sin, so that man is not able to\nrecognize the existence of God, and feel his obligation to Him. \"_Though\nthey_(the heathen) _knew God_ (dioti gnontes), they did not glorify him\nas God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imagination, and\ntheir foolish hearts were darkened. They changed the truth of God into a\nlie, and worshipped and served the creature _more_ than the Creator.\"\n\"And as they did not _approve of holding God with acknowledgment_, God\ndelivered them over to an unapproving mind, to work those things which\nare not suitable.\" After drawing a fearful picture of the darkness and\ndepravity of the heathen, the Apostle adds, \"Who, _though they_ KNOW\n_the law of God_, that they who practise such things are worthy of\ndeath, not only do them, but even are well pleased with those who\npractise them.\"[379] The obvious and direct teaching of this passage is\nthat the heathen, in the midst of their depravity and idolatry, are not\nutterly ignorant of God; \"they _know_ God\"--\"they _know_ the law of God\n\"--\"they worship Him,\" though they worship the creature _more than_ Him.\nThey know God, and are unwilling to \"acknowledge God.\" \"They know the\nrighteousness of God,\" and are \"haters of God\" on account of his purity;\nand their worshipping of idols does not proceed from ignorance of God,\nfrom an intellectual inability to know God, but from \"corruption of\nheart,\" and a voluntary choice of, and a \"pleasure\" in, the sinful\npractices accompanying idol worship. Therefore, argues the Apostle, they\nare \"without excuse.\" The whole drift and aim of the argument of Paul\nis, not to show that the heathen were, by their depravity, incapacitated\nto know God, but that because they knew God and knew his righteous law,\ntherefore their depravity and licentiousness was \"inexcusable.\"\n\n[Footnote 379: Romans, ch. i. ver. 23-32.]\n\nWe conclude our review of opposing schools by the re-affirmation of our\nposition, _that God is cognizable by human reason._ The human mind,\nunder the guidance of necessary laws of thought, is able, from the facts\nof the universe, to affirm the existence of God, and to attain some\nvalid knowledge of his character and will. Every attempt to solve the\ngreat problem of existence, to offer an explanation of the phenomenal\nworld, or to explore the fundamental idea of reason, when fairly and\nfully conducted, has resulted in the recognition of a Supreme\n_Intelligence_, a personal _Mind_ and _Will_, as the ground, and reason,\nand cause of all existence. A survey of the history of Greek Philosophy\nwill abundantly sustain this position, and to this we shall, in\nsubsequent chapters, invite the reader's attention.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VIII.\n\nTHE PHILOSOPHERS OF ATHENS.\n\nPRE-SOCRATIC SCHOOL.\n\nSENSATIONAL:\nTHALES--ANAXIMENES--HERACLITUS--ANAXIMANDER--LEUCIPPUS--DEMOCRITUS.\n\n\n      \"Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans and of the\n      Stoics encountered Paul.\"--Acts xvii. 18.\n\n      \"Plato affirms that this is the most just cause of the\n      creation of the world, that works which are good should be\n      wrought by the God who is good; whether he had read these\n      things in the Bible, or whether by his penetrating genius he\n      beheld _the invisible things of God as understood by the\n      things which are made_\"--ST. AUGUSTINE, \"De Civ. Dei,\" lib.\n      xi. ch. 21.\n\nOf all the monuments of the greatness of Athens which have survived the\nchanges and the wastes of time, the most perfect and the most enduring\nis her philosophy. The Propylaea, the Parthenon, and the Erechtheum,\nthose peerless gems of Grecian architecture, are now in ruins. The\nmagnificent sculpture of Phidias, which adorned the pediment, and outer\ncornice, and inner frieze of these temples, and the unrivalled statuary\nof gods and heroes which crowded the platform of the Acropolis, making\nit an earthly Olympus, are now no more, save a few broken fragments\nwhich have been carried to other lands, and, in their exile, tell the\nmournful story of the departed grandeur of their ancient home. The\nbrazen statue of Minerva, cast from the spoils of Marathon, which rose\nin giant grandeur above the buildings of the Acropolis, and the flashing\nof whose helmet plumes was seen by the mariner as soon as he had rounded\nthe Sunian promontory; and that other brazen Pallas, called, by\npre-eminence, \"the Beautiful;\" and the enormous Colossus of ivory and of\ngold, \"the Immortal Maid\"--the protecting goddess of the\nParthenon--these have perished. But whilst the fingers of time have\ncrumbled the Pentelic marble, and the glorious statuary has been broken\nto pieces by vandal hands, and the gold and brass have been melted in\nthe crucibles of needy monarchs and converted into vulgar money, the\nphilosophic _thought_ of Athens, which culminated in the dialectic of\nPlato, still survives. Not one of all the vessels, freighted with\nimmortal thought, which Plato launched upon the stream of time, has\nfoundered. And after the vast critical movement of European thought\nduring the past two centuries, in which all philosophic systems have\nbeen subjected to the severest scrutiny, the _method_ of Plato still\npreserves, if not its exclusive authority unquestioned, at least its\nintellectual pre-eminence unshaken. \"Platonism is immortal, because its\nprinciples are immortal in the human intellect and heart.\"[380]\n\n[Footnote 380: Butler's \"Lectures on Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. ii. p.\n9.]\n\nPhilosophy is, then, the world-enduring monument of the greatness and\nthe glory of Athens. Whilst Greece will be forever memorable as \"the\ncountry of wisdom and of wise men,\" Athens will always be pre-eminently\nmemorable as the University of Greece. This was the home of Socrates,\nand Plato, and Aristotle--the three imperial names which, for twenty\ncenturies, reigned supreme in the world of philosophic thought. Here\nschools of philosophy were founded to which students were attracted from\nevery part of the civilized world, and by which an impulse and a\ndirection was given to human thought in every land and in every age.\nStanding on the Acropolis at Athens, and looking over the city and the\nopen country, the Apostle would see these _places_ which are inseparably\nassociated with the names of the men who have always been recognized as\nthe great teachers of the pagan world, and who have also exerted a\npowerful influence upon Christian minds of every age. \"In opposite\ndirections he would see the suburbs where Plato and Aristotle, the two\npupils of Socrates, held their illustrious schools. The streamless bed\nof the Ilissus passes between the Acropolis and Hymettus in a\nsouth-westerly direction, until it vanishes in the low ground which\nseparates the city from the Piraeus.\" Looking towards the upper part of\nthis channel, Paul would see gardens of plane-trees and thickets of\nangus-castus, \"with other torrent-loving shrubs of Greece.\" Near the\nbase of Lycabettus was a sacred inclosure which Pericles had ornamented\nwith fountains. Here stood a statue of Apollo Lycius, which gave the\nname to the _Lyceum_. Here, among the plane-trees, Aristotle _walked_,\nand, as he walked, taught his disciples. Hence the name Peripatetics\n(the Walkers), which has always designated the disciples of the\nStagirite philosopher.\n\nOn the opposite side of the city, the most beautiful of the Athenian\nsuburbs, we have the scene of Plato's teaching. Beyond the outer\nCeramicus, which was crowded with the sepulchres of those Athenians who\nhad fallen in battle, and were buried at the public expense, the eye of\nPaul would rest on the favored stream of the Cephisus, flowing towards\nthe west. On the banks of this stream the _Academy_ was situated. A\nwall, built at great expense by Hipparchus, surrounded it, and Cimon\nplanted long avenues of trees and erected fountains. Beneath the\nplane-trees which shaded the numerous walks there assembled the\nmaster-spirits of the age. This was the favorite resort of poets and\nphilosophers. Here the divine spirit of Plato poured forth its sublimest\nspeculations in streams of matchless eloquence; and here he founded a\nschool which was destined to exert a powerful and perennial influence on\nhuman minds and hearts in all coming time.\n\nLooking down from the Acropolis upon the Agora, Paul would distinguish a\ncloister or colonnade. This is the Stoa Poecile, or \"Painted Porch,\" so\ncalled because its walls were decorated with fresco paintings of the\nlegendary wars of Greece, and the more glorious struggle at Marathon. It\nwas here that Zeno first opened that celebrated school which thence\nreceived the name of _Stoic_. The site of the _garden_ where Epicurus\ntaught is now unknown. It was no doubt within the city walls, and not\nfar distant from the Agora. It was well known in the time of Cicero, who\nvisited Athens as a student little more than a century before the\nApostle. It could not have been forgotten in the time of Paul. In this\n\"tranquil garden,\" in the society of his friends, Epicurus passed a life\nof speculation and of pleasure. His disciples were called, after him,\nthe Epicureans.[381]\n\n[Footnote 381: See Conybeare and Howson's \"Life and Epistles of St.\nPaul,\" vol. i., Lewes's \"Biographical History of Philosophy;\" and\nEncyclopaedia Britannica, article, \"Athens,\" from whence our materials\nfor the description of these \"places\" are mainly derived.]\n\nHere, then, in Athens the Apostle was brought into immediate contact\nwith all the phases of philosophic thought which had appeared in the\nancient world. \"Amongst those who sauntered beneath the cool shadows of\nthe plane-trees in the Agora, and gathered in knots under the porticoes,\neagerly discussing the questions of the day, were the philosophers, in\nthe garb of their several sects, ready for any new question on which\nthey might exercise their subtlety or display their rhetoric.\" If there\nwere any in that motley group who cherished the principles and retained\nthe spirit of the true Platonic school, we may presume they felt an\ninward intellectual sympathy with the doctrine enounced by Paul. With\nPlato, \"philosophy was only another name for _religion_: philosophy is\nthe love of perfect Wisdom; perfect Wisdom and perfect Goodness are\nidentical: the perfect Good is God himself; philosophy is the love of\nGod.\"[382] He confessed the need of divine assistance to attain \"the\ngood,\" and of divine interposition to deliver men from moral ruin.[383]\nLike Socrates, he longed for a supernatural--a divine light to guide\nhim, and he acknowledged his need thereof continually.[384] He was one\nof those who, in heathen lands, waited for \"the desire of nations;\" and,\nhad he lived in Christian times, no doubt his \"spirit of faith\" would\nhave joyfully \"embraced the Saviour in all the completeness of his\nrevelation and advent.\"[385] And in so far as the spirit of Plato\nsurvived among his disciples, we may be sure they were not among the\nnumber who \"mocked,\" and ridiculed, and opposed the \"new doctrine\"\nproclaimed by Paul. It was \"the philosophers of the Epicureans and of\nthe Stoics who _encountered_ Paul.\" The leading tenets of both these\nsects were diametrically opposed to the doctrines of Christianity. The\nruling spirit of each was alien from the spirit of Christ. The haughty\n_pride_ of the Stoic, the Epicurean abandonment to _pleasure_, placed\nthem in direct antagonism to him who proclaimed the crucified and risen\nChrist to be \"_the wisdom_ of God.\"\n\n[Footnote 382: Butler's \"Lectures on Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. ii. p.\n61.]\n\n[Footnote 383: \"Republic,\" bk. vi. ch. vi. vii.]\n\n[Footnote 384: Butler's \"Lectures,\" vol. i. p. 362.]\n\n[Footnote 385: Wheedon on \"The Will,\" p. 352; also Butler's \"Lectures,\"\nvol. ii. p. 252]\n\nIf, however, we would justly appreciate the relation of pagan philosophy\nto Christian truth, we must note that, when Paul arrived in Athens, the\nage of Athenian glory had passed away. Not only had her national\ngreatness waned, and her national spirit degenerated, but her\nintellectual power exhibited unmistakable signs of exhaustion, and\nweakness, and decay. If philosophy had borne any fruit, of course that\nfruit remained. If, in the palmy days of Athenian greatness, any field\nof human inquiry had been successfully explored; if human reason had\nachieved any conquests; if any thing true and good had been obtained,\nthat must endure as an heir-loom for all coming time; and if those\ncenturies of agonizing wrestlings with nature, and of ceaseless\nquestioning of the human heart, had yielded no results, then, at least,\nthe _lesson_ of their failure and defeat remained for the instruction of\nfuture generations. Either the problems they sought to solve were proved\nto be insoluble, or their methods of solution were found to be\ninadequate; for here the mightiest minds had grappled with the great\nproblems of being and of destiny. Here vigorous intellects had struggled\nto pierce the darkness which hangs alike over the beginning and the end\nof human existence. Here profoundly earnest men had questioned nature,\nreason, antiquity, oracles, in the hope they might learn something of\nthat invisible world of _real_ being which they instinctively felt must\nlie beneath the world of fleeting forms and ever-changing appearances.\nHere philosophy had directed her course towards every point in the\ncompass of thought, and touched every _accessible_ point. The sun of\nhuman reason had reached its zenith, and illuminated every field that\nlay within the reach of human ken. And this sublime era of Greek\nphilosophy is of inestimable value to us who live in Christian times,\nbecause _it is an exhaustive effort of human reason to solve the problem\nof being_, and in its history we have a record of the power and weakness\nof the human mind, at once on the grandest scale and in the fairest\ncharacters.[386]\n\n[Footnote 386: See article \"Philosophy,\" in Smith's \"Dictionary of the\nBible.\"]\n\nThese preliminary considerations will have prepared the way for, and\nawakened in our minds a profound interest in, the inquiry--1st. What\npermanent _results_ has Greek philosophy bequeathed to the world? 2d. In\nwhat manner did Greek philosophy fulfill for Christianity a\n_propoedeutic_ office?\n\nIt will at once be obvious, even to those who are least conversant with\nour theme, that it would be fruitless to attempt the answer to these\nimportant questions before we have made a careful survey of the entire\nhistory of philosophic thought in Greece. We must have a clear and\ndefinite conception of the problems they sought to solve, and we must\ncomprehend their methods of inquiry, before we can hope to appreciate\nthe results they reached, or determine whether they did arrive at any\ndefinite and valuable conclusions. It will, therefore, devolve upon us\nto present a brief and yet comprehensive epitome of the history of\nGrecian speculative thought.\n\n\"_Philosophy_,\" says Cousin, \"_is reflection_, and nothing else than\nreflection, in a vast form\"--\"Reflection elevated to the rank and\nauthority of a _method_.\" It is the mind looking back upon its own\nsensations, perceptions, cognitions, ideas, and from thence to the\n_causes_ of these sensations, cognitions, and ideas. It is thought\npassing beyond the simple perceptions of things, beyond the mere\nspontaneous operations of the mind in the cognition of things to seek\nthe _ground_, and _reason_, and _law_ of things. It is the effort of\nreason to solve the great problem of \"Being and Becoming,\" of appearance\nand reality, of the changeful and the permanent. Beneath the endless\ndiversity of the universe, of existence and action, there must be a\nprinciple of unity; below all fleeting appearances there must be a\npermanent substance; beyond this everlasting flow and change, this\nbeginning and ending of finite existence, there must be an _eternal\nbeing_, the source and cause of all we see and know, _What is that\nprinciple of unity, that permanent substance_, or principle, or being?\n\nThis fundamental question has assumed three separate forms or aspects in\nthe history of philosophy. These forms have been determined by the\nobjective phenomena which most immediately arrested and engaged the\nattention of men. If external nature has been the chief object of\nattention, then the problem of philosophy has been, _What is the\narche--_the beginning; what are the first principles_--the elements from\nwhich, the ideas or laws according to which, the efficient cause or\nenergy by which, and the reason or end for which the universe exists?_\nDuring this period reflective thought was a PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE. If the\nphenomena of mind--the opinions, beliefs, judgments of men--are the\nchief object of attention, then the problem of philosophy has been,\n_What are the fundamental Ideas which are unchangeable and permanent\namid all the diversities of human opinions, connecting appearance with\nreality, and constituting a ground of certain knowledge or absolute\ntruth?_ Reflective thought is now a PHILOSOPHY OF IDEAS. Then, lastly,\nif the practical activities of life and the means of well-being be the\ngrand object of attention, then the problem of philosophy has been,\n_What is the ultimate standard by which, amid all the diversities of\nhuman conduct, we may determine what is right and good in individual,\nsocial, and political life?_ And now reflective thought is a PHILOSOPHY\nOF LIFE. These are the grand problems with which philosophy has grappled\never since the dawn of reflection. They all appear in Greek philosophy,\nand have a marked chronology. As systems they succeed each other, just\nas rigorously as the phenomena of Greek civilization.\n\nThe Greek schools of philosophy have been classified from various points\nof view. In view of their geographical relations, they have been divided\ninto the _Ionian_, the _Italian_, the _Eleatic_, the _Athenian_, and the\n_Alexandrian_. In view of their prevailing spirit and tendency, they\nhave been classified by Cousin as the Sensational, the Idealistic, the\nSkeptical, and the Mystical. The most natural and obvious method is that\nwhich (regarding Socrates as the father of Greek philosophy in the\ntruest sense) arranges all schools from the Socratic stand point, and\ntherefore in the chronological order of development:\n\n     I. THE PRE-SOCRATIC SCHOOLS.\n     II. THE SOCRATIC SCHOOLS.\n     III. THE POST-SOCRATIC SCHOOLS.\n\nThe history of philosophy is thus divided into three grand epochs. The\nfirst reaching from Thales to the time of Socrates (B.C. 639-469): the\nsecond from the birth of Socrates to the death of Aristotle (B.C.\n469-322); the third from the death of Aristotle to the Christian era\n(B.C. 322, A.D. 1). Greek philosophy during the first period was almost\nexclusively a philosophy of nature; during the second period, a\nphilosophy of mind; during the last period, a philosophy of life.\nNature, man, and society complete the circle of thought. Successive\nsystems, of course, overlap each other, both in the order of time and as\nsubjects of human speculation; and the results of one epoch of thought\nare transmitted to and appropriated by another; but, in a general sense,\nthe order of succession has been very much as here indicated. Setting\naside minor schools and merely incidental discussions, and fixing our\nattention on the general aspects of each historic period, we shall\ndiscover that the first period was eminently _Physical_, the second\n_Psychological_, the last _Ethical_. Every stage of progress which\nreason, on _a priori_ grounds, would suggest as the natural order of\nthought, or of which the development of an individual mind would furnish\nan analogy, had a corresponding realization in the development of\nGrecian thought from the time of Thales to the Christian era. \"Thought,\"\nsays Cousin, \"in the first trial of its strength is drawn without.\" The\nfirst object which engages the attention of the child is the outer\nworld. He asks the \"_how_\" and \"_why_\" of all he sees. His reason urges\nhim to seek an explanation of the universe. So it was in the _childhood_\nof philosophy. The first essays of human thought were, almost without\nexception, discourses peri physeos (De rerum natura), of the nature of\nthings. Then the rebound of baffled reason from the impenetrable\nbulwarks of the universe drove the mind back upon itself. If the youth\ncan not interpret nature, he can at least \"know himself,\" and find\nwithin himself the ground and reason of all existence. There are\n\"_ideas_\" in the human mind which are copies of those \"_archetypal\nideas_\" which dwell in the Creative Mind, and after which the universe\nwas built. If by \"analysis\" and \"definition\" these universal notions can\nbe distinguished from that which is particular and contingent in the\naggregate of human knowledge, then so much of eternal truth has been\nattained. The achievements of philosophic thought in this direction,\nduring the Socratic age, have marked it as the most brilliant period in\nthe history of philosophy--the period of its _youthful_ vigor. Deeply\nimmersed in the practical concerns and conflicts of public life,\n_manhood_ is mainly occupied with questions of personal duty, and\nindividual and social well-being. And so, during the hopeless turmoil of\ncivil disturbance which marked the decline of national greatness in\nGrecian history, philosophy was chiefly occupied with questions of\npersonal interest and personal happiness. The poetic enthusiasm with\nwhich a nobler age had longed for _truth_, and sought it as the highest\ngood, has all disappeared, and now one sect seeks refuge from the storms\nand agitations of the age in Stoical indifference, the other in\nEpicurean effeminacy.\n\nIf now we have succeeded in presenting the real problem of philosophy,\nit will at once be obvious that the inquiry was not, in any proper\nsense, _theological_. Speculative thought, during the period we have\nmarked as the era of Greek philosophy, was not an inquiry concerning the\nexistence or nature of God, or concerning the relations of man to God,\nor the duties which man owes to God. These questions were all remitted\nto the _theologian_. There was a clear line of demarkation separating\nthe domains of religion and philosophy. Religion rested solely on\nauthority, and appealed to the instinctive faith of the human heart. She\npermitted no encroachment upon her settled usages, and no questioning of\nher ancient beliefs. Philosophy rested on reason alone. It was an\nindependent effort of thought to interpret nature, and attain the\nfundamental grounds of human knowledge--to find an arche--a first\nprinciple, which, being assumed, should furnish a rational explanation\nof all existence. If philosophy reach the conclusion that the arche was\nwater, or air, or fire, or a chaotic mixture of all the elements or\natoms, extended and self-moved, or monads, or to pan, or uncreated mind,\nand that conclusion harmonized with the ancient standards of religious\nfaith--well; if not, philosophy must present some method of\nconciliation. The conflicts of faith and reason; the stragglings of\ntraditional authority to maintain supremacy; the accommodations and\nconciliations attempted in those primitive times, would furnish a\nchapter of peculiar interest, could it now be written.\n\nThe poets who appeared in the dim twilight of Grecian\ncivilization--Orpheus, Musaeus, Homer, Hesiod--seem to have occupied the\nsame relation to the popular mind in Greece which the Bible now sustains\nto Christian communities.[387] Not that we regard them as standing on\nequal ground of authority, or in any sense a revelation. But, in the eye\nof the wondering Greek, they were invested with the highest sacredness\nand the supremest authority. The high poetic inspiration which pervaded\nthem was a supernatural gift. Their sublime utterances were accepted as\nproceeding from a divine afflatus. They were the product of an age in\nwhich it was believed by all that the gods assumed a human form,[388]\nand held a real intercourse with gifted men. This universal faith is\nregarded by some as being a relic of still more distant times, a faint\nremembrance of the glory of patriarchal days. The more natural opinion\nis, that it was begotten of that universal longing of the human heart\nfor some knowledge of that unseen world of real being, which man\ninstinctively felt must lie beyond the world of fleeting change and\ndelusive appearances. It was a prolepsis of the soul, reaching upward\ntowards its source and goal. The poet felt within him some native\naffinities therewith, and longed for some stirring breath of heaven to\nsweep the harp-strings of the soul. He invoked the inspiration of the\nGoddess of Song, and waited for, no doubt believed in, some \"deific\nimpulse\" descending on him. And the people eagerly accepted his\nutterance as the teaching of the gods. They were too eager for some\nknowledge from that unseen world to question their credentials. Orpheus,\nHesiod, Homer, were the theologoi--the theologians of that age.[389]\n\n[Footnote 387: \"Homer was, in a certain sense, the Bible of the\nGreeks.\"--Whewell, \"Platonic Dialogues,\" p. 283.]\n\n[Footnote 388: The universality of this belief is asserted by Cicero:\n\"Vetus opinio est, jam usque ab heroicis ducta temporibus, eaque et\npopuli Romani et omnium gentium firmata consensu, versari quandem inter\nhomines divinationem.\"--Cicero, \"De Divin.\" bk. i. ch. i.]\n\n[Footnote 389: Cicero.]\n\nThese ancient poems, then, were the public documents of the religion of\nGreece--the repositories of the national faith. And it is deserving of\nespecial note that the philosopher was just as anxious to sustain his\nspeculations by quoting the high traditional authority of the ancient\ntheologian, as the propounder of modern novelties is to sustain his\nnotions by the authority of the Sacred Scriptures. Numerous examples of\nthis solicitude will recur at once to the remembrance of the student of\nPlato. All encroachments of philosophy upon the domains of religion were\nwatched as jealously in Athens in the sixth century before Christ, as\nthe encroachments of science upon the fields of theology were watched in\nRome in the seventeenth century after Christ. The court of the Areopagus\nwas as earnest, though not as fanatical and cruel, in the defense of the\nancient faith, as the court of the Inquisition was in the defense of the\ndogmas of the Romish Church. The people, also, as \"the sacred wars\" of\nGreece attest, were ready quickly to repel every assault upon the\nmajesty of their religion. And so philosophy even had its martyrs. The\ntears of Pericles were needed to save Aspasia, because she was suspected\nof philosophy. But neither his eloquence nor his tears could save his\nfriend Anaxagoras, and he was ostracized. Aristotle had the greatest\ndifficulty to save his life. And Plato was twice imprisoned, and once\nsold into slavery.[390]\n\n[Footnote 390: Cousin's \"Lectures on the History of Philosophy,\" vol. i.\np. 305.]\n\nIt is unnecessary that we should, in this place, again attempt the\ndelineation of the theological opinions of the earlier periods of\nGrecian civilization. That the ancient Greeks believed in _one Supreme\nGod_ has been conclusively proved by Cudworth. The argument of his\nfourth chapter is incontrovertible.[391] However great the number of\n\"generated gods\" who crowded the Olympus, and composed the ghostly array\nof Greek mythology, they were all subordinate agents, \"demiurges,\"\nemployed in the framing of the world and all material things, or else\nthe ministers of the moral and providential government of the eis Theos\nagentos--the one uncreated God. Beneath, or beyond the whole system of\npagan polytheism, we recognize a faith in an _Uncreated Mind_, the\nSource of all the intelligence, and order, and harmony which pervades\nthe universe the Fountain of law and justice; the Ruler of the world;\nthe Avenger of injured innocence; and the final Judge of men. The\nimmortality of the soul and a state of future retribution were necessary\ncorollaries of this sublime faith. This primitive theology was\nunquestionably the people's faith; the faith, also, of the philosopher,\nin his inmost heart, however far he might wander in speculative thought.\nThe instinctive feeling of the human heart, the spontaneous intuitions\nof the human reason, have led man, in every age, to recognize a God. It\nis within the fields of speculative thought that skepticism has had its\nbirth. Any thing like atheism has only made its appearance amid the\nefforts of human reason to explain the universe. The native sentiments\nof the heart and the spontaneous movements of the reason have always\nbeen towards faith, that is, towards \"a religious movement of the\nsoul.\"[392] Unbridled speculative thought, which turns towards the outer\nworld alone, and disregards \"the voices of the soul,\" tends towards\n_doubt_ and irreligion. But, as Cousin has said, \"a complete\nextravagance, a total delusion (except in case of real derangement), is\nimpossible.\" \"Beneath reflection there is still spontaneity, when the\nscholar has denied the existence of a God; listen to the man,\ninterrogate him unawares, and you will see that all his words betray the\nidea of a God, and that faith in a God is, without his recognition, at\nthe bottom of his heart.\"[393]\n\n[Footnote 391: \"Intellectual System of the Universe;\" see also ch. iii.,\n\"On the Religion of the Athenians.\"]\n\n[Footnote 392: Cousin's \"Hist. of Philos.,\" vol. i. p. 22.]\n\n[Footnote 393: Id., ib., vol. i. p. 137.]\n\nLet us not, therefore, be too hasty in representing the early\nphilosophers as destitute of the idea of a God, because in the imperfect\nand fragmentary representations which are given us of the philosophical\nopinions of Thales, and Anaximenes, and Heraclitus, and Diogenes of\nApollonia, we find no explicit allusions to the _Uncreated Mind_ as the\nfirst principle and cause of all. A few sentences will comprehend the\nwhole of what remains of the opinions of the earliest philosophers, and\nthese were transmitted for ages by _oral_ tradition. To Plato and\nAristotle we are chiefly indebted for a stereotype of those scattered,\nfragmentary sentences which came to their hands through the dim and\ndistorting medium of more than two centuries. Surely no one imagines\nthese few sentences contain and sum up the results of a lifetime of\nearnest thought, or represent all the opinions and beliefs of the\nearliest philosophers! And should we find therein no recognition of a\npersonal God, would it not be most unfair and illogical to assert that\nthey were utterly ignorant of a God, or wickedly denied his being? If\nthey say \"there is no God,\" then they are foolish Atheists; if they are\nsilent on that subject, we have a right to assume they were Theists, for\nit is most natural to believe in God. And yet it has been quite\ncustomary for Christian teachers, after the manner of some Patristic\nwriters, to deny to those early sages the smallest glimpse of underived\nand independent knowledge of a Divine Being, in their zeal to assert for\nthe Sacred Scriptures the exclusive prerogative of revealing Him.\n\nNow in regard to the theological opinions of the Greek philosophers, we\nshall venture this general _lemma_--_the majority of them recognized an\n\"incorporeal substance\"_[394]_ an uncreated Intelligence, an ordering,\ngoverning Mind_. Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus, who were\nMaterialists, are perhaps the only exceptions. Many of them were\nPantheists, in the higher form of Pantheism, which, though it associates\nthe universe with its framer and mover, still makes \"the moving\nprinciple\" superior to that which is moved. The world was a living\norganism,\n\n     \"Whose body nature is, and God the soul.\"\n\nUnquestionably most on them recognized the existence of _two_ first\nprinciples, substances essentially distinct, which had co-existed from\neternity--an incorporeal Deity and matter.[395] We grant that the free\nproduction of a universe by a creative fiat--the calling of matter into\nbeing by a simple act of omnipotence--is not elementary to human reason.\nThe famous physical axiom of antiquity, \"_De nihilo nihil, in nihilum\nposse reverti\"_ under one aspect, may be regarded as the expression of\nthe universal consciousness of a mental inability to conceive a creation\nout of nothing, or an annihilation.[396] \"We can not conceive, either,\non the one hand, nothing becoming something, or something becoming\nnothing, on the other hand. When God is said to create the universe out\nof nothing, we think this by supposing that he evolves the universe out\nof himself; and in like manner, we conceive annihilation only by\nconceiving the Creator to withdraw his creation from actuality into\npower.\"[397] \"It is by _faith_ we understand the worlds were framed by\nthe _word of God_, so that things which are were not made from things\nwhich do appear\"--that is, from pre-existent matter.\n\n[Footnote 394: \"Ousian asomaton.\"--Plato.]\n\n[Footnote 395: Cudworth's \"Intellectual System,\" vol. i. p. 269.]\n\n[Footnote 396: Mansell's \"Limits of Religious Thought,\" p. 100.]\n\n[Footnote 397: Sir William Hamilton's \"Discussions on Philosophy,\" p.\n575.]\n\nThose writers[398] are, therefore, clearly in error who assert that the\nearliest question of Greek philosophy was, What is God? and that various\nand discordant answers were given, Thales saying, water is God,\nAnaximenes, air; Heraclitus, fire; Pythagoras, numbers; and so on. The\nidea of God is a native intuition of the mind. It springs up\nspontaneously from the depths of the human soul. The human mind\nnaturally recognizes God as an uncreated Mind, and recognizes itself as\n\"the offspring of God.\" And, therefore, it is simply impossible for it\nto acknowledge water, or air, or fire, or any material thing to be its\nGod. Now they who reject this fundamental principle evidently\nmisapprehend the real problem of early Grecian philosophic thought. The\nexternal world, the material universe, was the first object of their\ninquiry, and the method of their inquiry was, at the first stage, purely\nphysical. Every object of sense had a beginning and an end; it rose out\nof something, and it fell back into something. Beneath this ceaseless\nflow and change there must be some permanent principle. What is that\nstoicheon--that first element? The changes in the universe seem to obey\nsome principle of law--they have an orderly succession. What is that\nmorphe--that form, or ideal, or archetype, proper to each thing, and\naccording to which all things are produced? These changes must be\nproduced by some efficient cause, some power or being which is itself\nimmobile, and permanent, and eternal, and adequate to their production.\nWhat is that arche tes kineseos--that first principle of movement Then,\nlastly, there must be an end for which all things exist--a good reason\nwhy things are as they are, and not otherwise. What is that to ou eneken\nkai to agathon--that reason and good of all things? Now these are all\narchai or first principles of the universe. \"Common to all first\nprinciples,\" says Aristotle, \"is the being, the original, from which a\nthing is, or is produced, or is known.\"[399] First principles,\ntherefore, include both elements and causes, and, under certain aspects,\nelements are also causes, in so far as they are that without which a\nthing can not be produced. Hence that highest generalization by\nAristotle of all first principles; as--1. The Material Cause; 2. The\nFormal Cause; 3. The Efficient Cause; 4. The Final Cause. The grand\nsubject of inquiry in ancient philosophy was not alone what is the final\n_element_ from which all things have been produced? nor yet what is the\n_efficient cause_ of the movement and the order of the universe? _but\nwhat are those First Principles which, being assumed, shall furnish a\nrational explanation of all phenomena, of all becoming?_\n\n[Footnote 398: As the writer of the article \"Attica,\" in the\nEncyclopaedia Britannica.]\n\n[Footnote 399: \"Metaphysics,\" bk. iv. ch. i. p. 112 (Bohn's edition).]\n\nSo much being premised, we proceed to consider the efforts and the\nresults of philosophic thought in\n\n\n\nTHE PRE-SOCRATIC SCHOOLS.\n\n\"The first act in the drama of Grecian speculation was performed on the\nvaried theatre of the Grecian colonies--Asiatic, insular, and Italian,\nverging at length (in Anaxagoras) towards Athens.\" During the progress\nof this drama two distinct schools of philosophy were developed, having\ndistinct geographical provinces, one on the east, the other on the west,\nof the peninsula of Greece, and deriving their names from the localities\nin which they flourished. The earliest was the _Ionian;_ the latter was\nthe _Italian_ school.\n\nIt would be extremely difficult, at this remote period, to estimate the\ninfluence which geographical conditions and ethnical relations exerted\nin determining the course of philosophic thought in these schools.\nUnquestionably those conditions contributed somewhat towards fixing\ntheir individuality. At the same time, it must be granted that the\ndistinction in these two schools of philosophy is of a deeper character\nthan can be represented or explained by geographical surroundings; it is\na distinction reaching to the very foundation of their habits of\nthought. These schools represent two distinct aspects of philosophic\nthought, two distinct methods in which the human mind has essayed to\nsolve the problem of the universe.\n\nThe ante-Socratic schools were chiefly occupied with the study of\nexternal nature. \"Greek philosophy was, at its first appearance, a\nphilosophy of nature.\" It was an effort of the reason to reach a \"first\nprinciple\" which should explain the universe. This early attempt was\npurely speculative. It sought to interpret all phenomena by\n_hypotheses_, that is, by suppositions, more or less plausible,\nsuggested by physical analogies or by _a priori_ rational conceptions.\n\nNow there are two distinct aspects under which nature presents itself to\nthe observant mind. The first and most obvious is the _simple phenomena_\nas perceived by the senses. The second is the _relations_ of\n_phenomena_, cognized by the reason alone. Let phenomena, which are\nindeed the first objects of perception, continue to be the chief and\nalmost exclusive object of thought, and philosophy is on the highway of\npure physics. On the other hand, instead of stopping at phenomena, let\ntheir relations become the sole object of thought, and philosophy is now\non the road of purely mathematical or metaphysical abstraction. Thus two\nschools of philosophy are developed, the one SENSATIONAL, the other\nIDEALIST. Now these, it will be found, are the leading and\ncharacteristic tendencies of the two grand divisions of the pre-Socratic\nschools; the Ionian is _sensational_, the Italian is _idealist_.\n\nThese two schools have again been the subject of a further subdivision\nbased upon diverse habits of thought. The Ionian school sought to\nexplain the universe by _physical analogies._ Of these there are two\nclear and obvious divisions--analogies suggested by living organisms,\nand analogies suggested by mechanical arrangements. One class of\nphilosophers in the Ionian school laid hold on the first analogy. They\nregarded the world as a living being, spontaneously evolving itself--a\nvital organism whose successive developments and transformations\nconstitute all visible phenomena. A second class laid hold on the\nanalogy suggested by mechanical arrangements. For them the universe was\na grand superstructure, built up from elemental particles, arranged and\nunited by some ab-extra power or force, or else aggregated by some\ninherent mutual affinity. Thus we have two sects of the Ionian school;\nthe first, _Dynamical_ or vital; the second, _Mechanical_.[400]\n\n[Footnote 400: Ritter's \"Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. i. pp. 191, 192.]\n\nThe Italian school sought to explain the universe by rational\nconceptions and _a priori_ ideas. Now to those who seek, by simple\nreflection, to investigate the relations of the external world this\nmarked distinction will present itself: some are relations _between_\nsensible phenomena--relations of time, of place, of number, of\nproportion, and of harmony; others are relations _of_ phenomena to\nessential being--relations of qualities to substance, of becoming to\nbeing, of the finite to the infinite. The former constituted the field\nof Pythagorean the latter of Eleatic contemplation. The Pythagoreans\nsought to explain the universe by numbers, forms, and harmonies; the\nEleatics by the _a priori_ ideas of unity, substance, Being _in se_, the\nInfinite. Thus were constituted a _Mathematical_ and a _Metaphysical_\nsect in the Italian school. The pre-Socratic schools may, therefore, be\ntabulated in the following order:\n\n     I. IONIAN (Sensational), (1.) PHYSICAL {Dynamical or Vital.\n                                            {Mechanical.\n\n     II. Italian (Idealist), {(2.) MATHEMATICAL Pythagoreans.\n                             {(3.) METAPHYSICAL Eleatics.\n\nI. _The Ionian or Physical School._--We have premised that the\nphilosophers of this school attempted the explanation of the universe by\nphysical analogies.\n\nOne class of these early speculators, the _Dynamical_, or vital\ntheorists, proceeded on the supposition of a living energy infolded in\nnature, which in its spontaneous development continuously undergoes\nalteration both of quality and form. This imperfect analogy is the first\nhypothesis of childhood. The child personifies the stone that hurts him,\nand his first impulse is to resent the injury as though he imagined it\nto be endowed with consciousness, and to be acting with design. The\nchildhood of superstition (whose genius is multiplicity) personifies\neach individual existence--a rude Fetichism, which imagines a\nsupernatural power and presence enshrined in every object of nature, in\nevery plant, and stock, and stone. The childhood of philosophy (whose\ngenius is unity) personifies the universe. It regards the earth as one\nvast organism, animated by one soul, and this soul of the world as a\n\"created god.\"[401] The first efforts of philosophy were, therefore,\nsimply an attempt to explain the universe in harmony with the popular\ntheological beliefs. The cosmogonies of the early speculators in the\nIonian school were an elaboration of the ancient theogonies, but still\nan elaboration conducted under the guidance of that law of thought which\nconstrains man to seek for _unity_, and reduce the many to the one.\n\nTherefore, in attempting to construct a theory of the universe they\ncommenced by postulating an arche--a first principle or element out of\nwhich, by a _vital_ process, all else should be produced. \"Accordingly,\nwhatever seemed the most subtle or pliable, as well as _universal_\nelement in the mass of the visible world, was marked as the seminal\nprinciple whose successive developments and transformations produced all\nthe rest.\"[402] With this seminal principle the living, _animating_\nprinciple seems to have been associated--in some instances perhaps\nconfounded, and in most instances called by the same name. And having\npursued this analogy so far, we shall find the _most decided and\nconclusive_ evidence of a tendency to regard the soul of man as similar,\nin its nature, to the soul which animates the world.\n\n[Footnote 401: Plato's \"Laws,\" bk. x. ch. i.; \"Timaeus,\" ch. xii.]\n\n[Footnote 402: Butler's \"Lectures on Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. 1. p.\n292.]\n\n_Thales of Miletus_(B.C. 636-542) was the first to lead the way in the\nperilous inquiry after an arche, or first principle, which should\nfurnish a rational explanation of the universe. Following, as it would\nseem, the genealogy of Hesiod, he supposed _water_ to be the primal\nelement out of which all material things were produced. Aristotle\nsupposes he was impressed with this idea from observing that all things\nare nourished by moisture; warmth itself, he declared, proceeded from\nmoisture; the seeds of all things are moist; water, when condensed,\nbecomes earth.\n\nThus convinced of the universal presence of water, he declared it to be\nthe first principle of things.[403]\n\nAnd now, from this brief statement of the Thalean physics, are we to\nconclude that he recognized only a _material_ cause of the universe?\nSuch is the impression we receive from the reading of the First Book of\nAristotle's Metaphysics. His evident purpose is to prove that the first\nphilosophers of the Ionian school did not recognize an _efficient_\ncause. In his opinion, they were decidedly materialistic. Now to\nquestion the authority of Aristotle may appear to many an act of\npresumption. But Aristotle was not infallible; and nothing is more\ncertain than that in more than one instance he does great injustice to\nhis predecessors.[404] To him, unquestionably, belongs the honor of\nhaving made a complete and exhaustive classification of causes, but\nthere certainly does appear something more than vanity in the assumption\nthat he, of all the Greek philosophers, was the only one who recognized\nthem all. His sagacious classification was simply a resume of the labors\nof his predecessors. His \"principles\" or \"causes\" were incipient in the\nthought of the first speculators in philosophy. Their accurate\ndefinition and clearer presentation was the work of ages of analytic\nthought. The phrases \"efficient,\" \"formal,\" \"final\" cause, are, we\ngrant, peculiar to Aristotle; the ideas were equally the possession of\nhis predecessors.\n\n[Footnote 403: Aristotle's \"Metaphysics,\" bk. i. ch. iii.]\n\n[Footnote 404: Lewes's \"Biographical History of Philosophy,\" p. 77;\nCousin's \"The True, the Beautiful, and the Good,\" p. 77.]\n\nThe evidence, we think, is conclusive that, with this primal element\n(water), Thales associated a formative principle of motion; to the\n\"material\" he added the \"efficient\" cause. A strong presumption in favor\nof this opinion is grounded on the psychological views of Thales. The\nauthor of \"De Placitis Philosophorum\" associates him with Pythagoras and\nPlato, in teaching that the soul is incorporeal, making it naturally\nself-active, and an intelligent substance.[405] And it is admitted by\nAristotle (rather unwillingly, we grant, but his testimony is all the\nmore valuable on that account) that, in his time, the opinion that the\nsoul is a principle, aeikineton--ever moving, or essentially\nself-active, was currently ascribed to Thales. \"If we may rely on the\nnotices of Thales, he too would seem to have conceived the soul as a\n_moving principle_.\"[406] Extending this idea, that the soul is a moving\nprinciple, he held that all motion in the universe was due to the\npresence of a living soul. \"He is reported to have said that the\nloadstone possessed a soul because it could move iron.\"[407] And he\ntaught that \"the world itself is _animated_, and full of gods.\"[408]\n\"Some think that _soul_ and _life_ is mingled with the whole universe;\nand thence, perhaps, was that [opinion] of Thales that all things are\nfull of gods,\"[409] portions, as Aristotle said, of the universal soul.\nThese views are quite in harmony with the theology which makes the Deity\nthe moving energy of the universe--the energy which wrought the\nsuccessive transformations of the primitive aqueous element. They also\nfurnish a strong corroboration of the positive statement of\nCicero--\"Aquam, dixit Thales, esse initium rerum, Deum autem eam mentem\nquae ex aqua cuncta fingeret.\" Thales said that water is the first\nprinciple of things, but God was that mind which formed all things out\nof water;[410] as also that still more remarkable saying of Thales,\nrecorded by Diogenes Laertius; \"God is the most ancient of all things,\nfor he had no birth; the world is the most beautiful of all things, for\nit is the workmanship of God.\"[411] We are aware that some historians of\nphilosophy reject the statement of Cicero, because, say they, \"it does\nviolence to the chronology of speculation.\"[412] Following Hegel, they\nassert that Thales could have no conception of God as Intelligence,\nsince that is a conception of a more advanced philosophy. Such an\nopinion may be naturally expected from the philosopher who places God,\nnot at the commencement, but at the _end_ of things, God becoming\nconscious and intelligent in humanity. If, then, Hegel teaches that God\nhimself has had a progressive development, it is no wonder he should\nassert that the idea of God has also had an historic development, the\n_last_ term of which is an _intelligent God_. But he who believes that\nthe idea of God as the infinite and the perfect is native to the human\nmind, and that God stands at the beginning of the entire system of\nthings, will feel there is a strong _a priori_ ground for the belief\nthat Thales recognized the existence of an _intelligent God who\nfashioned the universe_.\n\n[Footnote 405: Cudworth's \"Intellectual System,\" vol. i. p. 71.]\n\n[Footnote 406: Aristotle, \"De Anima,\" i. 2, 17.]\n\n[Footnote 407: Id., ib., i. 2, 17.]\n\n[Footnote 408: Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives of the Philosophers,\" p. 18\n(Bohn's ed.).]\n\n[Footnote 409: Aristotle, \"De Anima,\" i. 17.]\n\n[Footnote 410: \"De Natura Deor.,\" bk. i. ch. x.]\n\n[Footnote 411: \"Lives,\" etc., p. 19.]\n\n[Footnote 412: Lewes's \"Hist. Philos.,\" p. 4.]\n\n_Anaximenes of Miletus_ (B.C. 529-480) we place next to Thales in the\nconsecutive history of thought. It has been usual to rank Anaximander\nnext to the founder of the Ionian School. The entire complexion of his\nsystem is, however, unlike that of a pupil of Thales. And we think a\ncareful consideration of his views will justify our placing him at the\nhead of the Mechanical or Atomic division of the Ionian school.\nAnaximenes is the historical successor of Thales; he was unquestionably\na vitalist. He took up the speculation where Thales had left it, and he\ncarried it a step forward in its development.[413]\n\nPursuing the same method as Thales, he was not, however, satisfied with\nthe conclusion he had reached. Water was not to Anaximenes the most\nsignificant, neither was it the most universal element. But air seemed\nuniversally present. \"The earth was a broad leaf resting upon it. All\nthings were produced from it; all things were resolved into it. When he\nbreathed he drew in a part of this universal life. All things are\nnourished by air.\"[414] Was not, therefore, _air_ the arche, or primal\nelement of things?\n\n[Footnote 413: Ritter's \"History of Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. i. p.\n203.]\n\n[Footnote 414: Lewes's \"Biographical History of Philosophy,\" p. 7.]\n\nThis brief notice of the physical speculations of Anaximenes is all that\nhas survived of his opinions. We search in vain for some intimations of\nhis theological views. On this merely negative ground, some writers have\nunjustly charged him with Atheism. Were we to venture a conjecture, we\nwould rather say that there are indications of a tendency to Pantheism\nin that form of it which associates God necessarily with the universe,\nbut does not utterly confound them. His fixing upon \"_air_\" as the\nprimal element, seems an effort to reconcile, in some apparently\nintermediate substance, the opposite qualities of corporeal and\nspiritual natures. Air is invisible, impalpable, all-penetrating, and\nyet in some manner appreciable to sense. May not the vital\ntransformations of this element have produced all the rest? The writer\nof the Article on Anaximenes in the Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us (on\nwhat ancient authorities he saith not) that \"he asserted this air was\nGod, since the divine power resides in it and agitates it.\"\n\nSome indications of the views of Anaximenes may perhaps be gathered from\nthe teachings of Diogenes of Apollonia (B.C. 520-490,) who was the\ndisciple, and is generally regarded as the commentator and expounder of\nthe views of Anaximenes. The air of Diogenes was a soul; therefore it\nwas _living_, and not only living, but conscious and _intelligent_. \"It\nknows much,\" says he; \"for without _reason_ it would be impossible for\nall to be arranged duly and proportionately; and whatever objects we\nconsider will be found to be so arranged and ordered in the best and\nmost beautiful manner.\"[415] Here we have a distinct recognition of the\nfundamental axiom that _mind is the only valid explanation of the order\nand harmony which pervades the universe_. With Diogenes the first\nprinciple is a \"divine air,\" which is vital, conscious, and intelligent,\nwhich spontaneously evolves itself, and which, by its ceaseless\ntransformations, produces all phenomena. The soul of man is a detached\nportion of this divine element; his body is developed or evolved\ntherefrom. The theology of Diogenes, and, as we believe, of his master,\nAnaximenes also, was a species of Materialistic Pantheism.\n\n[Footnote 415: Lewes's \"Biographical History of Philosophy,\" p. 8;\nRitter's \"History of Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. i. p. 214.]\n\n_Heraclitus of Ephesus_(B.C. 503-420) comes next in the order of\nspeculative thought. In his philosophy, _fire_ is the arche, or first\nprinciple; but not fire in the usual acceptation of that term. The\nHeraclitean \"fire\" is not flame, which is only an intensity of fire, but\na warm, dry vapor--an _ether_, which may be illustrated, perhaps, by the\n\"caloric\" of modern chemistry. This \"_ether_\" was the primal element out\nof which the universe was formed; it was also a vital power or principle\nwhich animated the universe, and, in fact, the _cause_ of all its\nsuccessive phenomenal changes. \"The world,\" he said, \"was neither made\nby the gods nor men, and it was, and is, and ever shall be, an\n_ever-living fire_, in due proportion self-enkindled, and in due measure\nself-extinguished.\"[416] The universe is thus reduced to \"an eternal\nfire,\" whose ceaseless energy is manifested openly in the work of\ndissolution, and yet secretly, but universally, in the work of\nrenovation. The phenomena of the universe are explained by Heraclitus as\n\"the concurrence of opposite tendencies and efforts in the motions of\nthis ever-living fire, out of which results the most beautiful harmony.\nThis harmony of the world is one of conflicting impulses, like the lyre\nand the bow. The strife between opposite tendencies is the parent of all\nthings. All life is change, and change is strife.\"[417]\n\n[Footnote 416: Ritter's \"History of Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. i. p.\n235.]\n\n[Footnote 417: Lewes's \"Biographical History of Philosophy,\" p. 70;\nRitter's \"History of Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. i. p. 244.]\n\nHeraclitus was the first to proclaim the doctrine of the perpetual\nfluxion of the universe (to reon, to gignomenon--Unrest and\nDevelopment), the endless changes of matter, and the mutability and\nperishability of all individual things. This restless, changing flow of\nthings, which never _are_, but always are _becoming_, he pronounced to\nbe the _One_ and the _All_.\n\nFrom this statement of the physical theory of Heraclitus we might\nnaturally infer that he was a Hylopathean Atheist. Such an hypothesis\nwould not, however, be truthful or legitimate. On a more careful\nexamination, his system will be found to stand half-way between the\nmaterialistic and the spiritual conception of the Author of the\nuniverse, and marks, indeed, a transition from the one to the other.\nHeraclitus unquestionably held that all substance is material, for a\nphilosopher who proclaims, as he did, that the senses are the only\nsource of knowledge, must necessarily attach himself to a material\nelement as the primary one. And yet he seems to have _spiritualized_\nmatter. \"The moving unit of Heraclitus--the Becoming--is as immaterial\nas the resting unit of the Eleatics--the Being.\"[418] The Heraclitean\n\"_fire_\" is endowed with _spiritual_ attributes. \"Aristotle calls it\npsyche--soul, and says that it is asomatotaton, or absolutely\nincorporeal (\"De Anima,\" i. 2. 16). It is, in effect, the common ground\nof the phenomena both of mind and matter it is not only the animating,\nbut also the intelligent and regulating principle of the universe; the\nZynos Logos, or universal Word or Reason, which it behooves all men to\nfollow.\"[419] The psychology of Heraclitus throws additional light upon\nhis theological opinions. With him human intelligence is a detached\nportion of the Universal Reason. \"Inhaling,\" said he, \"through the\nbreath the Universal Ether, which is Divine Reason, we become\nconscious.\" The errors and imperfections of humanity are consequently to\nbe ascribed to a deficiency of the Divine Reason in man. Whilst,\ntherefore, the theory of Heraclitus seems to materialize mind, it may,\nwith equal fairness, be said to spiritualize matter.\n\n[Footnote 418: Zeller's \"History of Greek Philosophy,\" vol. i. p. 57.]\n\n[Footnote 419: Butler's \"Lectures,\" vol. i. p. 297, note.]\n\nThe general inference, therefore, from all that remains of the doctrine\nof Heraclitus is that he was a Materialistic Pantheist. His God was a\nliving, rational, intelligent Ether--a soul pervading the universe. The\nform of the universe, its ever-changing phenomena, were a necessary\nemanation from, or a perpetual transformation of, this universal soul.\n\nWith Heraclitus we close our survey of that sect of the physical school\nwhich regarded the world as a living organism.\n\nThe second subdivision of the physical school, _the Mechanical_ or\n_Atomist theorists_, attempted the explanation of the universe by\nanalogies derived from mechanical collocations, arrangements, and\nmovements. The universe was regarded by them as a vast superstructure\nbuilt up from elemental particles, aggregated by some inherent force or\nmutual affinity.\n\n_Anaximander of Miletus_ (born B.C. 610) we place at the head of the\nMechanical sect of the Ionian school; first, on the authority of\nAristotle, who intimates that the philosophic dogmata of Anaximander\n\"resemble those of Democritus,\" who was certainly an Atomist; and,\nsecondly, because we can clearly trace a genetic connection between the\nopinions of Democritus and Leucippus and those of Anaximander.\n\nThe arche, or first principle of Anaximander, was to apeiron, _the\nboundless, the illimitable, the infinite_. Some historians of philosophy\nhave imagined that the infinite of Anaximander was the \"unlimited all,\"\nand have therefore placed him at the head of the Italian or \"idealistic\nschool.\" These writers are manifestly in error. Anaximander was\nunquestionably a sensationalist. Whatever his \"infinite\" may be found to\nbe, one thing is clear, it was not a \"metaphysical infinite\"--it did not\ninclude infinite power, much less infinite mind.\n\nThe testimony of Aristotle is conclusive that by \"the infinite\"\nAnaximander understood the multitude of primary, material particles. He\ncalls it \"a migma, or mixture of elements.\"[420] It was, in fact, a\n_chaos_--an original state in which the primary elements existed in a\nchaotic combination without _limitation_ or division. He assumed a\ncertain \"_prima materia_,\" which was neither air, nor water, nor fire,\nbut a \"mixture\" of all, to be the first principle of the universe. The\naccount of the opinions of Anaximander which is given by Plutarch (\"De\nPlacita,\" etc.) is a further confirmation of our interpretation of his\ninfinite. \"Anaximander, the Milesian, affirmed the infinite to be the\nfirst principle, and that all things are generated out of it, and\ncorrupted again into it. _His infinite is nothing else but matter._\"\n\"Whence,\" says Cudworth, \"we conclude that Anaximander's infinite was\nnothing else but an infinite chaos of matter, in which were actually or\npotentially contained all manner of qualities, by the fortuitous\nsecretion and segregation of which he supposed infinite worlds to be\nsuccessively generated and corrupted. So that we may easily guess whence\nLeucippus and Democritus had their infinite worlds, and perceive how\nnear akin these two Atheistic hypotheses were.\"[421] The reader, whose\ncuriosity may lead him to consult the authorities collected by Cudworth\n(pp. 185-188), will find in the doctrine of Anaximander a rude\nanticipation of the modern theories of \"spontaneous generation\" and \"the\ntransmutation of species.\" In the fragments of Anaximander that remain\nwe find no recognition of an ordering Mind, and his philosophy is the\ndawn of a Materialistic school.\n\n[Footnote 420: Aristotle's \"Metaphysics,\" bk. xi. ch. ii.]\n\n[Footnote 421: Cudworth's \"Intellectual System,\" vol. i. pp. 186, 187.]\n\n_Leucippus of Miletus_ (B.C. 500-400) appears, in the order of\nspeculation, as the successor of Anaximander. _Atoms_ and _space_ are,\nin his philosophy, the archai, or first principles of all things.\n\"Leucippus (and his companion, Democritus) assert that the plenum and\nthe vacuum [_i.e._, body and space] are the first principles, whereof\none is the Ens, the other Non-ens; the differences of the body, which\nare only figure, order, and position, are the causes of all\nothers.\"[422]\n\n[Footnote 422: Aristotle's \"Metaphysics,\" p. 21 (Bohn's edition).]\n\nHe also taught that the elements, and the worlds derived from them, are\n_infinite_. He describes the manner in which the worlds are produced as\nfollows: \"Many bodies of various kinds and shapes are borne by\namputation from the infinite [_i.e._, the chaotic migma of Anaximander]\ninto a vast vacuum, and then they, being collected together, produce a\nvortex; according to which, they, dashing against each other, and\nwhirling about in every direction, are separated in such a way that like\nattaches itself to like; bodies are thus, without ceasing, united\naccording to the impulse given by the vortex, and in this way the earth\nwas produced.\"[423] Thus, through a boundless void, atoms infinite in\nnumber and endlessly diversified in form are eternally wandering; and,\nby their aggregation, infinite worlds are successively produced. These\natoms are governed in their movements by a dark negation of\nintelligence, designated \"Fate,\" and all traces of a Supreme Mind\ndisappear in his philosophy. It is a system of pure materialism, which,\nin fact, is Atheism.\n\n[Footnote 423: Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives,\" p. 389.]\n\n_Democritus of Abdera_ (B.C. 460-357), the companion of Leucippus, also\ntaught \"that _atoms_ and the _vacuum_ were the beginning of the\nuniverse.\"[424] These atoms, he taught, were infinite in number,\nhomogeneous, extended, and possessed of those primary qualities of\nmatter which are necessarily involved in extension in space--as size,\nfigure, situation, divisibility, and mobility. From the combination of\nthese atoms all other existences are produced; fire, air, earth, and\nwater; sun, moon, and stars; plants, animals, and men; the soul itself\nis an aggregation of round, moving atoms. And \"motion, which is the\ncause of the production of every thing, he calls _necessity_.\"[425]\nAtoms are thus the only real existences; these, without any pre-existent\nmind, or intelligence, were the original of all things.\n\n[Footnote 424: Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives,\" p. 395.]\n\n[Footnote 425: Id, ib., p. 394.]\n\nThe psychological opinions of Democritus were as decidedly materialistic\nas his physical theories. All knowledge is derived from sensation. It is\nonly by material impact that we can know the external world, and every\nsense is, in reality, a kind of touch. Material images are being\ncontinually thrown off from the surface of external objects which come\ninto actual contact with the organs of sense. The primary qualities of\nmatter, that is, those which are involved in extension in space, are the\nonly objects of real knowledge; the secondary qualities of matter, as\nsoftness, hardness, sweetness, bitterness, and the like, are but\nmodifications of the human sensibilities. \"The sweet exists only in\nform--the bitter in form, hot in form, color in form; but in causal\nreality only atoms and space exist. The sensible things which are\nsupposed by opinion to exist have no real existence, but atoms and space\nalone exist.\"[426]\n\n[Footnote 426: Lewes's \"Biographical History of Philosophy,\" p. 96. The\nwords of Democritus, as reported by Sextus Empiricus.]\n\nThus by Democritus was laid the basis of a system of absolute\nmaterialism, which was elaborated and completed by Epicurus, and has\nbeen transmitted to our times. It has undergone some slight\nmodifications, adapting it to the progress of physical science; but it\nis to-day substantially the theory of Democritus. In Democritus we have\nthe culmination of the mechanical theory of the Ionian or Physical\nschool. In physics and psychology it terminated in pure materialism. In\ntheology it ends in positive Atheism.\n\nThe fundamental error of all the philosophers of the physical school was\nthe assumption, tacitly or avowedly, that sense-perception is the only\nsource of knowledge. This was the fruitful source of all their erroneous\nconclusions, the parent of all their materialistic tendencies. This led\nthem continually to seek an arche, or first principle of the universe,\nwhich should, under some form, be appreciable to _sense_; and\nconsequently the course of thought tended naturally towards materialism.\n\nThales was unquestionably a dualist. Instructed by traditional\nintimations, or more probably guided by the spontaneous apperceptions of\nreason, he recognized, with more or less distinctness, an incorporeal\nDeity as the moving, animating, and organizing cause of the universe.\nThe idea of God is a truth so self-evident as to need no demonstration.\nThe human mind does not attain to the idea of a God as the last\nconsequence of a series of antecedent principles. It comes at once, by\nan inherent and necessary movement of thought, to the recognition of God\nas the First Principle of all principles. But when, instead of\nhearkening to the simple and spontaneous intuitions of the mind, man\nturns to the world of sense, and loses himself in discursive thought,\nthe conviction of a personal God becomes obscured. Then, amid the\nendlessly diversified phenomena of the universe, he seeks for a cause or\norigin which in some form shall be appreciable to sense. The mere study\nof material phenomena, scientifically or unscientifically conducted,\nwill never yield the sense of the living God. Nature must be\ninterpreted, can only be interpreted in the light of certain _a priori_\nprinciples of reason, or we can never \"ascend from nature up to nature's\nGod.\" Within the circle of mere sense-perception, the dim and\nundeveloped consciousness of God will be confounded with the universe.\nThus, in Anaximenes, God is partially confounded with \"air,\" which\nbecomes a symbol; then a vehicle of the informing mind; and the result\nis a semi-pantheism. In Heraclitus, the \"ether\" is, at first, a\nsemi-symbol of the Deity; at length, God is utterly confounded with this\nether, or \"rational fire,\" and the result is a definite _materialistic\npantheism_. And, finally, when this feeling or dim consciousness of God,\nwhich dwells in all human souls, is not only disregarded, but pronounced\nto be an illusion--a phantasy; when all the analogies which intelligence\nsuggests are disregarded, and a purely mechanical theory of the universe\nis adopted, the result is the utter negation of an Intelligent Cause,\nthat is, _absolute Atheism_, as in Leucippus and Democritus.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER IX.\n\nTHE PHILOSOPHERS OF ATHENS _(continued_).\n\nPRE-SOCRATIC SCHOOL _(continued_).\n\nIDEALIST: PYTHAGORAS--XENOPHANES--PARMENIDES--ZENO. NATURAL REALIST:\nANAXAGORAS.\n\n\nSOCRATIC SCHOOL.\n\nSOCRATES.\n\n\nIn the previous chapter we commenced our inquiry with the assumption\nthat, in the absence of the true inductive method of philosophy which\nobserves, and classifies, and generalizes facts, and thence attains a\ngeneral principle or law, two only methods were possible to the early\nspeculators who sought an explanation of the universe--1st, That of\nreasoning from physical analogies; or, 2d, That of deduction from\nrational conceptions, or _a priori_ ideas.\n\nAccordingly we found that one class of speculators fixed their attention\nsolely on the mere phenomena of nature, and endeavored, amid sensible\nthings, to find a _single_ element which, being more subtile, and\npliable, and universally diffused, could be regarded as the ground and\noriginal of all the rest, and from which, by a vital transformation, or\nby a mechanical combination and arrangement of parts, all the rest\nshould be evolved. The other class passed beyond the simple phenomena,\nand considered only the abstract _relations_ of phenomena among\nthemselves, or the relations of phenomena to the necessary and universal\nideas of the reason, and supposed that, in these relations, they had\nfound an explanation of the universe. The former was the Ionian or\nSensation school; the latter was the Italian or Idealist school.\n\nWe have traced the method according to which the Ionian school\nproceeded, and estimated the results attained. We now come to consider\nthe method and results of\n\nTHE ITALIAN OR IDEALIST SCHOOL.\n\nThis school we have found to be naturally subdivided into--1st, The\n_Mathematical_ sect, which attempted the explanation of the universe by\nthe abstract conceptions of number, proportion, order, and harmony; and,\n2d, The _Metaphysical_ school, which attempted the interpretation of the\nuniverse according to the _a priori_ ideas of unity, of Being _in se_,\nof the Infinite, and the Absolute.\n\n_Pythagoras of Samos_(born B.C. 605) was the founder of the Mathematical\nschool.\n\nWe are conscious of the difficulties which are to be encountered by the\nstudent who seeks to attain a definite comprehension of the real\nopinions of Pythagoras. The genuineness of many of those writings which\nwere once supposed to represent his views, is now questioned. \"Modern\ncriticism has clearly shown that the works ascribed to Timaeus and\nArchytas are spurious; and the treatise of Ocellus Lucanus on 'The\nNature of the All' can not have been written by a Pythagorean.\"[427] The\nonly writers who can be regarded as at all reliable are Plato and\nAristotle; and the opinions they represent are not so much those of\nPythagoras as \"the Pythagoreans.\" This is at once accounted for by the\nfact that Pythagoras taught in secret, and did not commit his opinions\nto writing. His disciples, therefore, represent the _tendency_ rather\nthan the actual tenets of his system; these were no doubt modified by\nthe mental habits and tastes of his successors.\n\n[Footnote 427: Lewes's \"Biographical History of Philosophy,\" p. 24.]\n\nWe may safely assume that the proposition from which Pythagoras started\nwas the fundamental idea of all Greek speculation--_that beneath the\nfleeting forms and successive changes of the universe there is some\npermanent principle of unity_[428] The Ionian school sought that\nprinciple in some common physical element; Pythagoras sought, not for\n\"elements,\" but for \"relations,\" and through these relations for\nultimate laws indicating primal forces.\n\n[Footnote 428: See Plato, \"Timaeus,\" ch. ix. p. 331 (Bohn's edition);\nAristotle's \"Metaphysics,\" bk. v. ch. iii.]\n\nAristotle affirms that Pythagoras taught \"that _numbers_ are the first\nprinciples of all entities,\" and, \"as it were, a _material_ cause of\nthings,\"[429] or, in other words, \"that numbers are substances that\ninvolve a separate subsistence, and are primary causes of\nentities.\"[430]\n\n[Footnote 429: Aristotle's \"Metaphysics,\" bk. i. ch. v.]\n\n[Footnote 430: Id., ib., bk. xii. ch. vi.]\n\nAre we then required to accept the dictum of Aristotle as final and\ndecisive? Did Pythagoras really teach that numbers are real\nentities--the _substance_ and cause of all other existences? The reader\nmay be aware that this is a point upon which the historians of\nphilosophy are not agreed. Ritter is decidedly of opinion that the\nPythagorean formula \"can only be taken symbolically.\"[431] Lewes insists\nit must be understood literally.[432] On a careful review of all the\narguments, we are constrained to regard the conclusion of Ritter as most\nreasonable. The hypothesis \"that numbers are real entities\" does\nviolence to every principle of common sense. This alone constitutes a\nstrong _a priori_ presumption that Pythagoras did not entertain so\nglaring an absurdity. The man who contributed so much towards perfecting\nthe mathematical sciences, who played so conspicuous a part in the\ndevelopment of ancient philosophy, and who exerted so powerful a\ndetermining influence on the entire current of speculative thought, did\nnot obtain his ascendency over the intellectual manhood of Greece by the\nutterance of such enigmas. And further, in interpreting the philosophic\nopinions of the ancients, we must be guided by this fundamental\ncanon--\"The human mind has, under the necessary operation of its own\nlaws, been compelled to entertain the same fundamental ideas, and the\nhuman heart to cherish the same feelings in all ages.\" Now if a careful\nphilosophic criticism can not render the _reported_ opinions of an\nancient teacher into the universal language of the reason and heart of\nhumanity, we must conclude either that his opinions were misunderstood\nand misrepresented by some of his successors, or else that he stands in\nutter isolation, both from the present and the past. His doctrine has,\nthen, no relation to the successions of thought, and no place in the\nhistory of philosophy. Nay, more, such a doctrine has in it no element\nof vitality, no germ of eternal truth, and must speedily perish. Now it\nis well known that the teaching of Pythagoras awakened the deepest\nintellectual sympathy of his age; that his doctrine exerted a powerful\ninfluence on the mind of Plato, and, through him, upon succeeding ages;\nand that, in some of its aspects, it now survives, and is more\ninfluential to-day than in any previous age; but this element of\nimmutable and eternal truth was certainly not contained in the inane and\nempty formula, \"that numbers are real existences, the causes of all\nother existences!\" If the fame of Pythagoras had rested on such \"airy\nnothings,\" it would have melted away before the time of Plato.\n\n[Footnote 431: \"History of Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. i. p. 359.]\n\n[Footnote 432: \"Biographical History of Philosophy,\" p. 38.]\n\nWe grant there is considerable force in the argument of Lewes. He urges,\nwith some pertinence, the unquestionable fact that Aristotle asserts,\nagain and again, that the Pythagoreans taught \"that numbers are the\nprinciples and substance of things as well as the causes of their\nmodifications;\" and he argues that we are not justified in rejecting the\nauthority of Aristotle, unless better evidence can be produced.\n\nSo far, however, as the authority of Aristotle is concerned, even Lewes\nhimself charges him, in more than one instance, with strangely\nmisrepresenting the opinions of his predecessors.[433] Aristotle is\nevidently wanting in that impartiality which ought to characterize the\nhistorian of philosophy, and, sometimes, we are compelled to question\nhis integrity. Indeed, throughout his \"Metaphysics\" he exhibits the\negotism and vanity of one who imagines that he alone, of all men, has\nthe full vision of the truth. In Books I. and XII. he uniformly\nassociates the \"_numbers_\" of Pythagoras with the \"_forms_\" and\n\"_ideas_\" of Plato. He asserts that Plato identifies \"forms\" and\n\"numbers,\" and regards them as real entities--substances, and causes of\nall other things. \"_Forms are numbers_[434]... so Plato affirmed,\nsimilar with the Pythagoreans; and the dogma that numbers are causes to\nother things--of their substance-_he, in like manner, asserted with\nthem_.\"[435] And then, finally, he employs the _same_ arguments in\nrefuting the doctrines of both.\n\n[Footnote 433: \"Aristotle uniformly speaks disparagingly of Anaxagoras\"\n(Lewes's \"Biographical History of Philosophy\"). He represents him as\nemploying mind (nous) simply as \"a _machine_\" for the production of the\nworld;--\"when he finds himself in perplexity as to the cause of its\nbeing necessarily an orderly system, he then drags it (mind) in by force\nto his assistance\" \"Metaphysics,\" (bk. i. ch. iv.). But he is evidently\ninconsistent with himself, for in \"De Anima\" (bk. i. ch. ii.) he tells\nus that \"Anaxagoras saith that mind is at once a _cause of motion_ in\nthe whole universe, and also of _well_ and _fit_.\" We may further ask,\nis not the idea of fitness--of the good and the befitting--the final\ncause, even according to Aristotle?\n\nHe also totally misrepresents Plato's doctrine of \"Ideas.\" \"Plato's\nIdeas,\" he says, \"are substantial existences--real beings\"\n(\"Metaphysics,\" bk. i. ch. ix.). Whereas, as we shall subsequently show,\n\"they are objects of pure conception for human reason, and they are\nattributes of the Divine Reason. It is there they substantially exist.\"\n(Cousin, \"History of Philosophy,\" vol. i. p. 415). It is also pertinent\nto inquire, what is the difference between the \"formal cause\" of\nAristotle and the archetypal ideas of Plato? and is not Plato's to\nagathon the \"final cause?\" Yet Aristotle is forever congratulating\nhimself that he alone has properly treated the \"formal\" and the \"final\ncause!\"]\n\n[Footnote 434: This, however, was not the doctrine of Plato. He does not\nsay \"forms are numbers.\" He says: \"God formed things as they first arose\naccording to forms _and_ numbers.\" See \"Timaeus,\" ch. xiv. and xxvii.]\n\n[Footnote 435: Aristotle's \"Metaphysics,\" bk. i. ch. vi.]\n\nNow the writings of Plato are all extant to-day, and accessible in an\nexcellent English translation to any of our readers. Cousin has\nshown,[436] most conclusively (and we can verify his conclusions for\nourselves), that Aristotle has totally misrepresented Plato. And if, in\nthe same connection, and in the course of the same argument, and in\nregard to the same subjects, he misrepresents Plato, it is most probable\nhe also misrepresents Pythagoras.\n\n[Footnote 436: \"The True, the Beautiful, and the Good,\" pp. 77-81.]\n\nIt is, however, a matter of the deepest interest for us to find the\nevidence gleaming out here and there, on the pages of Aristotle, that he\nhad some knowledge of the fact that the Pythagorean numbers were\nregarded as _symbols_. The \"numbers\" of Pythagoras are, in the mind of\nAristotle, clearly identified with the \"forms\" of Plato. Now, in Chapter\nVI. of the First Book he says that Plato taught that these \"forms\" were\nparadeigmata--models, patterns, exemplars after which created things\nwere framed. The numbers of Pythagoras, then, are also models and\nexemplars. This also is admitted by Aristotle. The Pythagoreans indeed\naffirm that entities subsist by an _imitation_ (mimesis) of\nnumbers.[437] Now if ideas, forms, numbers, were the models or paradigms\nafter which \"the Operator\" formed all things, surely it can not be\nlogical to say they were the \"material\" out of which all things were\nframed, much less the \"efficient cause\" of things. The most legitimate\nconclusion we can draw, even from the statements of Aristotle, is that\nthe Pythagoreans regarded numbers as the best expression or\nrepresentation of those laws of proportion, and order, and harmony,\nwhich seemed, to their eyes, to pervade the universe. Their doctrine was\na faint glimpse of that grand discovery of modern science--that all the\nhigher laws of nature assume the form of a precise quantitative\nstatement.\n\n[Footnote 437: Aristotle's \"Metaphysics,\" bk. i. ch. vi.]\n\nThe fact seems to be this, the Pythagoreans busied themselves chiefly\nwith what Aristotle designates \"the _formal_ cause,\" and gave little\nattention to the inquiry concerning \"the _material_ cause.\" This is\nadmitted by Aristotle. Concerning fire, or earth, or the other bodies of\nsuch kind, they have declared nothing whatsoever, inasmuch as affirming,\nin my opinion, nothing that is peculiar concerning _sensible_\nnatures.[438] They looked, as we have previously remarked, to the\nrelations of phenomena, and having discovered certain \"numerical\nsimilitudes,\" they imagined they had attained an universal principle, or\nlaw. \"If all the essential properties and attributes of things were\nfully represented by the relations of numbers, the philosophy which\nsupplied such an explanation of the universe might well be excused from\nexplaining, also, that existence of objects, which is distinct from the\nexistence of all their qualities and properties. The Pythagorean\ndoctrine of numbers might have been combined with the doctrine of atoms,\nand the combination might have led to results worthy of notice. But, so\nfar as we are aware, no such combination was attempted, and perhaps we\nof the present day are only just beginning to perceive, through the\ndisclosures of chemistry and crystallography, the importance of such an\ninquiry.\"[439]\n\n[Footnote 4398: Id., ib., bk. i. ch. ix.]\n\n[Footnote 439: Whewell's \"History of Inductive Sciences,\" vol. i. p.\n78.]\n\nThese preliminary considerations will have cleared and prepared the way\nfor a fuller presentation of the philosophic system of Pythagoras. The\nmost comprehensive and satisfactory exposition of his \"method\" is that\ngiven by Wm Archer Butler in his \"_Lectures on Ancient Philosophy_,\" and\nwe feel we can not do better than condense his pages.[440]\n\n[Footnote 440: Lecture VI. vol. i.]\n\nPythagoras had long devoted his intellectual adoration to the lofty idea\nof _order_, which seemed to reveal itself to his mind, as the presiding\ngenius of the serene and silent world. He had, from his youth, dwelt\nwith delight upon the eternal relations of space, and determinate form,\nand number, in which the very idea of _proportion_ seems to find its\nfirst and immediate development, and without the latter of which\n(number), all proportion is absolutely inconceivable. To this ardent\ngenius, whose inventive energies were daily adding new and surprising\ncontributions to the sum of discoverable relations, it at length began\nto appear as if the whole secret of the universe was hidden in these\nmysterious correspondences.\n\nIn making this extensive generalization, Pythagoras may, on his known\nprinciples, be supposed to have reasoned as follows: The mind of man\nperceives the relations of an eternal _order_ in the proportions of\nspace, and form, and number. That mind is, no doubt, a portion of the\nsoul which animates and governs the universe; for on what other\nsupposition shall we account for its internal principle of activity--the\nvery principle which characterizes the prime mover, and can scarce be\nascribed to an inferior nature? And on what other supposition are we to\nexplain the identity which subsists between the principles of order,\nauthenticated by the reason and the facts of order which are found to\nexist in the forms and multiplicities around us, and independent of us?\nCan this sameness be other than the sameness of the internal and\nexternal principles of a common nature? The proportions of the universe\ninhere in its divine soul; they are indeed its very essence, or at\nleast, its attributes. The ideas or principles of Order which are\nimplanted in the human reason, must inhere in the Divine Reason, and\nmust be reflected in the visible world, which is its product. Man, then,\ncan boldly affirm the necessary harmony of the world, because he has in\nhis own mind a revelation which declares that the world, in its real\nstructure, must be the image and copy of that divine _proportion_ which\nhe inwardly adores.[441]\n\n[Footnote 441: It is an opinion which goes as far back as the time of\nPlato, and even Pythagoras, and has ever since been widely entertained,\nthat beauty of _form_ consists in some sort of _proportion_ or _harmony_\nwhich may admit of a mathematical expression; and later and more\nscientific research is altogether in its favor. It is now established\nthat complementary colors, that is, colors which when combined make up\nthe full beam, are felt to be beautiful when seen simultaneously; that\nis, the mind is made to delight in the unities of nature. At the basis\nof music there are certain fixed ratios; and in poetry, of every\ndescription, there are measures, and correspondencies. Pythagoras has\noften been ridiculed for his doctrine of \"the music of the spheres;\" and\nprobably his doctrine was somewhat fanciful, but later science shows\nthat there is a harmony in all nature--in its forms, in its forces, and\nin its motions. The highest unorganized and all organized objects take\ndefinite forms which are regulated by mathematical laws. The forces of\nnature can be estimated in numbers, and light and heat go in\nundulations, whilst the movements of the great bodies in nature admit of\na precise quantitative expression. The harmonies of nature in respect of\ncolor, of number, of form, and of time are forcibly exhibited in\n\"Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation,\" by M'Cosh.]\n\nAgain, the world is assuredly _perfect_, as being the sensible image and\ncopy of the Divinity, the outward and multiple development of the\nEternal Unity. It must, therefore, when thoroughly known and properly\ninterpreted, answer to all which we can conceive as perfect; that is, it\nmust be regulated by laws, of which we have the highest principles in\nthose first and elementary properties of numbers which stand next to\n_unity_. \"The world is then, through all its departments, _a living\narithmetic in its development, a realized geometry in its repose_.\" It\nis a kosmos (for the word is purely Pythagorean)--the expression of\n_harmony_, the manifestation, to sense, of everlasting _order_.\n\nThough Pythagoras found in geometry the fitting initiative for abstract\nspeculation, it is remarkable that he himself preferred to constitute\nthe science of Numbers as the true representative of the laws of the\nuniverse. The reason appears to be this: that though geometry speaks\nindeed of eternal truths, yet when the notion of symmetry and proportion\nis introduced, it is often necessary to insist, in preference, upon the\nproperties of numbers. Hence, though the universe displays the geometry\nof its Constructor or Animator, yet nature was eminently defined as the\nmimesis ton arithmon--the imitation of numbers.\n\nThe key to all the Pythagorean dogmas, then, seems to be the general\nformula of _unity in multiplicity_:--unity either evolving itself into\nmultiplicity, or unity discovered as pervading multiplicity. The\nprinciple of all things, the same principle which in this philosophy, as\nin others, was customarily called _Deity_, is the primitive unit from\nwhich all proceeds in the accordant relations of the universal scheme.\nInto the sensible world of multitude, the all-pervading Unity has\ninfused his own ineffable nature; he has impressed his own image upon\nthat world which is to represent him in the sphere of sense and man.\nWhat, then, is that which is at once single and multiple, identical and\ndiversified--which we perceive as the combination of a thousand\nelements, yet as the expression of a single spirit--which is a chaos to\nthe sense, a cosmos to the reason? What is it but\nharmony--proportion--the one governing the many, the many lost in the\none? The world is therefore a _harmony_ in innumerable degrees, from the\nmost complicated to the most simple: it is now a Triad, combining the\nMonad and the Duad, and partaking of the nature of both; now a Tetrad,\nthe form of perfection; now a Decad, which, in combining the four\nformer, involves, in its mystic nature, all the possible accordances of\nthe universe.[442]\n\nThe psychology of the Pythagoreans was greatly modified by their\nphysical, and still more, by their moral tenets. The soul was arithmos\neauton kinon--a self-moving number or Monad, the copy (as we have seen)\nof that Infinite Monad which unfolds from its own incomprehensible\nessence all the relations of the universe. This soul has three elements,\nReason (nous), Intelligence (phren), and Passion (Thymos). The two last,\nman has in common with brutes, the first is his grand and peculiar\ncharacteristic. It has, hence, been argued that Pythagoras could not\nhave held the doctrine of \"transmigration.\" This clear separation of man\nfrom the brute, by this signal endowment of reason, which is\nsempiternal, seems a refutation of those who charge him with the\ndoctrine.\n\nIn the department of morals, the legislator of Crotona found his\nappropriate sphere. In his use of numerical notation, moral good was\nessential unity--evil, essential plurality and division. In the fixed\ntruths of mathematical abstractions he found the exemplars of social and\npersonal virtue. The rule or law of all morality is resemblance to God;\nthat is, the return of number to its root, to unity,[443] and virtue is\nthus a harmony.\n\n[Footnote 442: That is, 1+2+3+4=10. There are intimations that the\nPythagoreans regarded the Monad as God, the Duad as matter, the Triad as\nthe complex phenomena of the world, the Tetrad as the completeness of\nall its relations, the Decad as the cosmos, or harmonious whole.]\n\n[Footnote 443: Aristotle, \"Nichomachian Ethics,\" bk. i. ch. vi.]\n\nThus have we, in Pythagoras, the dawn of an _Idealist_ school; for\nmathematics are founded upon abstractions, and there is consequently an\nintimate connection between mathematics and idealism. The relations of\nspace, and number, and determinate form, are, like the relations of\ncause and effect, of phenomena and substance, perceptible _only in\nthought_; and the mind which has been disciplined to abstract thought by\nthe study of mathematics, is prepared and disposed for purely\nmetaphysical studies. \"The looking into mathematical learning is a kind\nof prelude to the contemplation of real being.\"[444] Therefore Plato\ninscribed over the door of his academy, \"Let none but Geometricians\nenter here.\" To the mind thus disciplined in abstract thinking, the\nconceptions and ideas of reason have equal authority, sometimes even\nsuperior authority, to the perceptions of sense.\n\n[Footnote 444: Alcinous, \"Introduction to the Doctrines of Plato,\" ch.\nvii.]\n\nNow if the testimony of both reason and sense, as given in\nconsciousness, is accepted as of equal authority, and each faculty is\nregarded as, within its own sphere, a source of real, valid knowledge,\nthen a consistent and harmonious system of _Natural Realism_ or _Natural\nDualism_ will be the result. If the testimony of sense is questioned and\ndistrusted, and the mind is denied any immediate knowledge of the\nsensible world, and yet the existence of an external world is maintained\nby various hypotheses and reasonings, the consequence will be a species\nof _Hypothetical Dualism_ or _Cosmothetic Idealism_. But if the\naffirmations of reason, as to the unity of the cosmos, are alone\naccepted, and the evidence of the senses, as to the variety and\nmultiplicity of the world, is entirely disregarded, then we have a\nsystem of _Absolute Idealism_. Pythagoras regarded the harmony which\npervades the diversified phenomena of the outer world as a manifestation\nof the unity of its eternal principle, or as the perpetual evolution of\nthat unity, and the consequent _tendency_ of his system was to\ndepreciate the _sensible_. Following out this tendency, the Eleatics\nfirst neglected, and finally denied the variety of the universe--denied\nthe real existence of the external world, and asserted an absolute\n_metaphysical_ unity.\n\n_Xenophanes of Colophon_, in Ionia (B.C. 616-516), was the founder of\nthis celebrated school of Elea. He left Ionia, and arrived in Italy\nabout the same time as Pythagoras, bringing with him to Italy his Ionian\ntendencies; he there amalgamated them with Pythagorean speculations.\n\nPythagoras had succeeded in fixing the attention of his countrymen on\nthe harmony which pervades the material world, and had taught them to\nregard that harmony as the manifestation of the intelligence, and unity,\nand perfection of its eternal principle. Struck with this idea of\nharmony and of unity, Xenophanes, who was a poet, a rhapsodist, and\ntherefore by native tendency, rather than by intellectual discipline, an\nIdealist, begins already to attach more importance to _unity_ than\nmultiplicity in his philosophy of nature. He regards the testimony of\nreason as of more authority than the testimony of sense; \"and he holds\nbadly enough the balance between the unity of the Pythagoreans and the\nvariety which Heraclitus and the Ionians had alone considered.\"[445]\n\nWe are not, however, to suppose that Xenophanes denied entirely the\nexistence of _plurality_. \"The great Rhapsodist of Truth\" was guided by\nthe spontaneous intuitions of his mind (which seemed to partake of the\ncharacter of an inspiration), to a clearer vision of the truth than were\nhis successors of the same school by their discursive reasonings. \"The\nOne\" of Xenophanes was clearly distinguished from the outward universe\n(ta polla) on the one hand, and from the \"_non-ens_\" on the other. It\nwas his disciple, Parmenides, who imagined the logical necessity of\nidentifying plurality with the \"_non-ens_\" and thus denying all\nimmediate cognition of the phenomenal world. The compactness and logical\ncoherence of the system of Parmenides seems to have had a peculiar charm\nfor the Grecian mind, and to have diverted the eyes of antiquity from\nthe views of the more earnest and devout Xenophanes, whose opinions were\ntoo often confounded with those of his successors of the Eleatic school.\n\"Accordingly we find that Xenophanes has obtained credit for much that\nis, exclusively, the property of Parmenides and Zeno, in particular for\ndenying plurality, and for identifying God with the universe.\"[446]\n\n[Footnote 445: Cousin, \"History of Philosophy,\" vol. i. p. 440.]\n\n[Footnote 446: See note by editor, W.H. Thompson, M.A., on pages 331,\n332 of Butler's \"Lectures,\" vol. i. His authorities are \"Fragments of\nXenophanes\" and the treatise \"De Melisso, Xenophane, et Gorgia,\" by\nAristotle.]\n\nIn theology, Xenophanes was unquestionably a _Theist_. He had a profound\nand earnest conviction of the existence of a God, and he ridiculed with\nsarcastic force, the anthropomorphic absurdities of the popular\nreligion. This one God, he taught, was self-existent, eternal, and\ninfinite; supreme in power, in goodness, and intelligence.[447] These\ncharacteristics are ascribed to the Deity in the sublime words with\nwhich he opens his philosophic poem--\n\n     \"There is one God, of all beings, divine and human, the greatest:\n     Neither in body alike unto mortals, neither in mind.\"\n\nHe has no parts, no organs, as men have, being\n\n     \"All sight, all ear, all intelligence;\n     Wholly exempt from toil, he sways all things by _thought_ and\n                                                           _will_.\"[448]\n\nXenophanes also taught that God is \"uncreated\" or \"uncaused,\" and that\nhe is \"excellent\" as well as \"all-powerful.\"[449] And yet, regardless of\nthese explicit utterances, Lewes cautions his readers against supposing\nthat, by the \"one God,\" Xenophanes meant a Personal God; and he asserts\nthat his Monotheism was Pantheism. A doctrine, however, which ascribes\nto the Divine Being moral as well as intellectual supremacy, which\nacknowledges an outward world distinct from Him, and which represents\nHim as causing the changes in that universe by the acts of an\nintelligent volition, can only by a strange perversion of language be\ncalled pantheism.\n\n[Footnote 447: Lewes's \"Biographical History of Philosophy,\" p. 38;\nRitter's \"History of Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. i. pp. 428, 429.]\n\n[Footnote 448: Ritter's \"History of Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. i. pp.\n432, 434.]\n\n[Footnote 449: Butler's \"Lectures,\" vol. i. p. 331, note; Ritter's\n\"History of Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. i. p. 428.]\n\n_Parmenides of Elea_ (born B.C. 536) was the philosopher who framed the\npsychological opinions of the Idealist school into a precise and\ncomprehensive system. He was the first carefully to distinguish between\n_Truth_ (aletheian) and _Opinion_ (doxan)--between ideas obtained\nthrough the reason and the simple perceptions of sense. Assuming that\nreason and sense are the only sources of knowledge, he held that they\nfurnish the mind with two distinct classes of cognitions--one variable,\nfleeting, and uncertain; the other immutable, necessary, and eternal.\nSense is dependent on the variable organization of the individual, and\ntherefore its evidence is changeable, uncertain, and nothing but a mere\n\"_seeming_.\" Reason is the same in all individuals, and therefore its\nevidence is constant, real, and true. Philosophy is, therefore, divided\ninto two branches--_Physics_ and _Metaphysics_; one, a science of\nabsolute knowledge; the other, a science of mere appearances. The first\nscience, Physics, is pronounced illusory and uncertain; the latter,\nMetaphysics, is infallible and immutable.[450]\n\nProceeding on these principles, he rejects the dualistic system of the\nuniverse, and boldly declared that all essences are fundamentally\n_one_--that, in fact, there is no real plurality, and that all the\ndiversity which \"appears\" is merely presented under a peculiar aesthetic\nor sensible law. The senses, it is true, teach us that there are \"many\nthings,\" but reason affirms that, at bottom, there exists only \"the\none.\" Whatever, therefore, manifests itself in the field of sense is\nmerely illusory--the mental representation of a phenomenal world, which\nto experience seems diversified, but which reason can not possibly admit\nto be other than \"immovable\" and \"one.\" There is but one Being in the\nuniverse, eternal, immovable, absolute; and of this unconditioned being\nall phenomenal existences, whether material or mental, are but the\nattributes and modes. Hence the two great maxims of the Eleatic school,\nderived from Parmenides--ta panta en, \"_The All is One_\" and to auto\nnoein te kai einai (Idem est cogitare atque esse), \"_Thought and Being\nare identical._\" The last remarkable dictum is the fundamental principle\nof the modern pantheistic doctrine of \"absolute identity\" as taught by\nSchelling and Hegel.[451]\n\n[Footnote 450: Ritter's \"History of Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. i. pp.\n447, 451.]\n\n[Footnote 451: Id., ib., vol. i. pp. 450, 455.]\n\nLewes asserts that \"Parmenides did not, with Xenophanes, call 'the One'\nGod; he called it Being.[452] In support of this statement he, however,\ncites no ancient authorities. We are therefore justified in rejecting\nhis opinion, and receiving the testimony of Simplicius, \"the only\nauthority for the fragments of the Eleatics,\"[453] and who had a copy of\nthe philosophic poems of Parmenides. He assures us that Parmenides and\nXenophanes \"affirmed that '_the One,_' or unity, was the first Principle\nof all,....they meaning by this One _that highest or supreme God_, as\nbeing the cause of unity to all things.... It remaineth, therefore, that\nthat _Intelligence_ which is the cause of all things, and therefore of\nmind and understanding also, in which all things are comprehended in\nunity, was Parmenides' one Ens or Being.[454] Parmenides was, therefore,\na spiritualistic or idealistic Pantheist.\n\n_Zeno of Elea_ (born B.C. 500) was the logician of the Eleatic school.\nHe was, says Diogenes Laertius, \"the inventor of Dialectics.\"[455] Logic\nhenceforth becomes the organon[456]--organon of the Eleatics.\n\n[Footnote 452: \"Biographical History of Philosophy,\" p. 50.]\n\n[Footnote 453: Encyclopaedia Britannica, article \"Simplicius.\"]\n\n[Footnote 454: Cudworth's \"Intellectual System,\" vol. i. p. 511.]\n\n[Footnote 455: \"Lives,\" p. 387 (Bohn's edition).]\n\n[Footnote 456: Plato in \"Parmen.\"]\n\nThis organon, however, Zeno used very imperfectly. In his hands it was\nsimply the \"reductio ad absurdum\" of opposing opinions as the means of\nsustaining the tenets of his own sect. Parmenides had asserted, on _a\npriori_ grounds, the existence of \"the One.\" Zeno would prove by his\ndialectic the non-existence of \"the many.\" His grand position was that\nall phenomena, all that appears to sense, is but a _modification_ of the\nabsolute One. And he displays a vast amount of dialectic subtilty in the\neffort to prove that all \"appearances\" are unreal, and that all movement\nand change is a mere \"seeming\"--not a reality. What men call motion is\nonly a name given to a series of conditions, each of which, considered\nseparately, is rest. \"Rest is force resistant; motion is force\ntriumphant.\"[457] The famous puzzle of \"Achilles and the Tortoise,\" by\nwhich he endeavored to prove the unreality of motion, has been rendered\nfamiliar to the English reader.[458]\n\n[Footnote 457: Lewes's \"Biographical History of Philosophy,\" p. 60.]\n\n[Footnote 458: Ritter's \"History of Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. i. pp.\n475, 476.]\n\nAristotle assures us that Zeno, \"by his one Ens, which neither was moved\nnor movable, meaneth God.\" And he also informs us that \"Zeno endeavored\nto demonstrate that there is but one God, from the idea which all men\nhave of him, as that which is the best, supremest, most powerful of all,\nor an absolutely perfect being\" (\"De Xenophane, Zenone, et\nGorgia\").[459]\n\nWith Zeno we close our survey of the second grand line of independent\ninquiry by which philosophy sought to solve the problem of the universe.\nThe reader will be struck with the resemblance which subsists between\nthe history of its development and that of the modern Idealist school.\nPythagoras was the Descartes, Parmenides the Spinoza, and Zeno the Hegel\nof the Italian school.\n\nIn this survey of the speculations of the pre-Socratic schools of\nphilosophy, we have followed the course of two opposite streams of\nthought which had their common origin in one fundamental principle or\nlaw of the human mind--the _intuition of unity_--\"or the desire to\ncomprehend all the facts of the universe in a single formula, and\nconsummate all conditional knowledge in the unity of unconditioned\nexistence.\" The history of this tendency is, in fact, the history of all\nphilosophy. \"The end of all philosophy,\" says Plato, \"is the intuition\nof unity.\" \"All knowledge,\" said the Platonists, \"is the gathering up\ninto one.\"[460]\n\n[Footnote 459: Cudworth's \"Intellectual System,\" vol. i. p. 518.]\n\n[Footnote 460: Hamilton's \"Metaphysics,\" vol. i. pp. 67-70 (English\nedition).]\n\nStarting from this fundamental idea, _that, beneath the endless flux and\nchange of the visible universe, there must be a permanent principle of\nunity_, we have seen developed two opposite schools of speculative\nthought. As the traveller, standing on the ridges of the Andes, may see\nthe head-waters of the great South American rivers mingling in one, so\nthe student of philosophy, standing on the elevated plane of analytic\nthought, may discover, in this fundamental principle, the common source\nof the two great systems of speculative thought which divided the\nancient world. Here are the head-waters of the sensational and the\nidealist schools. The Ionian school started its course of inquiry in the\ndirection of _sense_; it occupied itself solely with the phenomena of\nthe external world, and it sought this principle of unity in a\n_physical_ element. The Italian school started its course of inquiry in\nthe direction of _reason_; it occupied itself chiefly with rational\nconceptions or _a priori_ ideas, and it sought this principle of unity\nin purely _metaphysical_ being. And just as the Amazon and La Plata\nsweep on, in opposite directions, until they reach the extremities of\nthe continent, so these two opposite streams of thought rush onward, by\nthe force of a logical necessity, until they terminate in the two\nUnitarian systems of _Absolute Materialism_ and _Absolute Idealism_,\nand, in their theological aspects, in a pantheism which, on the one\nhand, identifies God with matter, or, on the other hand, swallows up the\nuniverse in God.\n\nThe radical error of both these systems is at once apparent. The\ntestimony of the primary faculties of the mind was not regarded as each,\nwithin its sphere, final and decisive. The duality of consciousness was\nnot accepted in all its integrity; one school rejected the testimony of\nreason, the other denied the veracity of the senses, and both prepared\nthe way for the _skepticism_ of the Sophists.\n\nWe must not, however, lose sight of the fact that there were some\nphilosophers of the pre-Socratic school, as Anaxagoras and Empedocles,\nwho recognized the partial and exclusive character of both these\nsystems, and sought, by a method which Cousin would designate as\nEclecticism, to combine the element of truth contained in each.\n\n_Anaxagoras of Clazomencoe_ (B.C. 500-428) added to the Ionian\nphilosophy of a material element or elements the Italian idea of a\n_spirit_ distinct from, and independent of the world, which has within\nitself the principle of a spontaneous activity--Nous autocrates, and\nwhich is the first cause of motion in the universe--arche tes\nkineseos.[461]\n\n[Footnote 461: Cousin, \"History of Philosophy,\" vol. i. p. 411.]\n\nIn his physical theory, Anaxagoras was an Atomist. Instead of one\nelement, he declared that the elements or first principles were\nnumerous, or even infinite. No point in space is unoccupied by these\natoms, which are infinitely divisible. He imagined that, in nature,\nthere are as many kinds of principles as there are species of compound\nbodies, and that the peculiar form of the primary particles of which any\nbody is composed is the same with the qualities of the compound body\nitself. This was the celebrated doctrine of _Homoeomeria_, of which\nLucretius furnishes a luminous account in his philosophic poem \"De\nNatura Rerum\"--\n\n                        \"That bone from bones\n     Minute, and embryon; nerve from nerves arise;\n     And blood from blood, by countless drops increased.\n     Gold, too, from golden atoms, earths concrete,\n     From earths extreme; from fiery matters, fire;\n     And lymph from limpen dews. And thus throughout\n     From primal kinds that kinds perpetual spring.\"[462]\n\nThese primary particles were regarded by Anaxagoras as eternal; because\nhe held the dogma, peculiar to all the Ionians, that nothing can be\nreally created or annihilated (de nihilo nihil, in nihilum nil posse\nreverti). But he saw, nevertheless, that the simple existence of\n\"_inert_\" matter, even from eternity, could not explain the motion and\nthe harmony of the material world. Hence he saw the necessity of another\npower--_the power of Intelligence_. \"All things were in chaos; then came\nIntelligence and introduced Order.\"[463]\n\nAnaxagoras, unlike the pantheistic speculators of the Ionian school,\nrigidly separated the Supreme Intelligence from the material universe.\nThe Nous of Anaxagoras is a principle, infinite, independent\n(autocrates), omnipresent (en panti pantos moioa enon), the subtilest\nand purest of things (lepitotaton panion chrematon kaikai katharotaton);\nand incapable of mixture with aught besides; it is also omniscient\n(panta egno), and unchangeable (pas omoios esti).--Simplicius, in\n\"Arist. Phys.\" i. 33.[464]\n\n[Footnote 462: Good's translation, bk. i. p. 325.]\n\n[Footnote 463: Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives,\" p. 59.]\n\n[Footnote 464: Butler's \"Lectures on Philosophy,\" vol. i. p. 305, note.]\n\nThus did Anaxagoras bridge the chasm between the Ionian and the Italian\nschools. He accepted both doctrines with some modifications. He believed\nin the real existence of the phenomenal world, and he also believed in\nthe real existence of \"The Infinite Mind,\" whose Intelligence and\nOmnipotence were manifested in the laws and relations which pervade the\nworld. He proclaimed the existence of the Infinite Intelligence (\"the\nONE\"), who was the Architect and Governor of the Infinite Matter (\"the\nMANY\").\n\nOn the question as to the origin and certainty of human knowledge,\nAnaxagoras differed both from the Ionians and the Eleatics. Neither the\nsense alone, nor the reason alone, were for him a ground of certitude.\nHe held that reason (logos) was the regulative faculty of the mind, as\nthe Nous, or Supreme Intelligence, was the regulative power of the\nuniverse. And he admitted that the senses were veracious in their\nreports; but they reported only in regard to phenomena. The senses,\nthen, perceive _phenomena_, but it is the reason alone which recognizes\n_noumena_, that is, the reason perceives being in and through phenomena,\nsubstance in and through qualities; an anticipation of the fundamental\nprinciple of modern psychology--\"_that every power or substance in\nexistence is knowable to us, so far only, as we know its phenomena_.\"\nThus, again, does he bridge the chasm that separates between the\nSensationalist and the Idealist. The Ionians relied solely on the\nintuitions of sense; the Eleatics accepted only the apperceptions of\npure reason; he accepted the testimony of both, and in the synthesis of\nsubject and object--the union of an element supplied by sensation, and\nan element supplied by reason, he found real, certain knowledge.\n\nThe harmony which the doctrine of Anaxagoras introduced into the\nphilosophy of Athens, soon attracted attention and multiplied disciples.\nHe was teaching when Socrates arrived in Athens, and the latter attended\nhis school. The influence which the doctrine of Anaxagoras exerted upon\nthe mind of Socrates (leading him to recognize Intelligence as the cause\nof order and special adaptation in the universe),[465] and also upon the\ncourse of philosophy in the Socratic schools, is the most enduring\nmemorial of his name.[466]\n\n[Footnote 465: \"Phaedo,\" Sec. 105.]\n\n[Footnote 466: Aristotle's \"Metaphysics,\" bk. i. ch. iii.]\n\nWe have devoted a much larger space than we originally designed to the\nante-Socratic schools--quite out of proportion, indeed, with that we\nshall be able to appropriate to their successors. But inasmuch as all\nthe great primary problems of thought, which are subsequently discussed\nby Plato and Aristotle, were started, and received, at least, typical\nanswers in those schools, we can not hope to understand Plato, or\nAristotle, or even Epicurus, or Zeno of Cittium, unless we have first\nmastered the doctrines of Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Parmenides, and\nAnaxagoras.[467] The attention we have bestowed on these early thinkers\nwill, therefore, have been a valuable preparatory discipline for the\nstudy of\n\nII. THE SOCRATIC SCHOOL.\n\nThe first cycle of philosophy was now complete. That form of Grecian\nspeculative thought which, during the first period of its development,\nwas a philosophy of nature, had reached its maturity; it had sought \"the\nfirst principles of all things\" in the study of external nature, and had\nsignally failed. In this pursuit of first principles as the basis of a\ntrue and certain knowledge of the system of the universe, the two\nleading schools had been carried to opposite poles of thought. One had\nasserted that _experience_ alone, the other, that _reason_ alone was the\nsole criterion of truth. As the last consequence of this imperfect\nmethod, Leucippus had denied the existence of \"the one,\" and Zeno had\ndenied the existence of \"the many.\" The Ionian school, in Democritus,\nhad landed in Materialism; the Italian, in Parmenides, had ended in\nPantheism; and, as the necessary result of this partial and defective\nmethod of inquiry, which ended in doubt and contradiction, a spirit of\ngeneral skepticism was generated in the Athenian mind. If doubt be cast\nupon the veracity of the primary cognitive faculties of the mind, the\nflood-gates of universal skepticism are opened. If the senses are\npronounced to be mendacious and illusory in their reports regarding\nexternal phenomena, and if the intuitions of the reason, in regard to\nthe ground and cause of phenomena, are delusive, then we have no ground\nof certitude. If one faculty is unveracious and unreliable, how can we\ndetermine that the other is not equally so? There is, then, no such\nthing as universal and necessary truth. Truth is variable and uncertain,\nas the variable opinion of each individual.\n\n[Footnote 467: Maurice's \"Ancient Philosophy,\" p. 114; Butler's\n\"Lectures on Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. ii. pp. 87, 88.]\n\nThe Sophists, who belonged to no particular school, laid hold on the\nelements of skepticism contained in both the pre-Socratic schools of\nphilosophy, and they declared that \"the sophia\" was not only\nunattainable, but that no relative degree of it was possible for the\nhuman faculties.[468] Protagoras of Abdera accepted the doctrine of\nHeraclitus, that thought is identical with sensation, and limited by it;\nhe therefore declared that there is no criterion of truth, and _Man is\nthe measure of all things_.[469] Sextus Empiricus gives the\npsychological opinions of Protagoras with remarkable explicitness.\n\"Matter is in a perpetual flux, whilst it undergoes augmentations and\nlosses; the senses also are modified according to the age and\ndisposition of the body. He said, also, that the reason of all phenomena\nresides in matter as substrata, so that matter, in itself, might be\nwhatever it appeared to each. But men have different perceptions at\ndifferent periods, according to the changes in the things perceived....\nMan is, therefore, the criterion of that which exists; all that is\nperceived by him exists; _that which is perceived by no man does not\nexist_.\"[470] These conclusions were rigidly and fearlessly applied to\nethics and political science. If there is no Eternal Truth, there can be\nno Immutable Right. The distinction of right and wrong is solely a\nmatter of human opinion and conventional usage.[471] \"That which\n_appears_ just and honorable to each city, is so for _that city_, so\nlong as the opinion prevails.\"[472]\n\n[Footnote 468: Encyclopaedia Britannica, article \"Sophist.\"]\n\n[Footnote 469: Plato's \"Theaetetus\" (anthropos--\"the individual is the\nmeasure of all things\"), vol. i. p. 381 (Bohn's edition).]\n\n[Footnote 470: Lewes's \"Biographical History of Philosophy,\" p. 117.]\n\n[Footnote 471: \"Gorgias,\" Sec. 85-89.]\n\n[Footnote 472: Plato's \"Theaetetus,\" Sec. 65-75.]\n\nThere were others who laid hold on the weapons which Zeno had prepared\nto their hands. He had asserted that all the objects of sense were mere\nphantoms--delusive and transitory. By the subtilties of dialectic\nquibbling, he had attempted to prove that \"change\" meant \"permanence,\"\nand \"motion\" meant \"rest.\"[473] Words may, therefore, have the most\nopposite and contradictory meanings; and all language and all opinion\nmay, by such a process, be rendered uncertain. One opinion is,\nconsequently, for the individual, just as good as another; and all\nopinions are equally true and untrue. It was nevertheless desirable, for\nthe good of society, that there should be some agreement, and that, for\na time at least, certain opinions should prevail; and if philosophy had\nfailed to secure this agreement, rhetoric, at least, was effectual; and,\nwith the Sophist, rhetoric was \"the art of making the worst appear the\nbetter reason.\" All wisdom was now confined to a species of \"word\njugglery,\" which in Athens was dignified as \"the art of disputation.\"\n\n[Footnote 473: \"And do we not know that the Eleatic Palamedes (Zeno)\nspoke by art in such a manner that the same things appeared to be\nsimilar and dissimilar, one and many, at rest and in\nmotion?\"--\"Phaedrus,\" Sec. 97.]\n\nSOCRATES (B.C. 469-399), the grand central figure in the group of\nancient philosophers, arrived in Athens in the midst of this general\nskepticism. He had an invincible faith in truth. \"He made her the\nmistress of his soul, and with patient labor, and unwearied energy, did\nhis great and noble soul toil after perfect communion with her.\" He was\ndisappointed and dissatisfied with the results that had been reached by\nthe methods of his predecessors, and he was convinced that by these\nmethods the problem of the universe could not be solved. He therefore\nturned away from physical inquiries, and devoted his whole attention to\nthe study of the human mind, its fundamental beliefs, ideas, and laws.\nIf he can not penetrate the mysteries of the outer world, he will turn\nhis attention to the world within. He will \"know himself,\" and find\nwithin himself the reason, and ground, and law of all existence. There\nhe discovered certain truths which can not possibly be questioned. He\nfelt he had within his own heart a faithful monitor--a _conscience_,\nwhich he regarded as the voice of God.[474] He believed \"he had a divine\nteacher with him at all times. Though he did not possess wisdom, this\nteacher could put him on the road to seek it, could preserve him from\ndelusions which might turn him out of the way, could keep his mind fixed\nupon the end for which he ought to act and live.\"[475] In himself,\ntherefore, he sought that ground of certitude which should save him from\nthe prevailing skepticism of his times. The Delphic inscription, Gnoti\nseauton, \"_know thyself_\" becomes henceforth the fundamental maxim of\nphilosophy.\n\n[Footnote 474: The Daemon of Socrates has been the subject of much\ndiscussion among learned men. The notion, once generally received, that\nhis _daimon_ was \"a familiar genius,\" is now regarded as an exploded\nerror. \"Nowhere does Socrates, in Plato or Xenophon, speak of _a_ genius\nor demon, but always of a _doemoniac something (to daimonion_, or\n_daimonin ti_), or of a _sign_, a _voice_, a _divine sign_, a _divine\nvoice_\" (Lewes's \"Biographical History of Philosophy,\" p. 166).\n\"Socrates always speaks of a _divine or supernatural somewhat_ ('divinum\nquiddam,' as Cicero has it), the nature of which he does not attempt to\ndivine, and to which he never attributes personality\" (Butler's\n\"Lectures on Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. i. p. 357). The scholar need not\nto be informed that _to daimonion_, in classic literature, means the\ndivine Essence (Lat. _numen_), to which are attributed events beyond\nman's power, yet not to be assigned to any special god.]\n\n[Footnote 475: Maurice's \"Ancient Philosophy,\" p. 124.]\n\nTruth has a rational, _a priori_ foundation in the constitution of the\nhuman mind. There are _ideas_ connatural to the human reason which are\nthe copies of those archetypal ideas which belong to the Eternal Reason.\nThe grand problem of philosophy, therefore, now is--_What are these\nfundamental_ IDEAS _which are unchangeable and permanent, amid all the\ndiversifies of human opinion, connecting appearance with reality, and\nconstituting a ground of certain knowledge or absolute truth_? Socrates\nmay not have held the doctrine of ideas as exhibited by Plato, but he\ncertainly believed that there were germs of truth latent in the human\nmind--principles which governed, unconsciously, the processes of\nthought, and that these could be developed by reflection and by\nquestioning. These were embryonate in the womb of reason, coming to the\nbirth, but needing the \"maieutic\" or \"obstetric\" art, that they might be\nbrought forth.[476] He would, therefore, become the accoucheur of ideas,\nand deliver minds of that secret truth which lay in their mental\nconstitution. And thus _Psychology_ becomes the basis of all legitimate\nmetaphysics.\n\n[Footnote 476: Plato's \"Theaetetus,\" Sec. 22.]\n\nBy the general consent of antiquity, as well as by the concurrent\njudgment of all modern historians of philosophy, Socrates is regarded as\nhaving effected a complete revolution in philosophic thought, and, by\nuniversal consent, he is placed at the commencement of a new era in\nphilosophy. Schleiermacher has said, \"the service which Socrates\nrendered to philosophy consisted not so much in the truths arrived at\n_as in the_ METHOD _by which truth is sought_.\" As Bacon inaugurated a\nnew method in physical inquiry, so Socrates inaugurated a new method in\nmetaphysical inquiry.\n\nWhat, then, was this _new method_? It was no other than the _inductive_\nmethod applied to the facts of consciousness. This method is thus\ndefined by Aristotle: \"Induction is the process from particulars to\ngenerals;\" that is, it is the process of discovering laws from facts,\ncauses from effects, being from phenomena. But how is this process of\ninduction conducted? By observing and enumerating the real facts which\nare presented in consciousness, by noting their relations of resemblance\nor difference, and by classifying these facts by the aid of these\nrelations. In other words, it is _analysis_ applied to the phenomena of\nmind.[477] Now Socrates gave this method of psychological analysis to\nGreek philosophy. There are two things of which Socrates must justly be\nregarded as the author,--the _inductive reasoning_ and _abstract\ndefinition_.[478] We readily grant that Socrates employed this method\nimperfectly, for methods are the last things perfected in science; but\nstill, the Socratic movement was a vast movement in the right direction.\n\n[Footnote 477: Cousin's \"Lectures on the History of Philosophy,\" vol. i.\np. 30.]\n\n[Footnote 478: Aristotle's \"Metaphysics,\" vol. xii. ch. iv. p. 359\n(Bohn's edition).]\n\nIn what are usually regarded as the purely Socratic dialogues,[479]\nPlato evidently designs to exhibit this method of Socrates. They proceed\ncontinually on the firm conviction that there is a standard or criterion\nof truth in the reason of man, and that, by _reflection_, man can\napprehend and recognize the truth. To awaken this power of reflection;\nto compel men to analyze their language and their thoughts; to lead them\nfrom the particular and the contingent, to the universal and the\nnecessary; and to teach them to test their opinions by the inward\nstandard of truth, was the aim of Socrates. These dialogues are a\npicture of the conversations of Socrates. They are literally an\neducation of the thinking faculty. Their purpose is to discipline men to\nthink for themselves, rather than to furnish opinions for them. In many\nof these dialogues Socrates affirms nothing. After producing many\narguments, and examining a question on all sides, he leaves it\nundetermined. At the close of the dialogue he is as far from a\ndeclaration of opinions as at the commencement. His grand effort, like\nthat of Bacon's, is to furnish men a correct method of inquiry, rather\nthan to apply that method and give them results.\n\n[Footnote 479: \"Laches,\" \"Charmides,\" \"Lysis,\" \"The Rivals,\" \"First and\nSecond Alcibiades,\" \"Theages,\" \"Clitophon.\" See Whewell's translation,\nvol. i.]\n\nWe must not, however, from thence conclude that Socrates did not himself\nattain any definite conclusions, or reach any specific and valuable\nresults. When, in reply to his friends who reported the answer of the\noracle of Delphi, that \"Socrates was the wisest of men,\" he said, \"he\nsupposed the oracle declared him wise _because he knew nothing_,\" he did\nnot mean that true knowledge was unattainable, for his whole life had\nbeen spent in efforts to attain it. He simply indicates the disposition\nof mind which is most befitting and most helpful to the seeker after\ntruth. He must be conscious of his own ignorance. He must not exalt\nhimself. He must not put his own conceits in the way of the thing he\nwould know. He must have an open eye, a single purpose, an honest mind,\nto prepare him to receive light when it comes. And that there is light,\nthat there is a source whence light comes, he avowed in every word and\nact.\n\nSocrates unquestionably believed in one Supreme God, the immaterial,\ninfinite Governor of all. He cherished that instinctive, spontaneous\nfaith in God and his Providence which is the universal faith of the\nhuman heart. He saw this faith revealed in the religious sentiments of\nall nations, and in the tendency to worship so universally\ncharacteristic of humanity.[480] He appealed to the consciousness of\nabsolute dependence--the persuasion, wrought by God in the minds of all\nmen, that \"He is able to make men happy or miserable,\" and the\nconsequent sense of obligation which teaches man he ought to obey God.\nAnd he regarded with some degree of affectionate tenderness the common\nsentiment of his countrymen, that the Divine Government was conducted\nthrough the ministry of subordinate deities or generated gods. But he\nsought earnestly to prevent the presence of these subordinate agents\nfrom intercepting the clear view of the Supreme God.\n\nThe faith of Socrates was not, however, grounded on mere feeling and\nsentiment. He endeavored to place the knowledge of God on a rational\nbasis. We can not read the arguments he employed without being convinced\nthat he anticipated all the subsequent writers on Natural Theology in\nhis treatment of the argument from _special ends_ or _final causes_. We\nventure to abridge the account which is given by Xenophon of the\nconversation with Aristodemus:[481]\n\n[Footnote 480: \"Memorabilia,\" bk. i. ch. iv. Sec. 16.]\n\n[Footnote 481: Ibid., bk. i. ch. iv.]\n\n\"I will now relate the manner in which I once heard Socrates discoursing\nwith Aristodemus concerning the Deity; for, observing that he never\nprayed nor sacrificed to the gods, but, on the contrary, ridiculed those\nwho did, he said to him:\n\n\"'Tell me, Aristodemus, is there any man you admire on account of his\nmerits? Aristodemus having answered, 'Many,--'Name some of them, I pray\nyou,' said Socrates. 'I admire,' said Aristodemus, 'Homer for his Epic\npoetry, Melanippides for his dithyrambics, Sophocles for his tragedy,\nPolycletus for statuary, and Zeuxis for painting.'\n\n\"'But which seemed to you most worthy of admiration, Aristodemus--the\nartist who forms images void of motion and intelligence, or one who has\nskill to produce animals that are endued, not only with activity, but\nunderstanding?'\n\n\"'The latter, there can be no doubt,' replied Aristodemus, 'provided the\nproduction was not the effect of chance, but of wisdom and contrivance.'\n\n\"'But since there are many things, some of which we can easily see the\nuse of, while we can not say of others to what purpose they are\nproduced, which of these, Aristodemus, do you suppose the work of\nwisdom?'\n\n\"'It would seem the most reasonable to affirm it of those whose fitness\nand utility are so evidently apparent,' answered Aristodemus.\n\n\"'But it is evidently apparent that He who, at the beginning, made man,\nendued him with senses because they were good for him; eyes wherewith to\nbehold what is visible, and ears to hear whatever was heard; for, say,\nAristodemus, to what purpose should odor be prepared, if the sense of\nsmelling had been denied or why the distinction of bitter or sweet, of\nsavory or unsavory, unless a palate had been likewise given,\nconveniently placed to arbitrate between them and proclaim the\ndifference? Is not that Providence, Aristodemus, in a most eminent\nmanner conspicuous, which, because the eye of a man is so delicate in\nits contexture, hath therefore prepared eyelids like doors whereby to\nsecure it, which extend of themselves whenever it is needful, and again\nclose when sleep approaches? Are not these eyelids provided, as it were,\nwith a fence on the edge of them to keep off the wind and guard the eye?\nEven the eyebrow itself is not without its office, but, as a penthouse,\nis prepared to turn off the sweat, which falling from the forehead might\nenter and annoy that no less tender than astonishing part of us. Is it\nnot to be admired that the ears should take in sounds of every sort, and\nyet are not too much filled with them? That the fore teeth of the animal\nshould be formed in such a manner as is evidently best for cutting, and\nthose on the side for grinding it to pieces? That the mouth, through\nwhich this food is conveyed, should be placed so near the nose and eyes\nas to prevent the passing unnoticed whatever is unfit for\nnourishment?... And canst thou still doubt, Aristodemus, whether a\n_disposition of parts like this should be a work of chance, or of wisdom\nand contrivance_?'\n\n\"'I have no longer any doubt,' replied Aristodemus; 'and, indeed, the\nmore I consider it, the more evident it appears to me that man must be\nthe masterpiece of some great Artificer, carrying along with it infinite\nmarks of the love and favor of Him who hath thus formed it.'\n\n\"'But, further (unless thou desirest to ask me questions), seeing,\nAristodemus, thou thyself art conscious of reason and intelligence,\nsupposest thou there is no intelligence elsewhere? Thou knowest thy body\nto be a small part of that wide-extended earth thou everywhere\nbeholdest; the moisture contained in it thou also knowest to be a\nportion of that mighty mass of waters whereof seas themselves are but a\npart, while the rest of the elements contribute out of their abundance\nto thy formation. It is the _soul_, then, alone, that intellectual part\nof us, which is come to thee by some lucky chance, from I know not\nwhere. If so, there is no intelligence elsewhere; and we must be forced\nto confess that this stupendous universe, with all the various bodies\ncontained therein--equally amazing, whether we consider their magnitude\nor number, whatever their use, whatever their order--all have been\nproduced by chance, not by intelligence!'\n\n\"'It is with difficulty that I can suppose otherwise,' returned\nAristodemus; 'for I behold none of those gods whom you speak of as\nframing and governing the world; whereas I see the artists when at their\nwork here among us.'\n\n\"'Neither yet seest thou thy soul, Aristodemus, which, however, most\nassuredly governs thy body; although it may well seem, by thy manner of\ntalking, that it is chance and not reason which governs thee.'\n\n\"'I do not despise the gods,' said Aristodemus; 'on the contrary, I\nconceive so highly of their excellency, as to suppose they stand in no\nneed of me or of my services.'\n\n\"'Thou mistakest the matter,' Aristodemus, 'the great magnificence they\nhave shown in their care of thee, so much the more honor and service\nthou owest them.'\n\n\"'Be assured,' said Aristodemus, 'if I once could persuade myself the\ngods take care of man, I should want no monitor to remind me of my\nduty.'\n\n\"'And canst thou doubt, Aristodemus, if the gods take care of man? Hath\nnot the glorious privilege of walking upright been alone bestowed on\nhim, whereby he may with the better advantage survey what is around him,\ncontemplate with more ease those splendid objects which are above, and\navoid the numerous ills and inconveniences which would otherwise befall\nhim? Other animals, indeed, they have provided with feet; but to man\nthey have also given hands, with which he can form many things for use,\nand make himself happier than creatures of any other kind. A tongue hath\nbeen bestowed on every other animal; but what animal, except man, hath\nthe power of forming words with it whereby to explain his thoughts and\nmake them intelligible to others? But it is not with respect to the body\nalone that the gods have shown themselves bountiful to man. Their most\nexcellent gift is that of a soul they have infused into him, which so\nfar surpasses what is elsewhere to be found; for by what animal except\nman is even the existence of the gods discovered, who have produced and\nstill uphold in such regular order this beautiful and stupendous frame\nof the universe? What other creature is to be found that can serve and\nadore them?... In thee, Aristodemus, has been joined to a wonderful soul\na body no less wonderful; and sayest thou, after this, the gods take no\nthought for me? What wouldst thou, then, more to convince thee of their\ncare?'\n\n\"'I would they should send and inform me,' said Aristodemus, 'what\nthings I ought or ought not to do, in like manner as thou sayest they\nfrequently do to thee.'\"\n\nIn reply, Socrates shows that the revelations of God which are made in\nnature, in history, in consciousness, and by oracles, are made _for_ all\nmen and _to_ all men. He then concludes with these remarkable words:\n\"As, therefore, amongst men we make best trial of the affection and\ngratitude of our neighbor by showing him kindness, and make discovery of\nhis wisdom by consulting him in our distress, do thou, in like manner,\nbehave towards the gods; and if thou wouldst experience what their\nwisdom and their love, render thyself deserving of some of those divine\nsecrets which may not be penetrated by man, and are imparted to those\nalone who consult, who adore, and who obey the Deity. Then shalt thou,\nmy Aristodemus, understand _there is a Being whose eye passes through\nall nature, and whose ear is open to every sound; extended to all\nplaces, extending through all time; and whose bounty and care can know\nno other bounds than those fixed by his own creation_\".[482]\n\n[Footnote 482: Lewes's translation, in \"Biog. History of Philosophy,\"\npp. 160-165.]\n\nSocrates was no less earnest in his belief in the immortality of the\nsoul, and a state of future retribution. He had reverently listened to\nthe intuitions of his own soul--the instinctive longings and aspirations\nof his own heart, as a revelation from God. He felt that all the powers\nand susceptibilities of his inward nature were in conscious adaptation\nto the idea of immortality, and that its realization was the appropriate\ndestiny of man. He was convinced that a future life was needed to avenge\nthe wrongs and reverse the unjust judgments of the present life;[483]\nneeded that virtue may receive its meet reward, and the course of\nProvidence may have its amplest vindication. He saw this faith reflected\nin the universal convictions of mankind, and the \"common traditions\" of\nall ages.[484] No one refers more frequently than Socrates to the grand\nold mythologic stories which express this faith; to Minos, and\nRhadamanthus, and AEacus, and Triptolemus, who are \"real judges,\" and\nwho, in \"the Place of Departed Spirits, administer _justice_.\"[485] He\nbelieved that in that future state the pursuit of wisdom would be his\nchief employment, and he anticipated the pleasure of mingling in the\nsociety of the wise, and good, and great of every age.\n\n[Footnote 483: \"Apology,\" Sec. 32, p. 329 (Whewell's edition).]\n\n[Footnote 484: Ibid.]\n\n[Footnote 485: \"Apology,\" p. 330.]\n\nWhilst, then, Socrates was not the first to teach the doctrine of\nimmortality, because no one could be said to have first _discovered_ it\nany more than to have first discovered the existence of a God, he was\ncertainly the first to place it upon a philosophic basis. The Phaedo\npresents the doctrine and the _reasoning_ by which Socrates had elevated\nhis mind above the fear of death. Some of the arguments may be purely\nPlatonic, the argument especially grounded on \"ideas;\" still, as a\nwhole, it must be regarded as a tolerably correct presentation of the\nmanner in which Socrates would prove the immortality of the soul.\n\nIn _Ethics_, Socrates was pre-eminently himself. The systematic\nresolution of the whole theory of society into the elementary principle\nof natural law, was peculiar to him. _Justice_ was the cardinal\nprinciple which must lie at the foundation of all good government. The\nword sophia--_wisdom_--included all excellency in personal morals,\nwhether as manifested (reflectively) in the conduct of one's self, or\n(socially) towards others. And _Happiness_, in its purity and\nperfection, can only be found in virtuous action.[486]\n\n[Footnote 486: Butler's \"Lectures on Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. i. pp.\n360, 361.]\n\nSocrates left nothing behind him that could with propriety be called a\n_school_. His chief glory is that he inaugurated a new _method_ of\ninquiry, which, in Plato and Aristotle, we shall see applied. He gave a\nnew and vital impulse to human thought, which endured for ages; \"and he\nleft, as an inheritance for humanity, the example of a heroic life\ndevoted wholly to the pursuit of truth, and crowned with martyrdom.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER X.\n\nTHE PHILOSOPHERS OF ATHENS (_continued_).\n\nTHE SOCRATIC SCHOOL (_continued_).\n\nPLATO.\n\n\nWe have seen that the advent of Socrates marks a new era in the history\nof speculative thought. Greek philosophy, which at first was a\nphilosophy of nature, now changes its direction, its character, and its\nmethod, and becomes a philosophy of mind. This, of course, does not mean\nthat now it had mind alone for its object; on the contrary, it tended,\nas indeed philosophy must always tend, to the conception of a rational\nideal or _intellectual system of the universe_. It started from the\nphenomena of mind, began with the study of human thought, and it made\nthe knowledge of mind, of its ideas and laws, the basis of a higher\nphilosophy, which should interpret all nature. In other words, it\nproceeded from psychology, through dialectics, to ontology.[487]\n\n[Footnote 487: Cousin's \"Lectures on the History of Philosophy,\" vol. i.\np. 413.]\n\nThis new movement we have designated in general terms as the _Socratic\nSchool_. Not that we are to suppose that, in any technical sense,\nSocrates founded _a_ school. The Academy, the Lyceum, the Stoa, and the\nGarden, were each the chosen resort of distinct philosophic sects, the\nlocality of separate schools; but Athens itself, the whole city, was the\nscene of the studies, the conversations, and the labors of Socrates. He\nwandered through the streets absorbed in thought. Sometimes he stood\nstill for hours lost in profoundest meditation; at other times he might\nbe seen in the market-place, surrounded by a crowd of Athenians, eagerly\ndiscussing the great questions of the day.\n\nSocrates, then, was not, in the usual sense of the word, a teacher. He\nis not to be found in the Stoa or the Grove, with official aspect,\nexpounding a system of doctrine. He is \"the garrulous oddity\" of the\nstreets, putting the most searching and perplexing questions to every\nbystander, and making every man conscious of his ignorance. He delivered\nno lectures; he simply talked. He wrote no books; he only argued: and\nwhat is usually styled his school must be understood as embracing those\nwho attended him in public as listeners and admirers, and who caught his\nspirit, adopted his philosophic _method_, and, in after life, elaborated\nand systematized the ideas they had gathered from him.\n\nAmong the regular or the occasional hearers of Socrates were many who\nwere little addicted to philosophic speculation. Some were warriors, as\nNicias and Laches; some statesmen, as Critias and Critobulus; some were\npoliticians, in the worst sense of that word, as Glaucon; and some were\nyoung men of fashion, as Euthydemus and Alcibiades. These were all alike\ndelighted with his inimitable irony, his versatility of genius, his\ncharming modes of conversation, his adroitness of reply; and they were\ncompelled to confess the wisdom and justness of his opinions, and to\nadmire the purity and goodness of his life. The magic power which he\nwielded, even over men of dissolute character, is strikingly depicted by\nAlcibiades in his speech at \"the Banquet.\"[488] Of these listeners,\nhowever, we can not now speak. Our business is with those only who\nimbibed his philosophic spirit, and became the future teachers of\nphilosophy. And even of those who, as Euclid of Megara, and Antisthenes\nthe Cynic, and Aristippus of Cyrenaica, borrowed somewhat from the\ndialectic of Socrates, we shall say nothing. They left no lasting\nimpression upon the current of philosophic thought, because their\nsystems were too partial, and narrow, and fragmentary. It is in Plato\nand Aristotle that the true development of the Socratic philosophy is to\nbe sought, and in Plato chiefly, as the disciple and friend of Socrates.\n\n[Footnote 488: \"Banquet,\" Secs. 39, 40.]\n\nPlato (B.C. 430-347) was pre-eminently the pupil of Socrates. He came to\nSocrates when he was but twenty years of age, and remained with him to\nthe day of his death.\n\nDiogenes Laertius reports the story of Socrates having dreamed he found\nan unfledged cygnet on his knee. In a few moments it became winged and\nflew away, uttering a sweet sound. The next day a young man came to him\nwho was said to reckon Solon among his near ancestors, and who looked,\nthrough him, to Codrus and the god Poseidon. That young man was Plato,\nand Socrates pronounced him to be the bird he had seen in his\ndream.[489]\n\n[Footnote 489: Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives of the Philosophers,\" bk. iii.\nch. vii.]\n\nSome have supposed that this old tradition intimates that Plato departed\nfrom the method of his master--he became fledged and flew away into the\nair. But we know that Plato did not desert his master whilst he was\nliving, and there is no evidence that he abandoned his method after he\nwas dead. He was the best expounder and the most rigid observer of the\nSocratic \"organon.\" The influence of Socrates upon the philosophy of\nPlato is everywhere discernible. Plato had been taught by Socrates, that\nbeyond the world of sense there is a world of eternal truth, seen by the\neye of reason alone. He had also learned from him that the eye of reason\nis purified and strengthened by _reflection_, and that to reflect is to\nobserve, and analyze, and define, and classify the facts of\nconsciousness. Self-reflection, then, he had been taught to regard as\nthe key of real knowledge. By a completer induction, a more careful and\nexact analysis, and a more accurate definition, he carried this\nphilosophic method forward towards maturity. He sought to solve the\nproblem of _being_ by the principles revealed in his own consciousness,\nand in the _ultimate ideas of the reason_ to find the foundation of all\nreal knowledge, of all truth, and of all certitude.\n\nPlato was admirably fitted for these sublime investigations by the\npossession of those moral qualities which were so prominent in the\ncharacter of his master. He had that same deep seriousness of spirit,\nthat earnestness and rectitude of purpose, that longing after truth,\nthat inward sympathy with, and reverence for justice, and purity, and\ngoodness, which dwelt in the heart of Socrates, and which constrained\nhim to believe in their reality and permanence. He could not endure the\nthought that all ideas of right were arbitrary and factitious, that all\nknowledge was unreal, that truth was a delusion, and certainty a dream.\nThe world of sense might be fleeting and delusive, but the voice of\nreason and conscience would not mislead the upright man. The opinions of\nindividual men might vary, but the universal consciousness of the race\ncould not prevaricate. However conflicting the opinions of men\nconcerning beautiful things, right actions, and good sentiments, Plato\nwas persuaded there are ideas of Order, and Right, and Good, which are\nuniversal, unchangeable, and eternal. Untruth, injustice, and wrong may\nendure for a day or two, perhaps for a century or two, but they can not\nalways last; they must perish. The _just_ thing and the _true_ thing are\nthe only enduring things; these are eternal. Plato had a sublime\nconviction that his mission was to draw the Athenian mind away from the\nfleeting, the transitory, and the uncertain, and lead them to the\ncontemplation of an Eternal Truth, an Eternal Justice, an Eternal\nBeauty, all proceeding from and united in an Eternal Being--the ultimate\nagathon--_the Supremely Good_. The knowledge of this \"Supreme Good\" he\nregarded as the highest science.[490]\n\n[Footnote 490: \"Republic,\" bk. vi. ch. xvi. p. 193.]\n\nAdded to these moral qualifications, Plato had the further qualification\nof a comprehensive knowledge of all that had been achieved by his\npredecessors. In this regard he had enjoyed advantages superior to those\nof Socrates. Socrates was deficient in erudition, properly so called. He\nhad studied men rather than books. His wisdom consisted in an extensive\n_observation_, the results of which he had generalized with more or less\naccuracy. A complete philosophic method demands not only a knowledge of\ncontemporaneous opinions and modes of thought, but also a knowledge of\nthe succession and development of thought in past ages. Its instrument\nis not simply psychological analysis, but also historical analysis as a\ncounterproof.[491] And this erudition Plato supplied. He studied\ncarefully the doctrines of the Ionian, Italian, and Eleatic schools.\nCratylus gave him special instruction in the theories of\nHeraclitus.[492] He secured an intimate acquaintance with the lofty\nspeculations of Pythagoras, under Archytas of Tarentum, and in the\nwritings of Philolaus, whose books he is said to have purchased. He\nstudied the principles of Parmenides under Hermogenes,[493] and he more\nthan once speaks of Parmenides in terms of admiration, as one whom he\nhad early learned to reverence.[494] He studied mathematics under\nTheodoras, the most eminent geometrician of his day. He travelled in\nSouthern Italy, in Sicily, and, in search of a deeper wisdom, he pursued\nhis course to Egypt.[495] Enriched by the fruits of all previous\nspeculations, he returned to Athens, and devoted the remainder of his\nlife to the development of a comprehensive system \"which was to combine,\nto conciliate, and to supersede them all.\"[496] The knowledge he had\nderived from travel, from books, from oral instruction, he fused and\nblended with his own speculations, whilst the Socratic spirit mellowed\nthe whole, and gave to it a unity and scientific completeness which has\nexcited the admiration and wonder of succeeding ages.[497]\n\n[Footnote 491: Cousin's \"Lectures on the History of Philosophy,\" vol. i.\np. 31.]\n\n[Footnote 492: Aristotle's \"Metaphysics,\" bk. i. ch. vi.]\n\n[Footnote 493: Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives of the Philosophers,\" bk. iii.\nch. viii. p. 115.]\n\n[Footnote 494: See especially \"Theaetetus,\" Sec. 101.]\n\n[Footnote 495: Ritter's \"History of Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. ii. p.\n147.]\n\n[Footnote 496: Butler's \"Lectures on Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. ii. p.\n22.]\n\n[Footnote 497: Encyclopaedia Britannica, article \"Plato.\"]\n\nThe question as to _the nature, the sources, and the validity of human\nknowledge_ had attracted general attention previous to the time of\nSocrates and Plato. As the results of this protracted controversy, the\nopinions of philosophers had finally crystallized in two well-defined\nand opposite theories of knowledge.\n\n1. That which reduced all knowledge to the accidental and passively\nreceptive quality of the organs of sense and which asserted, as its\nfundamental maxim, that \"_Science consists in_\naisthesis--_sensation_.\"[498]\n\nThis doctrine had its foundation in the physical philosophy of\nHeraclitus. He had taught that all things are in a perpetual flux and\nchange. \"Motion gives the appearance of existence and of generation.\"\n\"Nothing _is_, but is always a _becoming\"_[499] Material substances are\nperpetually losing their identity, and there is no permanent essence or\nbeing to be found. Hence Protagoras inferred that truth must vary with\nthe ever-varying sensations of the individual. \"Man (the individual) is\nthe measure of all things.\" Knowledge is a purely relative thing, and\nevery man's opinion is truth for him.[500] The law of right, as\nexemplified in the dominion of a party, is the law of the strongest;\nfluctuating with the accidents of power, and never attaining a permanent\nbeing. \"Whatever a city enacts as appearing just to itself, this also is\njust to the city that enacts it, so long as it continues in force.\"[501]\n\"The just, then, is nothing else but that which is expedient for the\nstrongest.\"[502]\n\n[Footnote 498: \"Theaetetus,\" Sec. 23.]\n\n[Footnote 499: Ibid., Secs. 25, 26.]\n\n[Footnote 500: Ibid., Secs. 39, 87.]\n\n[Footnote 501: Ibid., Sec. 87.]\n\n[Footnote 502: \"Republic,\" bk. i. ch. xii.]\n\n2. The second theory is that which denies the existence (except as\nphantasms, images, or mere illusions of the mind) of the whole of\nsensible phenomena, and refers all knowledge to the _rational\napperception of unity_ (to en) _or the One_.\n\nThis was the doctrine of the later Eleatics. The world of sense was, to\nParmenides and Zeno, a blank negation, the _non ens_. The identity of\nthought and existence was the fundamental principle of their philosophy.\n\n      \"Thought is the same thing as the cause of thought; For\n      without the thing in which it is announced, You can not find\n      the thought; for there is nothing, nor shall be, Except the\n      existing.\"[503]\n\n[Footnote 503: Parmenides, quoted in Lewes's \"Biog. History of\nPhilosophy,\" p. 54.]\n\nThis theory, therefore, denied to man any valid knowledge of the\nexternal world.\n\nIt will at once be apparent to the intelligent reader that the direct\nand natural result of both these theories[504] of knowledge was a\ntendency to universal skepticism. A spirit of utter indifference to\ntruth and righteousness was the prevailing spirit of Athenian society.\nThat spirit is strikingly exhibited in the speech of Callicles, \"the\nshrewd man of the world,\" in \"Gorgias\" (Sec.85, 86). Is this new to our\nears?\" My dear Socrates, you talk of _law_. Now the laws, in my\njudgment, are just the work of the weakest and most numerous; in framing\nthem they never thought but of themselves and their own interests; they\nnever approve or censure except in reference to _this._ Hence it is that\nthe cant arises that tyranny is improper and unjust, and to struggle for\neminence, guilt. Unable to rise themselves, of course they would wish to\npreach liberty and equality. But nature proclaims the law of the\nstronger.... We surround our children from their infancy with\npreposterous prejudices about liberty and justice. The man of sense\ntramples on such impositions, and shows what Nature's justice is.... I\nconfess, Socrates, philosophy is a highly amusing study--in moderation,\nand for boys. But protracted too long, it becomes a perfect plague. Your\nphilosopher is a complete novice in the life _comme il faut_.... I like\nvery well to see a child babble and stammer; there is even a grace about\nit when it becomes his age. But to see a man continue the prattle of the\nchild, is absurd. Just so with your philosophy.\" The consequence of this\nprevalent spirit of universal skepticism was a general laxity of morals.\nThe Aleibiades, of the \"_Symposium_,\" is the ideal representative of the\nyoung aristocracy of Athens. Such was the condition of society\ngenerally, and such the degeneracy of even the Government itself, that\nPlato impressively declares \"that God alone could save the young men of\nhis age from ruin.\"[505]\n\n[Footnote 504: Between these two extreme theories there were offered\ntwo, apparently less extravagant, accounts of the nature and limits of\nhuman knowledge--one declaring that \"_Science_(real knowledge) _consists\nin right opinion_\" (doxa alethes), but having no further basis in the\nreason of man (\"Theaestetus,\" Sec. 108); and the other affirming that\n\"_Science is right opinion with logical explication or definition_\"\n(meta loxou, \"Theaetetus,\" Sec. 139). A close examination will, however,\nconvince us that these are but modifications of the sensational theory.\nThe latter forcibly remind us of the system of Locke, who adds\n\"reflection\" to \"sensation,\" but still maintains that all on \"simple\nideas\" are obtained from without, and that these are the only material\nupon which reflection can be exercised. Thus the human mind has no\ncriterion of truth within itself, no elements of knowledge which are\nconnatural and inborn.]\n\n[Footnote 505: \"Republic,\" bk. vi. ch. vii.]\n\nTherefore the grand, the vital, the most urgent question for his times,\nas indeed for all times, was, _What is Truth? What is Right_? In the\nmidst of all this variableness and uncertainty of human opinion, is\nthere no ground of certainty? Amid all the fluctuations and changes\naround us and within us, is there nothing that is immutable and\npermanent? Have we no ultimate standard of Right? Is there no criterion\nof Truth? Plato believed most confidently there was such a criterion and\nstandard. He had learned from Socrates, his master, to cherish an\nunwavering faith in the existence of an Eternal Truth, an Eternal Order,\nan Eternal Good, the knowledge of which is essential to the perfection\nand happiness of man, and which knowledge must therefore be presumed to\nbe attainable by man. Henceforth, therefore, the ceaseless effort of\nPlato's life is to attain a standard (kriterion)[506]--a CRITERION OF\nTRUTH.\n\n[Footnote 506: \"Theaetetus,\" Sec. 89.]\n\nAt the outset of his philosophic studies, Plato had derived from\nSocrates an important principle, which became the guide of all his\nsubsequent inquiries. He had learned from him that the criterion of\ntruth must be no longer sought amid the ever-changing phenomena of the\n\"sensible world.\" This had been attempted by the philosophers of the\nIonian school, and ended in failure and defeat. It must therefore be\nsought in the metaphenomenal--the \"intelligible world;\" that is, it must\nbe sought in the apperceptions of the reason, and not in opinions\nfounded on sensation. In other words, he must look _within_. Here, by\nreflection, he could recognize, dimly and imperfectly at first, but\nincreasing gradually in clearness and distinctness, two classes of\ncognitions, having essentially distinct and opposite characteristics. He\nfound one class that was complex (synkegumenon), changeable (thateron),\ncontingent and relative (ta pros ti schesin echonta); the other, simple\n(kexorismenon), unchangeable (akineton), constant (tauton), permanent\n(to on aei), and absolute (anypotheton = aploun). One class that may be\nquestioned, the other admitting of no question, because self-evident and\nnecessary, and therefore compelling belief. One class grounded on\nsense-perception, the other conceived by reason alone. But whilst the\nreason recognizes, it does not create them. They are not particular and\nindividual, but universal. They belong not to the man, but to the race.\n\nHe found, then, that there are in all minds certain \"principles\" which\nare fundamental--principles which lie at the basis of all our cognitions\nof the objective world, and which, as \"mental laws,\" determine all our\nforms of thought; and principles, too, which have this marvellous and\nundeniable character, that they are encountered in the most common\nexperiences, and, at the same time, instead of being circumscribed\nwithin the limits of experience, transcend and govern it--principles\nwhich are _universal_ in the midst of particular phenomena--_necessary,_\nthough mingled with things contingent--to our eyes _infinite_ and\n_absolute_, even when appearing in us the relative and finite beings\nthat we are.[507] These first or fundamental principles Plato called\nIDEAS (ideai).\n\n[Footnote 507: Cousin's \"The True, the Beautiful, and the Good,\" p. 40.]\n\nIn attempting to present to the reader an adequate representation of the\nPlatonic Ideas, we shall be under the necessity of anticipating some of\nthe results of his Dialectical method before we have expounded that\nmethod. And, further, in order that it may be properly appreciated by\nthe modern student, we shall avail ourselves of the lights which modern\npsychology, faithful to the method of Plato, has thrown upon the\nsubject. Whilst, however, we admit that modern psychology has succeeded\nin giving more definiteness and precision to the \"doctrine of Ideas,\" we\nshall find that all that is fundamentally valuable and true was present\nto the mind of Plato. Whatever superiority the \"Spiritual\" philosophy of\nto-day may have over the philosophy of past ages, it has attained that\nsuperiority by its adherence to the principles and method of Plato.\n\nIn order to the completeness of our preliminary exposition of the\nPlatonic doctrine of Ideas, we shall conditionally assume, as a natural\nand legitimate hypothesis, the doctrine so earnestly asserted by Plato,\nthat the visible universe, at least in its present form, is an _effect_\nwhich must have had a _cause_,[508] and that the Order, and Beauty, and\nExcellence of the universe are the result of the presence and operation\nof a \"regulating Intelligence\"--a _Supreme Mind_.[509] Now that,\nanterior to the creation of the universe, there must have existed in the\nEternal Mind certain fundamental principles of Order, Right, and Good,\nwill not be denied. Every conceivable _form_, every possible _relation_,\nevery principle of _right_, must have been eternally present to the\nDivine thought. As pure intelligence, the Deity must have always been\nself-conscious--must have known himself as substance and cause, as the\nInfinite and Perfect. If then the Divine Energy is put forth in creative\nacts, that energy must obey those eternal principles of Order, Right,\nand Good. If the Deity operate at all, he must operate rightly, wisely,\nand well. The created universe must be an _image_, in the sphere of\nsense, of the ideas which inhere in the reason of the great First Cause.\n\n[Footnote 508: \"Timaeus,\" ch. ix.]\n\n[Footnote 509: \"Phaedo,\" Sec. 105.]\n\n\"Let us declare,\" says Plato, \"with what _motive_ the Creator hath\nformed nature and the universe. He was _good_, and in the good no manner\nof envy can, on any subject, possibly subsist. Exempt from envy, he had\nwished that all things should, as far as possible, _resemble\nhimself_.... It was not, and is not to be allowed for the Supremely Good\nto do any thing except what is most _excellent_ (kalliston)--most\n_fair_, most _beautiful_.\"[510] Therefore, argues Plato, \"inasmuch as\nthe world is the most beautiful of things, and its artificer the best of\ncauses, it is evident that the Creator and Father of the universe looked\nto the _Eternal Model_(paradeigma), pattern, or plan,\"[511] which lay in\nhis own mind. And thus this one, only-generated universe, is the _image_\n(eikon) of that God who is the object of the intellect, the greatest,\nthe best, and the most perfect Being.[512]\n\n[Footnote 510: \"Timaeus,\" ch. x.]\n\n[Footnote 511: Ibid., ch. ix.]\n\n[Footnote 512: \"Timaeus,\" ch. lxxiii.]\n\nAnd then, furthermore, if this Supreme Intelligence, this Eternal Mind,\nshall create another _mind_, it must, in a still higher degree, resemble\nhim. Inasmuch as it is a rational nature, it must, in a peculiar sense,\npartake of the Divine characteristics. \"The soul,\" says Plato, \"is that\nwhich most partakes of the _Divine_\"[513] The soul must, therefore, have\nnative _ideas_ and sentiments which correlate it with the Divine\noriginal. The ideas of substance and cause, of unity and identity, of\nthe infinite and perfect, must be mirrored there. As it is the\n\"offspring of God,\"[514] it must bear some traces and lineaments of its\nDivine parentage. That soul must be configured and correlated to those\nprinciples of Order, Right, and Good which dwell in the Eternal Mind.\nAnd because it has within itself the same ideas and laws, according to\nwhich the great Architect built the universe, therefore it is capable of\nknowing, and, in some degree, of comprehending, the intellectual system\nof the universe. It apprehends the external world by a light which the\nreason supplies. It interprets nature according to principles and laws\nwhich God has inwrought within the very essence of the soul. \"That which\nimparts truth to knowable things, and gives the knower his power of\nknowing truth, is the _idea of the good_, and you are to conceive of\nthis as the source of knowledge and of truth.\"[515]\n\n[Footnote 513: \"Laws,\" bk. v. ch. i.]\n\n[Footnote 514: Ibid., bk. x.]\n\n[Footnote 515: \"Republic,\" bk. vi. ch. xviii.]\n\nAnd now we are prepared to form a clear conception of the Platonic\ndoctrine of Ideas. Viewed in their relation to the Eternal Reason, as\ngiving the primordial thought and law of all being, these principles are\nsimply eide auta kath auta--_ideas in themselves_--the essential\nqualities or attributes of Him who is the supreme and ultimate Cause of\nall existence. When regarded as before the Divine imagination, giving\ndefinite forms and relations, they are the tupoi, the paradeigmata--_the\ntypes_, _models, patterns, ideals_ according to which the universe was\nfashioned. Contemplated in their actual embodiment in the laws, and\ntypical forms of the material world, they are eikones--_images_ of the\neternal perfections of God. The world of sense pictures the world of\nreason by a participation (methexis) of the ideas. And viewed as\ninterwoven in the very texture and framework of the soul, they are\nomoiomata--copies of the Divine Ideas which are the primordial laws of\nknowing, thinking, and reasoning. Ideas are thus the nexus of relation\nbetween God and the visible universe, and between the human and the\nDivine reason.[516] There is something divine in the world, and in the\nhuman soul, namely, _the eternal laws and reasons of things_, mingled\nwith the endless diversity and change of sensible phenomena. These ideas\nare \"the light of the intelligible world;\" they render the invisible\nworld of real Being perceptible to the reason of man. \"Light is the\noffspring of the Good, which the Good has produced in his own likeness.\nLight in the visible world is what the _idea of the Good_ is in the\nintelligible world. And this offspring of the Good--light--has the same\nrelation to vision and visible things which the Good has to intellect\nand intelligible things.\"[517]\n\n[Footnote 516: \"Now, Idea is, as regards God, a mental operation by him\n(the notions of God, eternal and perfect in themselves); as regards us,\nthe first things perceptible by mind; as regards Matter, a standard; but\nas regards the world, perceptible by sense, a pattern; but as considered\nwith reference to itself, an existence.\"--Alcinous, \"Introduction to the\nDoctrines of Plato,\" p. 261.\n\n\"What general notions are to our minds, he (Plato) held, ideas are to\nthe Supreme Reason (nous basileus); they are the eternal thoughts of the\nDivine Intellect, and we attain truth when our thoughts conform with\nHis--when our general notions are in conformity with the\nideas.\"--Thompson, \"Laws of Thought,\" p. 119.]\n\n[Footnote 517: \"Republic,\" bk. vi. ch. xix.]\n\n_Science_ is, then, according to Plato, _the knowledge of universal,\nnecessary, unchangeable, and eternal ideas_. The simple cognition of the\nconcrete phenomena of the universe is not regarded by him as _real_\nknowledge. \"Science, or real knowledge, belongs to _Being_, and\nignorance to _non_-Being.\" Whilst that which is conversant only \"with\nthat which partakes of both--of being and non-being--and which can not\nbe said either to be or not to be\"--that which is perpetually\n\"becoming,\" but never \"really is,\" is \"simply _opinion_, and not real\nknowledge.\"[518] And those only are \"philosophers\" who have a knowledge\nof the _really-existing_, in opposition to the mere seeming; of the\n_always-existing_, in opposition to the transitory; and of that which\nexists _permanently_, in opposition to that which waxes and wanes--is\ndeveloped and destroyed alternately. \"Those who recognize many beautiful\nthings, but who can not see the Beautiful itself, and can not even\nfollow those who would lead them to it, they _opine_, but do not _know_.\nAnd the same may be said of those who recognize right actions, but do\nnot recognize an absolute righteousness. And so of other ideas. But they\nwho look at these ideas--permanent and unchangeable ideas--these men\n_really know_.\"[519] Those are the true philosophers alone who love the\nsight of truth, and who have attained to the vision of the eternal\norder, and righteousness, and beauty, and goodness in the Eternal Being.\nAnd the means by which the soul is raised to this vision of real Being\n(to ontos on) is THE SCIENCE OF REAL KNOWLEDGE.\n\nPlato, in the \"Theaetetus,\" puts this question by the interlocutor\nSocrates, \"What is Science (Episteme) or positive knowledge?\"[520]\nTheaetetus essays a variety of answers, such as, \"Science is sensation,\"\n\"Science is right judgment or opinion,\" \"Science is right opinion with\nlogical definition.\" These, in the estimation of the Platonic Socrates,\nare all unsatisfactory and inadequate. But after you have toiled to the\nend of this remarkable discussion, in which Socrates demolishes all the\nthen received theories of knowledge, he gives you no answer of his own.\nHe abruptly closes the discussion by naively remarking that, at any\nrate, Theaetetus will learn that he does not understand the subject; and\nthe ground is now cleared for an original investigation.\n\n[Footnote 518: \"Republic,\" bk. v. ch. xx.]\n\n[Footnote 519: Ibid., bk. v. ch. xxii.]\n\n[Footnote 520: \"Theaetetus,\" Sec. 10.]\n\nThis investigation is resumed in the \"Republic.\" This greatest work of\nPlato's was designed not only to exhibit a scheme of Polity, and present\na system of Ethics, but also, at least in its digressions, to propound a\nsystem of Metaphysics more complete and solid than had yet appeared. The\ndiscussion as to the _powers_ or _faculties_ by which we obtain\nknowledge, the _method_ or _process_ by which real knowledge is\nattained, and the ultimate _objects_ or _ontological grounds_ of all\nreal knowledge, commences at Sec. 18, book v., and extends to the end of\nbook vii.\n\nThat we may reach a comprehensive view of this \"sublimest of sciences,\"\nwe shall find it necessary to consider--\n\n1st. _What are the powers or faculties by which we obtain knowledge, and\nwhat are the limits and degrees of human knowledge?_\n\n2d. _What is the method in which, or the processes and laws according to\nwhich, the mind operates in obtaining knowledge?_\n\n3d. _What are the ultimate results attained by this method? what are the\nobjective and ontological grounds of all real knowledge?_\n\nThe answer to the first question will give the PLATONIC PSYCHOLOGY; the\nanswer to the second will exhibit the PLATONIC DIALECTIC; the answer to\nthe last will reveal the PLATONIC ONTOLOGY.\n\nI. PLATONIC PSYCHOLOGY.\n\nEvery successful inquiry as to the reality and validity of human\nknowledge must commence by clearly determining, by rigid analysis, what\nare the actual phenomena presented in consciousness, what are the powers\nor faculties supposed by these phenomena, and what reliance are we to\nplace upon the testimony of these faculties? And, especially, if it be\nasserted that there is a science of absolute Reality, of ultimate and\nessential Being, then the most important and vital question is, By what\npower do we cognize real Being? through what faculty do we obtain the\nknowledge of that which absolutely _is_? If by sensation we only obtain\nthe knowledge of the fleeting and the transitory, \"_the becoming_\" how\ndo we attain to the knowledge of the unchangeable and permanent, \"the\n_Being_?\" Have we a faculty of universal, necessary, and eternal\nprinciples? Have we a faculty, an interior eye which beholds \"_the\nintelligible_,\" ideal, spiritual world, as the eye of sense beholds the\nvisible or \"_sensible world_?\"[521]\n\nPlato commences this inquiry by first defining his understanding of the\nword dynamis--_power_ or _faculty_. \"We will say _faculties_ (dynameis)\nare a certain kind of real existences by which we can do whatever we are\nable (_e.g._, to know), as there are powers by which every thing does\nwhat it does: the eye has a _power_ of seeing; the ear has a _power_ of\nhearing. But these powers (of which I now speak) have no color or figure\nto which I can so refer that I can distinguish one power from another.\n_In order to make such distinction, I must look at the power itself, and\nsee what it is, and what it does. In that way I discern the power of\neach thing, and that is the same power which produces the same effect,\nand that is a different power which produces a different effect_.\"[522]\nThat which is employed about, and accomplishes one and the same purpose,\nthis Plato calls a _faculty_.\n\n[Footnote 521: \"Republic,\" bk. vi. ch. xviii.]\n\n[Footnote 522: Ibid., bk. v. ch. xxi.]\n\nWe have seen that our first conceptions (_i.e._, first in the order of\ntime) are of the mingled, the concrete (to synkechymenon), \"the\nmultiplicity of things to which the multitude ascribe beauty, etc.[523]\nThe mind \"contemplates what is great and small, not as distinct from\neach other, but as confused.[524] Prior to the discipline of\n_reflection_, men are curious about mere sights and sounds, love\nbeautiful voices, beautiful colors, beautiful forms, but their\nintelligence can not see, can not embrace, the essential nature of the\nBeautiful itself.[525] Man's condition previous to the education of\nphilosophy is vividly presented in Plato's simile of the cave.[526] He\nbeholds only the images and shadows of the ectypal world, which are but\ndim and distant adumbrations of the real and archetypal world.\n\nPrimarily nothing is given in the abstract (to kegorismenon), but every\nthing in the concrete. The primary faculties of the mind enter into\naction spontaneously and simultaneously; all our primary notions are\nconsequently synthetic. When reflection is applied to this primary\ntotality of consciousness, that is, when we analyze our notions, we find\nthem composed of diverse and opposite elements, some of which are\nvariable, contingent, individual, and relative, others are permanent,\nunchangeable, universal, necessary, and absolute. Now these elements, so\ndiverse, so opposite, can not have been obtained from the same source;\nthey must be supplied by separate powers. \"Can any man with common sense\nreduce under one what _is infallible_, and what is _not\ninfallible?_\"[527] Can that which is \"_perpetually becoming_\" be\napprehended by the same faculty as that which \"_always is?_\"[528] Most\nassuredly not.\n\n[Footnote 523: Ibid., bk. v. ch. xxii.]\n\n[Footnote 524: Ibid., bk. vii. ch. viii.]\n\n[Footnote 525: Ibid., bk. v. ch. xx.]\n\n[Footnote 526: Ibid., bk. vii. ch. i., ii.]\n\n[Footnote 527: \"Republic,\" bk. v. ch. xxi.]\n\n[Footnote 528: Ibid., bk. v. ch. xxii.; also \"Timaeus,\" Sec. 9.]\n\nThese primitive intuitions--the simple perceptions of sense, and the _a\npriori_ intuitions of the reason, which constitute the elements of all\nour complex notions, have essentially _diverse objects_--the sensible or\nectypal world, seen by the eye and touched by the hand, which Plato\ncalls doxasten--_the subject of opinion_; and the noetic or archetypal\nworld, perceived by reason, and which he calls dianontiken--_the subject\nof rational intuition or science_. \"It is plain,\" therefore, argues\nPlato, \"that _opinion_ is a different thing from _science_. They must,\ntherefore, have a different _faculty_ in reference to a different\nobject--science as regards that which _is_, so as to know the nature of\nreal _being_--opinion as regards that which can not be said absolutely\nto be, or not to be. That which is known and that which is opined can\nnot possibly be the same,... since they are naturally faculties of\ndifferent things, and both of them are faculties--_opinion_ and\n_science_, and each of them different from the other.\"[529] Here then\nare two grand divisions of the mental powers--a faculty of apprehending\nuniversal and necessary Truth, of intuitively beholding absolute\nReality, and a faculty of perceiving sensible objects, and of judging\naccording to appearance.\n\n[Footnote 529: Ibid., bk. v. ch. xxi., xxii.]\n\nAccording to the scheme of Plato, these two general divisions of the\nmental powers are capable of a further subdivision. He says: Consider\nthat there are two kinds of things, the _intelligible_ and the\n_visible_; two different regions, the intelligible world and the\nsensible world. Now take a line divided into two equal segments to\nrepresent these two regions, and again divide each segment in the same\nratio--both that of the visible and that of the intelligible species.\nThe parts of each segment are to represent differences of clearness and\nindistinctness. In the visible world the parts are _things_ and\n_images_. By _images_ I mean shadows,[530] reflections in water and in\npolished bodies, and all such like representations; and by _things_ I\nmean that of which images are resemblances, as animals, plants, and\nthings made by man.\n\nYou allow that this difference corresponds to the difference of\n_knowledge_ and _opinion_; and the _opinionable_ is to the _knowable_ as\nthe _image_ to the _reality_.[531]\n\n[Footnote 530: As in the simile of the cave (\"Republic,\" bk. vii. ch. i.\nand ii.).]\n\n[Footnote 531: The analogy between the \"images produced by reflections\nin water and on polished surfaces\" and \"the images of external objects\nproduced in the mind by sensation\" is more fully presented in the\n\"Timaeus,\" ch. 19.\n\nThe eye is a light-bearer, \"made of that part of elemental fire which\ndoes not burn, but sheds a mild light, like the light of day.... When\nthe light of the day meets the light which beams from the eye, then\nlight meets like, and make a homogeneous body; the external light\nmeeting the internal light, in the direction in which the eye looks. And\nby this homogeneity like feels like; and if this beam touches any\nobject, or any object touches it, it transmits the motions through the\nbody to the soul, and produces that sensation which we call _seeing_....\nAnd if (in sleep) some of the strong motions remain in some part of the\nframe, they produce within us likenesses of external objects,... and\nthus give rise to dreams.... As to the images produced by mirrors and by\nsmooth surfaces, they are now easily explained, for all such phenomena\nresult from the mutual affinity of the external and internal fires. The\nlight that proceeds from the face (as an object of vision), and the\nlight that proceeds from the eye, become one continuous ray on the\nsmooth surface.\"]\n\nNow we have to divide the segment which represents intelligible things\nin this way: The one part represents the knowledge which the mind gets\nby using things as images--the other; that which it has by dealing with\nthe ideas themselves; the one part that which it gets by reasoning\ndownward from principles--the other, the principles themselves; the one\npart, truth which depends on hypotheses--the other, unhypothetical or\nabsolute truth.\n\nThus, to explain a problem in geometry, the geometers make certain\nhypotheses (namely, definitions and postulates) about numbers and\nangles, and the like, and reason from them--giving no reason for their\nassumptions, but taking them as evident to all; and, reasoning from\nthem, they prove the propositions which they have in view. And in such\nreasonings, they use visible figures or diagrams--to reason about a\nsquare, for instance, with its diagonals; but these reasonings are not\nreally about these visible figures, but about the mental figures, and\nwhich they conceive in thought.\n\nThe diagrams which they draw, being visible, are the images of thoughts\nwhich the geometer has in his mind, and these images he uses in his\nreasoning. There may be images of these images--shadows and reflections\nin water, as of other visible things; but still these diagrams are only\nimages of conceptions.\n\nThis, then, is _one_ kind of intelligible things: _conceptions_--for\ninstance, geometrical conceptions of figures. But in dealing with these\nthe mind depends upon assumptions, and does not ascend to first\nprinciples. It does not ascend above these assumptions, but uses images\nborrowed from a lower region (the visible world), these images being\nchosen so as to be as distinct as may be.\n\nNow the _other_ kind of intelligible things is this: that which the\n_Reason_ includes, in virtue of its power of reasoning, when it regards\nthe assumptions of the sciences as (what they are) assumptions only, and\nuses them as occasions and starting-points, that from these it may\nascend to the _Absolute_, which does not depend upon assumption, the\norigin of scientific truth.\n\n_The reason takes hold of this first principle of truth_, and availing\nitself of all the connections and relations of this principle, it\nproceeds to the conclusion--using no sensible image in doing this, but\ncontemplates the _idea alone_; and with these ideas the process begins,\ngoes on, and terminates.\n\n\"I apprehend,\" said Glaucon, \"but not very clearly, for the matter is\nsomewhat abstruse. _You wish to prove that the knowledge which by the\nreason, in an intuitive manner, we may acquire of real existence and\nintelligible things is of a higher degree of certainty than the\nknowledge which belongs to what are commonly called the Sciences_. Such\nsciences, you say, have certain assumptions for their basis; and these\nassumptions are by the student of such sciences apprehended not by\nsense, but by a mental operation--by conception.\n\n\"But inasmuch as such students ascend no higher than assumptions, and do\nnot go to the first principles of truth, they do not seem to have true\nknowledge, intellectual insight, intuitive reason, on the subjects of\ntheir reasonings, though the subjects are intelligible things. And you\ncall this habit and practice of the geometers and others by the name of\nJUDGMENT (dianoia), not reason, or insight, or intuition--taking\njudgment to be something between opinion, on the one side, and intuitive\nreason, on the other.\n\n\"You have explained it well,\" said I. \"And now consider these four kinds\nof things we have spoken of, as corresponding to four affections (or\nfaculties) of the mind. INTUITIVE REASON (noesis), the highest; JUDGMENT\n(dianoia)(or _discursive reason_), the next; the third, BELIEF (pistis);\nand the fourth, CONJECTURE, or _guess_ (eikasia); and arrange them in\norder, so that they may be held to have more or less certainty, as their\nobjects have more or less truth.\"[532] The completeness, and even\naccuracy of this classification of all the objects of human cognition,\nand of the corresponding mental powers, will be seen at once by studying\nthe diagram proposed by Plato, as figured on the opposite page.\n\n[Footnote 532: \"Republic,\" bk. vi. ch. xx. and xxi.]\n\nPLATONIC SCHEME OF THE OBJECTS OF COGNITION, AND THE RELATIVE MENTAL POWERS\n___________________________________________________________________________\n            |                                 |\n            | VISIBLE WORLD                   | INTELLIGIBLE WORLD\n            | (the object of Opinion--doxa).  |(the object of Knowledge or\n            |                                 | Science--ipytteme).\n            |_________________________________|____________________________\n            |                |                |              |\n            | Things.        | Images.        | Intuitions.  | Conceptions.\n____________|________________|________________|______________|_____________\n\nAnd may be thus further expanded:\n___________________________________________________________________________\n            |                                 |\n            | VISIBLE WORLD.                  |   INTELLIGIBLE WORLD.\n____________|_________________________________|____________________________\n            |                |                |             |\n            | Things         | Images         | Ideas       | Conceptions\nOBJECT      |                |                |             |\n            | zoa. k. t. l.  | icones.        | ideai.      | duenoemata.\n____________|________________|________________|_____________|______________\n            |                |                |             |\n            | Belief.        | Conjecture.    | Intuition.  |Demonstration.\nPROCESS     |                |                |             |\n            | piotis.        | eikasia.       | noesis.     | ipisieie.\n____________|________________|________________|_____________|______________\n            |                |                |             |\n            | SENSATION.     | PHANTASY.      | INTUITIVE   | DISCURSIVE\nFACULTY     |                |                |   REASON.   |    REASON.\n            | aisthesis.     | phantasia.     | nous.       | logos.\n____________|________________|________________|_____________|______________\n            |                |                |             |\nMODERN      | SENSE.         | IMAGINATION.   | REASON.     | JUDGMENT.\nNOMENCLATURE|Presentative    |Representative  |Regulative   | Logical\n            | Faculty.       | Faculty        | Faculty.    |    Faculty.\n____________|________________|________________|_____________|______________\n            |                                 |\n            | MEMORY.                         | REMINISCENCE\n            | mneme.                          |   anamesis.\n            | The Conservative Faculty--      | The Reproductive Faculty--\n            | \"the preserver of sensation\"    |\"the recollection of the\n            | (soteria aisin, seos.) [533]    | things which the soul\n            |                                 | saw (in Eternity) when\n            |                                 | journeying in the train of\n            |                                 | the Deity.\"[534]\n            |[Footnote 533: \"Philebus,\" Sec. 67] | [Footnote 534: Phaedrus,\n            |                                 |                     Sec. 62.]\n____________|_________________________________|____________________________\n\n\nThe foregoing diagram, borrowed from Whewell, with some modifications\nand additions we have ventured to make, exhibits a perfect view of the\nPlatonic scheme of the _cognitive powers_--the faculties by which the\nmind attains to different degrees of knowledge, \"having more or less\ncertainty, as their objects have more or less truth.\"[535]\n\n1st. SENSATION (aisthesis).--This term is employed by Plato to denote\nthe passive mental states or affections which are produced within us by\nexternal objects through the medium of the vital organization, and also\nthe cognition or vital perception or consciousness[536] which the mind\nhas of these mental states.\n\n2d. PHANTASY (phantasia).--This term is employed to describe the power\nwhich the mind possesses of imagining or representing whatever has once\nbeen the object of sensation. This may be done involuntarily as \"in\ndreams, disease, and hallucination,\"[537] or voluntarily, as in\nreminiscence. Phantasmata are the images, the life-pictures (zographena)\nof sensible things which are present to the mind, even when no external\nobject is present to the sense.\n\n[Footnote 535: \"Republic,\" bk. vii. ch. xix.]\n\n[Footnote 536: \"In Greek philosophy there was no term for\n'consciousness' until the decline of philosophy, and in the latter ages\nof the language. Plato and Aristotle, to say nothing of other\nphilosophers, had no special term to express the knowledge which the\nmind has of the operation of its own faculties, though this, of course,\nwas necessarily a frequent matter of consideration. Intellect was\nsupposed by them to be cognizant of its own operations.... In his\n'Theaetetus' Plato accords to sense the power of perceiving that it\nperceives.\"--Hamilton's \"Metaphysics,\" vol. i. p. 198 (Eng. ed.).]\n\n[Footnote 537: \"Theaetetus,\" Sec. 39.]\n\nThe conjoint action of these two powers results in what Plato calls\n_opinion_ (doxa). \"Opinion is the complication of memory and sensation.\nFor when we meet for the first time with a thing perceptible by a sense,\nand a sensation is produced by it, and from this sensation a memory, and\nwe subsequently meet again with the same thing perceived by a sense, we\ncombine the memory previously brought into action with the sensation\nproduced a second time, and we say within ourselves [this is] Socrates,\nor a horse, or fire, or whatever thing there may be of such a kind. Now\nthis is called _opinion_, through our combining the recollection brought\npreviously into action with the sensation recently produced. And when\nthese, placed along each other, agree, a true opinion is produced; but\nwhen they swerve from each other, a false one.\"[538] The dixa of Plato,\ntherefore answers to the experience, or the _empirical knowledge_ of\nmodern philosophy, which is concerned only with appearances (phenomena),\nand not with absolute realities, and can not be elevated to the dignity\nof _science_ or real knowledge.\n\nWe are not from hence to infer that Plato intended to deny all reality\nwhatever to the objects of sensible experience. These transitory\nphenomena were not real existences, but they were _images_ of real\nexistences. The world itself is but the image, in the sphere of sense,\nof those ideas of Order, and Proportion, and Harmony, which dwell in the\nDivine Intellect, and are mirrored in the soul of man. \"Time itself is a\nmoving image of Eternity.\"[539] But inasmuch as the immediate object of\nsense-perception is a representative image generated in the vital\norganism, and all empirical cognitions are mere \"conjectures\" (eikasiai)\nfounded on representative images, they need to be certified by a higher\nfaculty, which immediately apprehends real Being (to on). Of things, as\nthey are in themselves, the senses give us no knowledge; all that in\nsensation we are conscious of is certain affections of the mind\n(pathos); the existence of self, or the perceiving subject, and a\nsomething external to self, a perceived object, are revealed to us, not\nby the senses, but by the reason.\n\n[Footnote 538: Alcinous, \"Introduction to the Doctrine of Plato,\" p.\n247.]\n\n[Footnote 539: \"Timaeus,\" Sec. 14.]\n\n3d. JUDGMENT (dianoia, logos), _the Discursive Faculty, or the Faculty\nof Relations_.--According to Plato, this faculty proceeds on the\nassumption of certain principles as true, without inquiring into their\nvalidity, and reasons, by deduction, to the conclusions which\nnecessarily flow from these principles. These assumptions Plato calls\nhypotheses (ypotheseis). But by hypotheses he does not mean baseless\nassumptions--\"mere theories--\"but things self-evident and \"obvious to\nall;\"[540] as for example, the postulates and definitions of Geometry.\n\"After laying down hypotheses of the odd and even, and three kinds of\nangles [right, acute, and obtuse], and figures [as the triangle, square,\ncircle, and the like], he _proceeds on them as known, and gives no\nfurther reason about them_, and reasons downward from these\nprinciples,\"[541] affirming certain judgments as consequences deducible\ntherefrom.\n\n[Footnote 540: \"Republic,\" bk. vi. ch. xx.]\n\n[Footnote 541: Ibid., bk. vi. ch. xx.]\n\nAll judgments are therefore founded on _relations_. To judge is to\ncompare two terms. \"Every judgment has three parts: the subject, or\nnotion about which the judgment is; the predicate, or notion with which\nthe subject is compared; and the copula, or nexus, which expresses the\nconnection or relation between them.[542] Every act of affirmative\njudgment asserts the agreement of the predicate and subject; every act\nof negative judgment asserts the predicate and subject do not agree. All\njudgment is thus an attempt to reduce to unity two cognitions, and\nreasoning (logizesthai) is simply the extension of this process. When we\nlook at two straight lines of equal length, we do not merely think of\nthem separately as _this_ straight line, and _that_ straight line, but\nthey are immediately connected together by a comparison which takes\nplace in the mind. We perceive that these two lines are alike; they are\nof equal length, and they are both straight; and the connection which is\nperceived as existing between them is a _relation of sameness or\nidentity._[543] When we observe any change occurring in nature, as, for\nexample, the melting of wax in the presence of heat, the mind recognizes\na causal efficiency in the fire to produce that change, and the relation\nnow apprehended is a _relation of cause and effect_[544] But the\nfundamental principles, the necessary ideas which lie at the basis of\nall the judgments (as the ideas of space and time, of unity and\nidentity, of substance and cause, of the infinite and perfect) are not\ngiven by the judgment, but by the \"highest faculty\"--\"the _Intuitive\nReason_,[545] which is, for us, the source of all unhypothetical and\nabsolute knowledge.\n\n[Footnote 542: Thompson's \"Laws of Thought,\" p. 134.]\n\n[Footnote 543: \"Phaedo,\" Secs. 50-57, 62.]\n\n[Footnote 544: \"Timaeus,\" ch. ix.; \"Sophocles,\" Sec. 109.]\n\n[Footnote 545: \"Republic,\" bk. vi. ch. xxi.]\n\nThe knowledge, therefore, which is furnished by the Discursive Reason,\nPlato does not regard as \"real Science.\" \"It is something between\nOpinion on the one hand, and Intuition on the other.\"[546]\n\n[Footnote 546: Ibid., bk. vi. ch. xxi.]\n\n4th. REASON (nous)--_Intuitive Reason_, is the organ of self-evident,\nnecessary, and universal Truth. In an immediate, direct, and intuitive\nmanner, it takes hold on truth with absolute certainty. The reason,\nthrough the medium of _ideas_, holds communion with the world of real\nBeing. These ideas are the _light_ which reveals the world of unseen\nrealities, as the sun reveals the world of sensible forms. \"_The idea of\nthe good_ is the _sun_ of the Intelligible World; it sheds on objects\nthe light of truth, and gives to the soul that knows, the power of\nknowing.\"[547] Under this light, the eye of reason apprehends the\neternal world of being as truly, yes more truly, than the eye of sense\napprehends the world of phenomena. This power the rational soul\npossesses by virtue of its having a nature kindred, or even homogeneous\nwith the Divinity. It was \"generated by the Divine Father,\" and, like\nhim, it is in a certain sense \"_eternal_.\"[548] Not that we are to\nunderstand Plato as teaching that the rational soul had an independent\nand underived existence; it was created or \"generated\" in eternity,[549]\nand even now, in its incorporate state, is not amenable to the\nconditions of time and space, but, in a peculiar sense, dwells in\neternity; and therefore is capable of beholding eternal realities, and\ncoming into communion with absolute beauty, and goodness, and\ntruth--that is, with God, the _Absolute Being_.\n\n[Footnote 547: Ibid., bk. vi. ch. xix.; see also ch. xviii.]\n\n[Footnote 548: The reader must familiarize himself with the Platonic\nnotion of _\"eternity\" as a fixed state out of time existing\ncontemporaneous with one in time_, to appreciate the doctrine of Plato\nas stated above. If we regard his idea of eternity as merely an\nindefinite extension of time, with a past, a present, and a future, we\ncan offer no rational interpretation of his doctrine of the eternal\nnature of the rational essence of the soul. An eternal nature\n\"generated\" in a \"past\" or \"present\" time is a contradiction. But that\nwas not Plato's conception of \"eternity,\" as the reader will discover on\nperusing the \"Timaeus\" (ch. xiv.). \"God resolved to create a moving image\nof eternity, and out of that eternity which reposes in its own\n_unchangeable unity_ he framed an eternal image moving according to\nnumerical succession, which we call _Time_. Nothing can be more\ninaccurate than to apply the terms, _past, present, future_, to real\nBeing, which is immovable. Past and future are expressions only suitable\nto generation which proceeds through time.\" Time reposes on the bosom of\neternity, as all bodies are in space.]\n\n[Footnote 549: \"Timaeus,\" ch. xvi., and \"Phaedrus,\" where the soul is\npronounced arche de ageneton.]\n\nThus the soul (psyche) as a composite nature is on one side linked to\nthe eternal world, its essence being generated of that ineffable element\nwhich constitutes the real, the immutable, and the permanent. It is a\nbeam of the eternal Sun, a spark of the Divinity, an emanation from God.\nOn the other side it is linked to the phenomenal or sensible world, its\nemotive part[550] being formed of that which is relative and phenomenal.\nThe soul of man thus stands midway between the eternal and the\ncontingent, the real and the phenomenal, and as such, it is the mediator\nbetween, and the interpreter of, both.\n\n[Footnote 550: thymeides, the seat of the nobler--epithymetikon, the\nseat of the baser passions.]\n\nIn the allegory of the \"Chariot and Winged Steeds\"[551] Plato represents\nthe lower or inferior part of man's nature as dragging the soul down to\nthe earth, and subjecting it to the slavery and debasement of corporeal\nconditions. Out of these conditions there arise numerous evils that\ndisorder the mind and becloud the reason, for evil is inherent to the\ncondition of finite and multiform being into which we have \"fallen by\nour own fault.\" The present earthly life is a fall and a punishment. The\nsoul is now dwelling in \"the grave we call the body.\" In its incorporate\nstate, and previous to the discipline of education, the rational element\nis \"asleep.\" \"Life is more of a dream than a reality.\" Men are utterly\nthe slaves of sense, the sport of phantoms and illusions. We now\nresemble those \"captives chained in a subterraneous cave,\" so poetically\ndescribed in the seventh book of the \"Republic;\" their backs are turned\nto the light, and consequently they see but the shadows of the objects\nwhich pass behind them, and they \"attribute to these shadows a perfect\nreality.\" Their sojourn upon earth is thus a dark imprisonment in the\nbody, a dreamy exile from their proper home. \"Nevertheless these pale\nfugitive shadows suffice to revive in us the reminiscence of that higher\nworld we once inhabited, if we have not absolutely given the reins to\nthe impetuous untamed horse which in Platonic symbolism represents the\nemotive sensuous nature of man.\" The soul has some dim and shadowy\nrecollection of its ante-natal state of bliss, and some instinctive and\nproleptic yearnings for its return.\n\n[Footnote 551: \"Phaedrus,\" Sec. 54-62.]\n\n     \"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;\n     The soul that rises with us, our life's star,\n       Has had elsewhere its setting,\n       And cometh from afar,\n       Not in entire forgetfulness,\n       And not in utter nakedness,\n     But trailing clouds of glory, do we come\n     From God, who is our home.\"[552]\n\n[Footnote 552: Wordsworth, \"Ode on the Intimations of Immortality,\" vol.\nv.]\n\nExiled from the true home of the spirit, imprisoned in the body,\ndisordered by passion, and beclouded by sense, the soul has yet longings\nafter that state of perfect knowledge, and purity, and bliss, in which\nit was first created. Its affinities are still on high. It yearns for a\nhigher and nobler form of life. It essays to rise, but its eye is\ndarkened by sense, its wings are besmeared by passion and lust; it is\n\"borne downward, until at length it falls upon and attaches itself to\nthat which is material and sensual,\" and it flounders and grovels still\namid the objects of sense.\n\nAnd now, with all that seriousness and earnestness of spirit which is\npeculiarly Christian, Plato asks how the soul may be delivered from the\nillusions of sense, the distempering influence of the body, and the\ndisturbances of passion, which becloud its vision of the real, the good,\nand the true?\n\nPlato believed and hoped this could be accomplished by _philosophy_.\nThis he regarded as a grand intellectual discipline for the purification\nof the soul. By this it was to be disenthralled from the bondage of\nsense[553] and raised into the empyrean of pure thought \"where truth and\nreality shine forth.\" All souls have the faculty of knowing, but it is\nonly by reflection, and self-knowledge, and intellectual discipline,\nthat the soul can be raised to the vision of eternal truth, goodness,\nand beauty--that is, to the vision of God. And this intellectual\ndiscipline was the _Platonic Dialectic_.\n\n[Footnote 553: Not, however, fully in this life. The consummation of the\nintellectual struggle into \"the intelligible world\" is death. The\nintellectual discipline was therefore melete thanatou, _a preparation\nfor death_.]\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XI.\n\nTHE PHILOSOPHERS OF ATHENS (_continued_.)\n\nTHE SOCRATIC SCHOOL (_continued_).\n\nPLATO.\n\n\nII. THE PLATONIC DIALECTIC.\n\nThe Platonic Dialectic is the Science of Eternal and Immutable\nPrinciples, and the _method_ (organon) by which these first principles\nare brought forward into the clear light of consciousness. The student\nof Plato will have discovered that he makes no distinction between logic\nand metaphysics. These are closely united in the one science to which he\ngives the name of \"_Dialectic_\" and which was at once the science of the\nideas and laws of the Reason, and of the mental process by which the\nknowledge of Real Being is attained, and a ground of absolute certainty\nis found. This science has, in modern times, been called _Primordial_ or\n_Transcendental Logic_.\n\nWe have seen that Plato taught that the human reason is originally in\npossession of fundamental and necessary ideas--the copies of the\narchetypal ideas which dwell in the eternal Reason; and that these ideas\nare the primordial laws of thought--that is, they are the laws under\nwhich we conceive of all objective things, and reason concerning all\nexistence. These ideas, he held, are not derived from sensation, neither\nare they generalizations from experience, but they are inborn and\nconnatural. And, further, he entertained the belief, more, however, as a\nreasonable hypothesis[554] than as a demonstrable truth, that these\nstandard principles were acquired by the soul in a pre-existent state in\nwhich it stood face to face with ideas of eternal order, beauty,\ngoodness, and truth.[555] \"Journeying with the Deity,\" the soul\ncontemplated justice, wisdom, science--not that science which is\nconcerned with change, and which appears under a different manifestation\nin different objects, which we choose to call beings; but such science\nas is in that which alone is indeed _being_.[556] Ideas, therefore,\nbelong to, and inhere in, that portion of the soul which is properly\nousia--_essence_ or _being_; which had an existence anterior to time,\nand even now has no relation to time, because it is now in\neternity--that is, in a sphere of being to which past, present, and\nfuture can have no relation.[557]\n\n[Footnote 554: Within \"the eikoton mython idea--the category of\nprobability.\"--\"Phaedo.\"]\n\n[Footnote 555: \"Phaedo,\" Sec. 50-56.]\n\n[Footnote 556: \"Phaedrus,\" Sec. 58.]\n\n[Footnote 557: See note on p. 349.]\n\nAll knowledge of truth and reality is, therefore, according to Plato, a\nREMINISCENCE (anamnesis)--a recovery of partially forgotten ideas which\nthe soul possessed in another state of existence; and the _dialectic_ of\nPlato is simply the effort, by apt _interrogation_, to lead the mind to\n\"_recollect_\"[558] the truth which has been formerly perceived by it,\nand is even now in the memory though not in consciousness. An\nillustration of this method is attempted in the \"_Meno_\" where Plato\nintroduces Socrates as making an experiment on the mind of an uneducated\nperson. Socrates puts a series of questions to a slave of Meno, and at\nlength elicits from the youth a right enunciation of a geometrical\ntruth. Socrates then points triumphantly to this instance, and bids Meno\nobserve that he had not taught the youth any thing, but simply\ninterrogated him as to his opinions, whilst the youth had recalled the\nknowledge previously existing in his own mind.[559]\n\n[Footnote 558: \"To learn is to recover our own previous knowledge, and\nthis is properly to _recollect._\"--\"Phaedo\" Sec. 55.]\n\n[Footnote 559: \"Meno,\" Sec. 16-20. \"Now for a person to recover knowledge\nhimself through himself, is not this to _recollect_.\"]\n\nNow whilst we readily grant that the instance given in the \"_Meno_\" does\nnot sustain the inference of Plato that \"the boy\" had learnt these\ngeometrical truths \"in eternity,\" and that they had simply been brought\nforward into the view of his consciousness by the \"questioning\" of\nSocrates, yet it certainly does prove that _there are ideas or\nprinciples in the human reason which are not derived from without--which\nare anterior to all experience, and for the development of which,\nexperience furnishes the occasion, but is not the origin and source_. By\na kind of lofty inspiration, he caught sight of that most important\ndoctrine of modern philosophy, so clearly and logically presented by\nKant, _that the Reason is the source of a pure_ a priori _knowledge_--a\nknowledge native to, and potentially in the mind, antecedent to all\nexperience, and which is simply brought out into the field of\nconsciousness by experience conditions. Around this greatest of all\nmetaphysical truths Plato threw a gorgeous mythic dress, and presented\nit under the most picturesque imagery.[560] But, when divested of the\nrich coloring which the glowing imagination of Plato threw over it, it\nis but a vivid presentation of the cardinal truth that _there are ideas\nin the mind which have not been derived from without_, and which,\ntherefore, the mind brought with it into the present sphere of being.\nThe validity and value of this fundamental doctrine, even as presented\nby Plato, is unaffected by any speculations in which he may have\nindulged, as to the pre-existence of the soul. He simply regarded this\ndoctrine of pre-existence as highly probable--a plausible explanation of\nthe facts. That there are ideas, innate and connatural to the human\nmind, he clung to as the most vital, most precious, most certain of all\ntruths; and to lead man to the recognitions of these ideas, to bring\nthem within the field of consciousness, was, in his judgment, the great\nbusiness of philosophy.\n\nAnd this was the grand aim of his _Dialectic_--to elicit, to bring to\nlight the truths which are already in the mind--\"a maieusis\" a kind of\nintellectual midwifery[561]--a delivering of the mind of the ideas with\nwhich it was pregnant.\n\n[Footnote 560: As in the \"Phaedo,\" Secs. 48-57; \"Phaedrus,\" Secs. 52-64;\n\"Republic,\" bk. x.]\n\n[Footnote 561: \"Theaetetus,\" Secs. 17-20.]\n\nIt is thus, at first sight, obvious that it was a higher and more\ncomprehensive science than the art of deduction. For it was directed to\nthe discovery and establishment of First Principles. Its sole object was\nthe discovery of truth. His dialectic was an _analytical_ and _inductive\nmethod_. \"In Dialectic Science,\" says _Alcinous_, \"there is a dividing\nand a defining, and an analyzing, and, moreover, that which is inductive\nand syllogistic.\"[562] Even _Bacon_, who is usually styled \"the Father\nof the Inductive method,\" and who, too often, speaks disparagingly of\nPlato, is constrained to admit that he followed the inductive method.\n\"An induction such as will be of advantage for the invention and\ndemonstration of Arts and Sciences must distinguish the essential nature\nof things (naturam) by proper rejections and exclusions, and then after\nas many of these negatives as are sufficient, by comprising, above all\n(super), the positives. Up to this time this had not been done, nor even\nattempted, _except by Plato alone, who, in order to attain his\ndefinitions and ideas, has used, to a certain extent, the method of\nInduction_.\"[563]\n\n[Footnote 562: \"Introduction to the Doctrines of Plato,\" vol. vi. p.\n249. \"The Platonic Method was the method of induction.\"--Cousin's\n\"History of Philosophy,\" vol. i. p. 307.]\n\n[Footnote 563: \"Novum Organum,\" vol. i. p. 105.]\n\nThe process of investigation adopted by Plato thus corresponds with the\ninductive method of modern times, with this simple difference, that\nBacon conducted science into the world of _matter_, whilst Plato\ndirected it to the world of _mind_. The dialectic of Plato aimed at the\ndiscovery of the \"laws of thought;\" the modern inductive philosophy aims\nat the discovery of the \"laws of nature.\" The latter concerns itself\nchiefly with the inquiry after the \"causes\" of material phenomena; the\nformer concerned itself with the inquiry after the \"first principles\" of\nall knowledge and of all existence. Both processes are, therefore,\ncarried on by _interrogation_. The analysis which seeks for a law of\nnature proceeds by the interrogation of nature. The analysis of Plato\nproceeds by the interrogation of mind, in order to discover the\nfundamental _ideas_ which lie at the basis of all cognition, which\ndetermine all our processes of thought, and which, in their final\nanalysis, reveal the REAL BEING, which is the ground and explanation of\nall existence.\n\nNow the fact that such an inquiry has originated in the human mind, and\nthat it can not rest satisfied without some solution, is conclusive\nevidence that the mind has an instinctive belief, a proleptic\nanticipation, that such knowledge can be attained. There must\nunquestionably be some mental initiative which is the _motive_ and\n_guide_ to all philosophical inquiry. We must have some well-grounded\nconviction, some _a priori_ belief, some pre-cognition \"ad intentionem\nejus quod quaeritur,\"[564] which determines the direction of our\nthinking. The mind does not go to work aimlessly; it asks a specific\nquestion; it demands the \"_whence_\" and the \"_why_\" of that which is.\nNeither does it go to work unfurnished with any guiding principles. That\nwhich impels the mind to a determinate act of thinking is the possession\nof a _knowledge_ which is different from, and independent of, the\nprocess of thinking itself. \"A rational anticipation is, then, the\nground of the _prudens quaestio_--\"the forethought query, which, in\nfact, is the prior half of the knowledge sought.\"[565] If the mind\ninquire after \"laws,\" and \"causes,\" and \"reasons,\" and \"grounds,\"--the\nfirst principles of all knowledge and of all existence,--\"it must have\nthe _a priori_ ideas of \"law,\" and \"cause,\" and \"reason,\" and \"being _in\nse\"_ which, though dimly revealed to the mind previous to the discipline\nof reflection, are yet unconsciously governing its spontaneous modes of\nthought. The whole process of induction has, then, some rational ground\nto proceed upon--some principles deeper than science, and more certain\nthan demonstration, which reason contains within itself, and which\ninduction \"draws out\" into clearer light.\n\n[Footnote 564: Bacon.]\n\n[Footnote 565: Coleridge, vol. ii. p. 413.]\n\nNow this mental initiative of every process of induction is the\nintuitive and necessary conviction _that there must be a sufficient\nreason why every thing exists, and why it is as it is, and not\notherwise_;[566] or in other words, if any thing begins to be, some\nthing else must be supposed[567] as the ground, and reason, and cause,\nand law of its existence. This \"_law of sufficient_ (or _determinant)\nreason_\"[568] is the fundamental principle of all metaphysical inquiry.\nIt is contained, at least in a negative form, in that famous maxim of\nancient philosophy, \"_De nihilo nihil_\"--\"Adynaton ginestai ti ek\nmedenos prouparxontos.\" \"It is impossible for a real entity to be made\nor generated from nothing pre-existing;\" or in other words, \"nothing can\nbe made or produced without an efficient cause.\"[569] This principle is\nalso distinctly announced by Plato: \"Whatever is generated, is\nnecessarily generated from a certain aitian\"--_ground, reason_, or\n_cause_; \"for it is wholly impossible that any thing should be generated\nwithout a cause.\"[570]\n\n[Footnote 566: \"Phaedo,\" Sec. 103.]\n\n[Footnote 567: _Suppono_, to place under as a support, to take as a\nground.]\n\n[Footnote 568: This generic principle, viewed under different relations,\ngives--\n\n     1st. _The principle of Substance_--every quality supposes a subject\n       or real being.\n\n     2d. _The principle of Causality_--every thing which begins to be\n       must have a cause.\n\n     3d. _The principle of Law_--every phenomenon must obey some uniform\n       law.\n\n     4th. _The principle of Final Cause_--every means supposes an end,\n       every existence has a purpose or reason why.\n\n     5th. _The principle of Unity_--all plurality supposes a unity as\n       its basis and ground.]\n\n[Footnote 569: Cudworth's \"Intellectual System,\" vol. ii. p. 161.]\n\n[Footnote 570: \"Timaeus,\" ch. ix.]\n\nThe first business of Plato's dialectic is to demonstrate that the\nground and reason of all existence can not be found in the mere objects\nof sense, nor in any opinions or judgments founded upon sensation.\nPrinciples are only so far \"first principles\" as they are permanent and\nunchangeable, depending on neither time, nor place, nor circumstances.\nBut the objects of sense are in ceaseless flux and change; they are\n\"_always becoming_;\" they can not be said to have any \"_real being_.\"\nThey are not to-day what they were yesterday, and they will never again\nbe what they are now; consequently all opinions founded on mere\nphenomena are equally fluctuating and uncertain. Setting out, therefore,\nfrom the assumption of the fallaciousness of \"_opinion_\" it examined the\nvarious hypotheses which had been bequeathed by previous schools of\nphilosophy, or were now offered by contemporaneous speculators, and\nshowed they were utterly inadequate to the solution of the problem. This\nscrutiny consisted in searching for the ground of \"contradiction\"[571]\nwith regard to each opinion founded on sensation, and showing that\nopposite views were equally tenable. It inquired on what ground these\nopinions were maintained, and what consequences flowed therefrom, and it\nshowed that the grounds upon which \"opinion\" was founded, and the\nconclusions which were drawn from it, were contradictory, and\nconsequently untrue.[572] \"They,\" the Dialecticians, \"examined the\nopinions of men as if they were error; and bringing them together by a\nreasoning process to the same point, they placed them by the side of\neach other: and by so placing, they showed that _the opinions are at one\nand the same time contrary to themselves, about the same things, with\nreference to the same circumstances, and according to the same\npremises_.\"[573] And inasmuch as the same attribute can not, at the same\ntime, be affirmed and denied of the same subject,[574] therefore a thing\ncan not be at once \"changeable\" and \"unchangeable,\" \"movable\" and\n\"immovable,\" \"generated\" and \"eternal.\"[575] The objects of sense,\nhowever generalized and classified, can only give the contingent, the\nrelative, and the finite; therefore the permanent ground and sufficient\nreason of all phenomenal existence can not be found in opinions and\njudgments founded upon sensation.\n\n[Footnote 571: \"The Dialectitian is one who syllogistically infers the\ncontradictions implied in popular opinions.\"--Aristotle, \"Sophist,\" Secs.\n1, 2.]\n\n[Footnote 572: \"Republic,\" bk. vi. ch. xiii.]\n\n[Footnote 573: \"Sophist,\" Sec. 33; \"Republic,\" bk. iv. ch. xii.]\n\n[Footnote 574: See the \"Phaedo,\" Sec. 119, and \"Republic,\" bk. iv. ch.\nxiii., where the Law of Non-contradiction is announced.]\n\n[Footnote 575 \"Parmenides,\" Sec. 3.]\n\nThe dialectic process thus consisted almost entirely of\n_refutation_,[576] or what both he and Aristotle denominated _elenchus_\n(elenchos)--a process of reasoning by which the contradictory of a given\nproposition is inferred. \"When refutation had done its utmost, and all\nthe points of difficulty and objection had been fully brought out, the\ndialectic method had accomplished its purpose; and the affirmation which\nremained, after this discussion, might be regarded as setting forth the\ntruth of the question under consideration;\"[577] or in other words,\n_when a system of error is destroyed by refutation, the contradictory\nopposite principle, with its logical developments, must be accepted as\nan established truth_.\n\n[Footnote 576: Confutation is the greatest and chiefest of\npurification.--\"Sophist,\" Sec. 34.]\n\n[Footnote 577: Article \"Plato,\" Encyclopaedia Britannica.]\n\nBy the application of this method, Plato had not only exposed the\ninsufficiency and self-contradiction of all results obtained by a mere\n_a posteriori_ generalization of the simple facts of experience, but he\ndemonstrated, as a consequence, that we are in possession of some\nelements of knowledge which have not been derived from sensation; that\nthere are, in all minds, certain notions, principles, or ideas, which\nhave been furnished by a higher faculty than sense; and that these\nnotions, principles, or ideas, transcend the limits of experience, and\nreveal the knowledge of _real being_--to ontos on--_Being in se_.\n\nTo determine what these principles or ideas are, Plato now addresses\nhimself to the _analysis of thought_. \"It is the glory of Plato to have\nborne the light of analysis into the most obscure and inmost region; he\nsearched out what, in this totality which forms consciousness, is the\nprovince of reason; what comes from it, and not from the imagination and\nthe senses--from within, and not from without.\"[578] Now to analyze is\nto decompose, that is, to divide, and to define, in order to see better\nthat which really is. The chief logical instruments of the dialectic\nmethod are, therefore, _Division_ and _Definition_. \"The being able to\n_divide_ according to genera, and not to consider the same species as\ndifferent, nor a different as the same,\"[579] and \"to see under one\naspect, and bring together under one general idea, many things scattered\nin various places, that, by _defining_ each, a person may make it clear\nwhat the subject is,\" is, according to Plato, \"dialectical.\"[580]\n\n[Footnote 578: Cousin's \"Lectures on the History of Philosophy,\" vol. i.\np. 328.]\n\n[Footnote 579: \"Sophist,\" Sec. 83.]\n\n[Footnote 580: \"Phaedrus,\" Secs. 109, 111.]\n\nWe have already seen that, in his first efforts at applying reflection\nto the concrete phenomena of consciousness, Plato had recognized two\ndistinct classes of cognitions, marked by characteristics essentially\nopposite;--one of \"_sensible_\" objects having a definite outline, limit,\nand figure, and capable of being imaged and represented to the mind in a\ndeterminate form--the other of \"_intelligible_\" objects, which can not\nbe outlined or represented in the memory or the imagination by any\nfigures or images, and are, therefore, the objects of purely rational\nconception. He found, also, that we arrive at one class of cognitions\n\"_mediately_\" through images generated in the vital organism, or by some\ntestimony, definition, or explication of others; whilst we arrive at the\nother class \"_immediately_\" by simple intuition, or rational\napperception. The mind stands face to face with the object, and gazes\ndirectly upon it. The reality of that object is revealed in its own\nlight, and we find it impossible to refuse our assent--that is, it is\n_self-evident_. One class consisted of _contingent_ ideas--that is,\ntheir objects are conceived as existing, with the possibility, without\nany contradiction, of conceiving of their non-existence; the other\nconsisted of _necessary_ ideas--their objects are conceived as existing\nwith the absolute impossibility of conceiving of their non-existence.\nThus we can conceive of this book, this table, this earth, as not\nexisting, but we can not conceive the non-existence of space. We can\nconceive of succession in time as not existing, but we can not, in\nthought, annihilate duration. We can imagine this or that particular\nthing not to have been, but we can not conceive of the extinction of\nBeing in itself. He further observed, that one class of our cognitions\nare _conditional_ ideas; the existence of their objects is conceived\nonly on the supposition of some antecedent existence, as for example,\nthe idea of qualities, phenomena, events; whilst the other class of\ncognitions are _unconditional_ and _absolute_--we can conceive of their\nobjects as existing independently and unconditionally--existing whether\nany thing else does or does not exist, as space, duration, the infinite,\nBeing _in se_. And, finally, whilst some ideas appear in us as\n_particular_ and _individual_, determined and modified by our own\npersonality and liberty, there are others which are, in the fullest\nsense, _universal_. They are not the creations of our own minds, and\nthey can not be changed by our own volitions. They depend upon neither\ntimes, nor places, nor circumstances; they are common to all minds, in\nall times, and in all places. These ideas are the witnesses in our\ninmost being that there is something beyond us, and above us; and beyond\nand above all the contingent and fugitive phenomena around us. Beneath\nall changes there is a _permanent_ being. Beyond all finite and\nconditional existance there is something _unconditional_ and _absolute_.\nHaving determined that there are truths which are independent of our own\nminds--truths which are not individual, but universal--truths which\nwould be truths even if our minds did not perceive them, we are led\nonward to a _super-sensual_ and super-natural ground, on which they\nrest.\n\nTo reach this objective reality on which the ideas of reason repose, is\nthe grand effort of Plato's dialectic. He seeks, by a rigid analysis,\nclearly to _separate_, and accurately to _define_ the _a priori_\nconceptions of reason. And it was only when he had eliminated every\nelement which is particular, contingent, and relative, and had defined\nthe results in precise and accurate language, that he regarded the\nprocess as complete. The ideas which are self-evident, universal, and\nnecessary, were then clearly disengaged, and raised to their pure and\nabsolute form. \"You call the man dialectical who requires a reason of\nthe essence or being of each thing. As the dialectical man can define\nthe essence of every thing, so can he of the good. He can _define_ the\nidea of the good, _separating_ it from all others--follow it through all\nwindings, as in a battle, resolved to mark it, not according to opinion,\nbut according to science.\"[581]\n\n[Footnote 581: \"Republic,\" bk. vii. ch. xiv.]\n\n_Abstraction_ is thus the process, the instrument of the Platonic\ndialectic. It is important, however, that we should distinguish between\nthe method of _comparative_ abstraction, as employed in physical\ninquiry, and that _immediate_ abstraction, which is the special\ninstrument of philosophy. The former proceeds by comparison and\ngeneralization, the latter by simple separation. The one yields a\ncontingent general principle as the result of the comparison of a number\nof individual cases, the other gives an universal and necessary\nprinciple by the analysis of a single concrete fact. As an illustration\nwe may instance \"the principle of causality.\" To enable us to affirm\n\"that every event must have a cause,\" we do not need to compare and\ngeneralize a great number of events. \"The principle which compels us to\npronounce the judgment is already complete in the first as in the last\nevent; it can change in regard to its object, it can not change in\nitself; it neither increases nor decreases with the greater or less\nnumber of applications.\"[582] In the presence of a single event, the\nuniversality and necessity of this principle of causality is recognized\nwith just as much clearness and certainty as in the presence of a\nmillion events, however carefully generalized.\n\n[Footnote 582: Cousin's \"The True, the Beautiful, and the Good,\" pp. 57,\n58.]\n\nAbstraction, then, it will be seen, creates nothing; neither does it add\nany new element to the store of actual cognitions already possessed by\nall human minds. It simply brings forward into a clearer and more\ndefinite recognition, that which necessarily belongs to the mind as part\nof its latent furniture, and which, as a law of thought, has always\nunconsciously governed all its spontaneous movements. As a process of\nrational inquiry, it was needful to bring the mind into intelligible and\nconscious communion with the world of _Ideas_. These ideas are partially\nrevealed in the sensible world, all things being formed, as Plato\nbelieved, according to ideas as models and exemplars, of which sensible\nobjects are the copies. They are more fully manifested in the\nconstitution of the human mind which, by virtue of its kindred nature\nwith the original essence or being, must know them intuitively and\nimmediately. And they are brought out fully by the dialectic process,\nwhich disengages them from all that is individual and phenomenal, and\nsets them forth in their pure and absolute form.\n\nBut whilst Plato has certainly exhibited the true method of\ninvestigation by which the ideas of reason are to be separated from all\nconcrete phenomena and set clearly before the mind, he has not attempted\na complete enumeration of the ideas of reason; indeed, such an\nenumeration is still the grand desideratum of philosophy. We can not\nfail, however, in the careful study of his writings, to recognize the\ngrand Triad of Absolute Ideas--ideas which Cousin, after Plato, has so\nfully exhibited, viz., the _True_, the _Beautiful_, and the _Good_.\n\nPLATONIC SCHEME OF IDEAS\n\nI. _The idea of_ ABSOLUTE TRUTH or REALITY (to alethes--to on)--the\nground and efficient cause of all existence, and by participating in\nwhich all phenomenal existence has only so far a reality, sensible\nthings being merely shadows and resemblances of ideas. This idea is\ndeveloped in the human intelligence in its relation with the phenomenal\nworld; as,\n\n1. _The idea of_ SUBSTANCE (ousia)--the ground of all phenomena, \"the\nbeing or essence of all things,\" the permanent reality.--\"Timaeeus,\" ch.\nix. and xii.; \"Republic,\" bk. vii. ch. xiv.; \"Phaedo,\"Secs. 63-67, 73.\n\n2. _The idea of_ CAUSE (aitia)--the power or efficiency by which things\nthat \"become,\" or begin to be, are generated or produced.--\"Timaeus,\" ch.\nix.; \"Sophist,\" Sec. 109; \"Philebus,\" Secs. 45, 46.\n\n3. _The idea of_ IDENTITY (auto to ison)--that which \"does not change,\"\n\"is always the same, simple and uniform, incomposite and\nindissoluble,\"--that which constitutes personality or\nself-hood.--\"Phaedo,\" Secs. 61-75; \"Timaeus,\" ch. ix.; \"Republic,\" bk. ii.\nch. xix. and xx.\n\n4. _The idea of_ UNITY (to en)--one _mind_ or intelligence pervading the\nuniverse, the comprehensive conscious _thought_ or _plan_ which binds\nall parts of the universe in one great whole (to pan)--the principle of\n_order_.--\"Timaeus,\" ch. xi. and xv.; \"Republic,\" bk. vi. ch. xiii.;\n\"Philebus,\" Secs. 50-51.\n\n5. _The idea of the_ INFINITE (to apeiron)--that which is unlimited and\nunconditioned, \"has no parts, bounds, no beginning, nor middle, nor\nend.\"--\"Parmenides,\" Secs. 22, 23.\n\nII. _The idea of_ ABSOLUTE BEAUTY (to kalon)--the formal cause of the\nuniverse, and by participation in which all created things have only so\nfar a real beauty.--\"Timaeus,\" ch. xi, \"Greater Hippias,\" Secs. 17, 18;\n\"Republic,\" bk. v. ch. 22.\n\nThis idea is developed in the human intelligence in its relation to the\norganic world; as,\n\n      1. _The Idea of_ PROPORTION or SYMMETRY (symmetria)--the\n      proper relation of parts to an organic whole resulting in a\n      harmony (cosmos), and which relation admits of mathematical\n      expression.--\"Timaeus,\" ch. lxix.; \"Philebus,\" Sec. 155\n      (\"Timaeus,\" ch. xi. and xii., where the relation of numerical\n      proportions to material elements is expounded).\n\n      2. _The idea of_ DETERMINATE FORM (paradeigma\n      archetypos)--the eternal models or archetypes according to\n      which all things are framed, and which admit of geometrical\n      representation.--\"Timaeus,\" ch. ix.; \"Phaedo,\" Sec.112 (\"Timaeus,\"\n      ch. xxviii.-xxxi., where the relation of geometrical forms\n      to material elements is exhibited).\n\n      3. _The idea of_ RHYTHM (rythmos)--measured movement in time\n      and space, resulting in melody and grace.--\"Republic,\" bk.\n      iii. ch. xi. and xii.; \"Philebus,\" Sec. 21.\n\n      4. _The idea of_ FITNESS or ADAPTATION\n      (chresimon)--effectiveness to some purpose or end.--\"Greater\n      Hippias,\" Sec. 35.\n\n      5. _The idea of_ PERFECTION (teleiotes)--that which is\n      complete, \"a structure which is whole and finished--of whole\n      and perfect parts.\"--\"Timaeus,\" ch. xi., xii., and xliii.\n\n\nIII. _The idea of_ ABSOLUTE GOOD (to agathon)--the final _cause_ or\n_reason_ of all existence, the sun of the invisible world, that pours\nupon all things the revealing light of truth.\n\nThe first Good[583] (_summum bonum_) is God the highest, and Mind or\nIntelligence (nous), which renders man capable of knowing and resembling\nGod. The second flows from the first, and are virtues of mind. They are\ngood by a participation of the chief good, and constitute in man a\nlikeness or _resemblance_ to God.--\"Phaedo,\" Secs.110-114; \"Laws,\" bk. i.\nch. vi., bk. iv. ch. viii.; \"Theaetetus,\" Secs. 84, 85; \"Republic,\" bk. vi.\nch. xix., bk. vii. ch. iii., bk. x. ch. xii.[584]\n\n[Footnote 583: \"Let us declare, then, on what account the framing\nArtificer settled the formation of the universe. He was GOOD;\" and being\ngood, \"he desired that all things should as much as possible resemble\nhimself.\"--\"Timaeus,\" ch. x.]\n\n[Footnote 584: \"At the utmost bounds of the intellectual world is the\n_idea of the Good_, perceived with difficulty, but which, once seen,\nmakes itself known as the cause of all that is beautiful and good; which\nin the visible world produces light, and the orb that gives it; and\nwhich in the invisible world directly produces Truth and\nIntelligence.\"--\"Republic,\" bk. vii. ch. iii.]\n\nThis idea is developed in the human intelligence in its relation to the\nworld of moral order; as,\n\n1. _The idea of_ WISDOM or PRUDENCE (phronesis)--thoughtfulness,\nrightness of intention, following the guidance of reason, the right\ndirection of the energy or will.--\"Republic,\" bk. iv. ch. vii., bk. vi.\nch. ii.\n\n2. _The idea of_ COURAGE or FORTITUDE (andria)--zeal, energy, firmness\nin the maintenance of honor and right, virtuous indignation against\nwrong.--\"Republic,\" bk. iv. ch. viii.; \"Laches;\" \"Meno,\" Sec. 24.\n\n3. _The idea of_ SELF-CONTROL or TEMPERANCE\n(sophrosyne)--sound-mindedness, moderation, dignity.--\"Republic,\" bk.\niv. ch. ix.; \"Meno,\" Sec. 24; \"Phaedo,\" Sec. 35.\n\n4. _The idea of_ JUSTICE (dikalosyne)--the harmony or perfect\nproportional action of all the powers of the soul.--\"Republic,\" bk. i.\nch. vi., bk. iv. ch. x.-xii., bk. vi. ch. ii. and xvi.; \"Philebus,\" Sec.\n155; \"Phaedo,\" Sec. 54; \"Theaetetus,\" Secs. 84, 85.\n\nPlato's idea of Justice comprehends--\n\n(1) EQUITY (isotes)--the rendering to every man his due.--\"Republic,\"\nbk. i. ch. vi.\n\n(2.) VERACITY (alepheia)--the utterance of what is true.--\"Republic,\"\nbk. i. ch. v., bk. ii. ch. xx., bk. vi. ch. ii.\n\n(3.) FAITHFULNESS (pistotes)--the strict performance of a\ntrust.--\"Republic,\" bk. i. ch. v., bk. vi. ch. ii.\n\n(4.) USEFULNESS (opheltmon)--the answering of some valuable\nend.--\"Republic,\" bk. ii. ch. xviii., bk. iv. ch. xviii.; \"Meno,\" Sec. 22.\n\n(5.) BENEVOLENCE (eunoia)--seeking the well-being of\nothers.--\"Republic,\" bk. i. ch. xvii., bk. ii. ch. xviii.\n\n(6.) HOLINESS (osiotes)--purity of mind, piety.--\"Protagoras,\" Secs. 52-54;\n\"Phaedo,\" Sec. 32; \"Theaetetus,\" Sec. 84.\n\nThe final effort of Plato's Dialectic was to ascend from these ideas of\nAbsolute Truth, and Absolute Beauty, and Absolute Goodness to the\n_Absolute Being_, in whom they are all united, and from whom they all\nproceed. \"He who possesses the true love of science is naturally carried\nin his aspirations to the _real Being_; and his love, so far from\nsuffering itself to be retarded by the multitude of things whose reality\nis only apparent, knows no repose until it have arrived at union with\nthe _essence_ of each object, by the part of the soul which is akin to\nthe permanent and essential; so that this divine conjunction having\nproduced intelligence and truth, the knowledge of _being_ is won.\"[585]\n\n[Footnote 585: \"Republic,\" bk. vi. ch. v.]\n\nTo the mind of Plato, there was in every thing, even the smallest and\nmost insignificant of sensible objects, a _reality_ just in so far as it\nparticipates in some archetypal form or idea. These archetypal forms or\nideas are the \"_thoughts of God_\"[586]--they are the plan according to\nwhich he framed the universe. \"The Creator and Father of the universe\nlooked to an _eternal model_.... Being thus generated, the universe is\nframed according to principles that can be comprehended by reason and\nreflection.\"[587] Plato, also, regarded all individual conceptions of\nthe mind as hypothetical notions which have in them an _a priori_\nelement--an idea which is unchangeable, universal, and necessary. These\nunchangeable, universal, and necessary ideas are copies of the Divine\nIdeas, which are, for man, the primordial laws of all cognition, and all\nreasoning. They are possessed by the soul \"in virtue of its kindred\nnature to that which is permanent, unchangeable, and eternal.\" He also\nbelieved that every archetypal form, and every _a priori_ idea, has its\nground and root in a higher idea, which is _unhypothetical_ and\n_absolute_--an idea which needs no other supposition for its\nexplanation, and which is, itself, needful to the explanation of all\nexistence--even the idea of an _absolute_ and _perfect Being_, in whose\nmind the ideas of absolute truth, and beauty, and goodness inhere, and\nin whose eternity they can only be regarded as eternal.[588] Thus do the\n\"ideas of reason\" not only cast a bridge across the abyss that separates\nthe sensible and the ideal world, but they also carry us beyond the\nlimits of our personal consciousness, and discover to us a realm of real\nBeing, which is the foundation, and cause, and explanation of the\nphenomenal world that appears around us and within us.\n\n[Footnote 586: Alcinous, \"Doctrines of Plato,\" p. 262.]\n\n[Footnote 587: \"Timaeus,\" ch. ix.]\n\n[Footnote 588: Maurice's \"Ancient Philosophy,\" p. 149.]\n\nThis passage from psychology to ontology is not achieved _per saltum_,\nor effected by any arbitrary or unwarrantable assumption. There are\nprinciples revealed in the centre of our consciousness, whose regular\ndevelopment carry us beyond the limits of consciousness, and attain to\nthe knowledge of actual being. The absolute principles of _causality_\nand _substance_, of _intentionality_ and _unity_, unquestionably give us\nthe absolute Being. Indeed the absolute truth _that every idea supposes\na being in which it resides_, and which is but another form of the law\nor principle of substance, viz., _that every quality supposes a\nsubstance or being in which it inheres_, is adequate to carry us from\nIdea to Being. \"There is not a single cognition which does not suggest\nto us the notion of existence, and there is not an unconditional and\nabsolute truth which does not necessarily imply an absolute and\nunconditional Being.\"[589]\n\n[Footnote 589: Cousin's \"Elements of Psychology,\" p. 506.]\n\nThis, then, is the dialectic of Plato. Instead of losing himself amid\nthe endless variety of particular phenomena, he would search for\nprinciples and laws, and from thence ascend to the great Legislator, the\n_First Principle of all Principles_. Instead of stopping at the\nrelations of sensible objects to the general ideas with which they are\ncommingled, he will pass to their _eternal Paradigms_--from the just\nthing to the idea of absolute justice, from the particular good to the\nabsolute good, from beautiful things to the absolute beauty, and thence\nto the ultimate reality--_the absolute Being_. By the realization of the\nlower idea, embodied in the forms of the visible universe and in the\nnecessary laws of thought, he sought to rise to the higher idea, in its\npure and abstract form--the _Supreme Idea_, containing in itself all\nother ideas--the _One Intelligence_ which unites the universe in a\nharmonious whole. \"The Dialectic faculty proceeds from hypothesis to an\nunhypothetical principle.... It uses hypotheses as steps, and\nstarting-points, in order to proceed from thence to the _absolute_. The\nIntuitive Reason takes hold of the First Principle of the Universe, and\navails itself of all the connections and relations of that principle. It\nascends from idea to idea, until it has reached the Supreme Idea\"--the\n_Absolute Good_--that is, _God_.[590]\n\n[Footnote 590: \"Republic,\" bk. vi. ch. xx. and xxi.]\n\nWe are thus brought, in the course of our examination of the Platonic\nmethod, to the _results_ obtained by this method--or, in other words, to\n\nIII. THE PLATONIC ONTOLOGY.\n\nThe grand object of all philosophic inquiry in ancient Greece was to\nattain to the knowledge of real Being--that Being which is permanent,\nunchangeable, and eternal. It had proceeded on the intuitive conviction,\nthat beneath all the endless diversity of the universe there must be a\nprinciple of _unity_--below all fleeting appearances there must be a\npermanent _substance_--beyond all this everlasting flow and change, this\nbeginning and end of finite existence, there must be an eternal Being,\nwhich is the _cause_, and which contains, in itself, the _reason_ of the\norder, and harmony, and beauty, and excellency which pervades the\nuniverse. And it had perpetually asked what is this permanent,\nunchangeable, and eternal substance or being?\n\nPlato had assiduously labored at the solution of this problem. The\nobject of his dialectic was \"to lead upward the soul to the knowledge of\nreal being,\"[591] and the conclusions to which he attained may be summed\nup as follows:\n\n1st. _Beneath all_ SENSIBLE _phenomena there is an unchangeable\nsubject-matter, the mysterious substratum of the world of sense, which\nhe calls the receptacle (ipodoche) the nurse (tithene) of all that is\nproduced_.[592]\n\nIt is this \"substratum or physical groundwork\" which gives a reality and\ndefiniteness to the evanescent phantoms of sense, for, in their\nceaseless change, _they_ can not justify any title whatever. It alone\ncan be styled \"_this_\" or \"_that_\" (tode or touto); they rise no higher\nthan \"_of such kind_\" or \"_of what kind or quality\" (toiouton or\nopoionoun ti).[593] It is not earth, or air, or fire, or water, but \"an\ninvisible _species_ and formless universal receiver, which, in the most\nobscure way, receives the immanence of the intelligible.\"[594] And in\nrelation to the other two principles (_i.e._, ideas and objects of\nsense), \"it is _the mother_\" to the father and the offspring.[595] But\nperhaps the most remarkable passage is that in which he seems to\nidentify it with _pure space_, which, \"itself imperishable, furnishes a\n_seat_ (edran) to all that is produced, not apprehensible by direct\nperception, but caught by a certain spurious reasoning, scarcely\nadmissible, but which we see as in a dream; gaining it by that judgment\nwhich pronounces it necessary that all which is, be _somewhere_, and\noccupy a _certain space_.\"[596] This, it will be seen, approaches the\nCartesian doctrine, which resolves matter into _simple extension.[597]\n\n[Footnote 591: \"Republic,\" bk. vii. ch. xii. and xiii.]\n\n[Footnote 592: \"Timaeus,\" ch. xxii.]\n\n[Footnote 593: \"Timaeus,\" ch. xxiii.]\n\n[Footnote 594: Ibid., ch. xxiv.]\n\n[Footnote 595: Ibid., ch. xxiv.]\n\n[Footnote 596: Ibid., ch. xxvi.]\n\n[Footnote 597: Butler's \"Lectures on Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. ii. p.\n171.]\n\nIt should, however, be distinctly noted that Plato does not use the word\nyle--matter. This term is first employed by Aristotle to express \"the\nsubstance which is the subject of all changes.\"[598] The subject or\nsubstratum of which Plato speaks, would seem to be rather a logical than\na material entity. It is the _condition or supposition_ necessary for\nthe production of a world of phenomena. It is thus the\n_transition-element_ between the real and the apparent, the eternal and\nthe contingent; and, lying thus on the border of both territories, we\nmust not be surprised that it can hardly be characterized by any\ndefinite attribute.[599] Still, this unknown recipient of forms or ideas\nhas a _reality_; it has \"an abiding nature,\" \"a constancy of existence;\"\nand we are forbidden to call it by any name denoting quality, but\npermitted to style it \"_this_\" and \"_that_\" (tode kai touto).[600]\nBeneath the perpetual changes of sensible phenomena there is, then, an\nunchangeable subject, which yet is neither the Deity, nor ideas, nor the\nsoul of man, which exists as the means and occasion of the manifestation\nof Divine Intelligence in the organization of the world.[601]\n\n[Footnote 598: \"Metaphysics,\" bk. vii. ch. i.]\n\n[Footnote 599: Butler's \"Lectures on Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. ii. p.\n178.]\n\n[Footnote 600: \"Timaeus,\" ch. xxiii.]\n\n[Footnote 601: Ibid., ch. xiiii]\n\nThere has been much discussion as to whether Plato held that this\n\"_Receptacle_\" and \"_Nurse_\" of forms and ideas was eternal, or\ngenerated in time. Perhaps no one has more carefully studied the\nwritings of Plato than William Archer Butler, and his conclusions in\nregard to this subject are presented in the following words: \"As, on the\none hand, he maintained a strict system of dualism, and avoided, without\na single deviation, that seduction of pantheism to which so many\nabstract speculators of his own school have fallen victims; so, on the\nother hand, it appears to me that he did not scruple to place this\nprinciple, the opposite of the Divine intelligence, in a sphere\nindependent of temporal origination.... But we can scarcely enter into\nhis views, unless we ascertain his notions of the nature of _Time_\nitself. This was considered to have been created with the rest of the\nsensible world, to finish with it, if it ever finished--to be altogether\nrelated to this phenomenal scene.[602] 'The generating Father determined\nto create a moving image of eternity (aionos); and in disposing the\nheavens, he framed of this eternity, reposing in its own unchangeable\nunity, an eternal _image_, moving according to numerical succession,\nwhich he called _Time_. With the world arose days, nights, months,\nyears, which all had no previous existence. The past and future are but\nforms of time, which we most erroneously transfer to the eternal\nsubstance (aidion ousian); we say it was, and is, and will be, whereas\nwe can only fitly say _it is_. Past and future are appropriate to the\nsuccessive nature of generated beings, for they bespeak motion; but the\nBeing eternally and immovably the same is subject neither to youth nor\nage, nor to any accident of time; it neither was, nor hath been, nor\nwill be, which are the attributes of fleeting sense--the circumstances\nof time, imitating eternity in the shape of number and motion. Nor can\nany thing be more inaccurate than to apply the term _real being_ to\npast, or present, or future, or even to non-existence. Of this, however,\nwe can not now speak fully. _Time_, then, was formed with the heavens,\nthat, together created, they may together end, _if indeed an end be in\nthe purpose of the Creator_; and it is designed as closely as possible\nto resemble the eternal nature, its exemplar. The model exists through\nall eternity; the world has been, is, and will be through all\n_time_.'[603] In this ineffable eternity Plato places the Supreme Being,\nand the archetypal ideas of which the sensible world of time partakes.\nWhether he also includes under the same mode of existence the\n_subject-matter_ of the sensible world, it is not easy to pronounce; and\nit appears to me evident that he did not himself undertake to speak with\nassurance on this obscure problem.\"[604] The creation of matter \"out of\nnothing\" is an idea which, in all probability, did not occur to the mind\nof Plato. But that he regarded it as, in some sense, a _dependent_\nexistence--as existing, like time, by \"the purpose or will of the\nCreator\"--perhaps as an eternal \"generation\" from the \"eternal\nsubstance,\" is also highly probable; for in the last analysis he\nevidently desires to embrace all things in some ultimate _unity_--a\ntendency which it seems impossible for human reason to avoid.\n\n[Footnote 602: See _ante_, note 4, p. 349.]\n\n[Footnote 603: \"Timaeus,\" ch. xiv.]\n\n[Footnote 604: Butler's \"Lectures on Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. ii. p.\n171-175.]\n\n2d. _Beneath all mental phenomena there is a permanent subject or\nsubstratum which he designates_ THE IDENTICAL (to auto)--_the rational\nelement of the soul--\"the principle of self-activity\" or\nself-determination_.[605]\n\nThere are three principles into which Plato analyzes the soul--the\nprinciple of the _Identical_, the _Diverse_, and the _Intermediate\nEssence_.[606] The first is indivisible and eternal, always existing in\n_sameness_, the very substance of _Intelligence_ itself, and of the same\nnature with the Divine.[607] The second is divisible and corporeal,\nanswering to our notion of the passive _sensibilities_, and placing the\nsoul in relation with the visible world. The third is an intermediate\nessence, partaking of the natures of both, and constituting a medium\nbetween the eternal and the mutable--the conscious _energy_ of the soul\ndeveloped in the contingent world of time. Thus the soul is, on one\nside, linked to the unchangeable and the eternal, being formed of that\nineffable element which constitutes the _real_ or _immutable Being_, and\non the other side, linked to the sensible and the contingent, being\nformed of that element which is purely _relative_ and _contingent_. This\nlast element of the soul is regarded by Plato as \"mortal\" and\n\"corruptible,\" the former element as \"immortal\" and \"indestructible,\"\nhaving its foundations laid in eternity.\n\n[Footnote 605: \"Laws,\" bk. x. ch. vi. and vii.; \"Phaedrus,\" Sec. 51; \"arche\nkineseos.\"]\n\n[Footnote 606: \"Timaeus,\" ch. xii.; tauton, thateron, and ousia or to\nsymmisgomenon.]\n\n[Footnote 607: \"Laws,\" bk. v. ch. i.]\n\nThis doctrine of the eternity of the free and rational element of the\nsoul must, of course, appear strange and even repulsive to those who are\nunacquainted with the Platonic notion of eternity as a fixed state out\nof time, which has no past, present, or future, and is simply that which\n\"always _is_\"--an everlasting _now_. The soul, in its elements of\nrationality and freedom, has existed anterior to time, because it now\nexists in eternity.[608] In its actual manifestations and personal\nhistory it is to be contemplated as a \"generated being,\" having a\ncommencement in time.\n\nNow, that the human soul, like the uncreated Deity, has always had a\ndistinct, conscious, personal, independent being, does not appear to be\nthe doctrine of Plato. He teaches, most distinctly, that the \"divine,\"\nthe immortal part, was created, or rather \"generated,\" in eternity. \"The\nDeity himself _formed the divine_, and he delivered over to his\ncelestial offspring [the subordinate and generated gods] the task of\n_forming the mortal_. These subordinate deities, copying the example of\ntheir parent, and receiving from his hands the _immortal principle_ of\nthe human soul, fashioned subsequently to this the mortal body, which\nthey consigned to the soul as a vehicle, and in which they placed\nanother kind of soul, mortal, the seat of violent and fatal\naffections.\"[609] He also regarded the soul as having a derived and\ndependent existence. He draws a marked distinction between the divine\nand human forms of the \"self-moving principle,\" and makes its\ncontinuance dependent upon the will and wisdom of the Almighty Disposer\nand Parent, of whom it is \"the first-born offspring.\"[610]\n\n[Footnote 608: See _ante_, note 4, p. 349, as to the Platonic notions of\n\"Time\" and \"Eternity.\"]\n\n[Footnote 609: \"Timaeus,\" ch. xliv.]\n\n[Footnote 610: See the elaborate exposition in \"Laws,\" bk. x. ch. xii.\nand xiii.]\n\nThat portion of the soul which Plato regarded as \"immortal\" and \"to be\nentitled divine,\" is thus the \"_offspring of God_\"--a ray of the\nDivinity \"generated\" by, or emanating from, the Deity. He seems to have\nconceived it as co-eternal with its ideal objects, in some mysterious\nultimate _unity_. \"The true foundation of the Platonic theory of the\nconstitution of the soul is this fundamental principle of his\nphilosophy--the _oneness of truth and knowledge_.[611] This led him\nnaturally to derive the _rational_ element of the soul (that element\nthat _knows_), that possesses the power of noesis from the _real_\nelement in things (the element that _is_)--the nooumenon; and in the\noriginal, the final, and, though imperfectly, the present state of that\nrational element, he, doubtless, conceived it united with its object in\nan eternal conjunction, or even identity. But though intelligence and\nits correlative intelligibles were and are thus combined, the soul is\n_more_ than pure intelligence; it possesses an element of personality\nand consciousness distinct to each individual, of which we have no\nreason to suppose, from any thing his writings contain, Plato ever meant\nto deprive it.\"[612] On the contrary, he not only regarded it as having\nnow, under temporal conditions, a distinct personal existence, but he\nalso claimed for it a conscious, personal existence after death. He is\nmost earnest, and unequivocal, and consistent in his assertion of the\ndoctrine of the immortality of the soul. The arguments which human\nreason can supply are exhibited with peculiar force and beauty in the\n\"Phaedo,\" the \"Phaedrus,\" and the tenth book of the \"Republic.\" The most\nimportant of these arguments may be presented in a few words.\n\n[Footnote 611: See Grant's \"Aristotle,\" vol. i. pp. 150, 151.]\n\n[Footnote 612: Butler's \"Lectures on Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. ii. p.\n209, note.]\n\n1. _The soul is immortal, because it is incorporeal_. There are two\nkinds of existences, one compounded, the other simple; the former\nsubject to change, the latter unchangeable; one perceptible to sense,\nthe other comprehended by mind alone. The one is visible, the other is\ninvisible. When the soul employs the bodily senses, it wanders and is\nconfused; but when it abstracts itself from the body, it attains to\nknowledge which is stable, unchangeable, and immortal. The soul,\ntherefore, being uncompounded, incorporeal, invisible, must be\nindissoluble--that is to say, immortal.[613]\n\n[Footnote 613: \"Phaedo,\" Secs. 61-75.]\n\n2. _The soul is immortal, because it has an independent power of\nself-motion_--that is, it has self-activity and self-determination. No\narrangement of matter, no configuration of body, can be conceived as the\noriginator of free and voluntary movement.\n\nNow that which can not move itself, but derives its motion from\nsomething else, may cease to move, and perish. \"But that which is\nself-moved, never ceases to be active, and is also the cause of motion\nto all other things that are moved.\" And \"whatever is continually active\nis immortal.\" This \"self-activity is,\" says Plato, \"the very essence and\ntrue notion of the soul.\"[614] Being thus essentially _causative_, it\ntherefore partakes of the nature of a \"principle,\" and it is the nature\nof a principle to exclude its _contrary_. That which is essentially\nself-active can never cease to be active; that which is the cause of\nmotion and of change, can not be extinguished by the change called\ndeath.[615]\n\n3. _The soul is immortal, because it possesses universal, necessary, and\nabsolute ideas_, which transcend all material conditions, and bespeak an\norigin immeasurably above the body. No modifications of matter, however\nrefined, however elaborated, can give the Absolute, the Necessary, the\nEternal. But the soul has the ideas of absolute beauty, goodness,\nperfection, identity, and duration, and it possesses these ideas in\nvirtue of its having a nature which is one, simple, identical, and in\nsome sense, eternal.[616] If the soul can conceive an immortality, it\ncan not be less than immortal. If, by its very nature, \"it has hopes\nthat will not be bounded by the grave, and desires and longings that\ngrasp eternity,\" its nature and its destiny must correspond.\n\nIn the concluding sections of the \"Phaedo\" he urges the doctrine with\nearnestness and feeling as the grand motive to a virtuous life, for \"the\nreward is noble and the hope is great.\"[617] And in the \"Laws\" he\ninsists upon the doctrine of a future state, in which men are to be\nrewarded or punished as the most conclusive evidence that we are under\nthe moral government of God.[618]\n\n[Footnote 614: \"Phaedrus,\" Secs. 51-53.]\n\n[Footnote 615: \"Phaedo,\" Secs. 112-128.]\n\n[Footnote 616: Ibid., Secs. 48-57, 110-115.]\n\n[Footnote 617: Ibid., Secs. 129-145.]\n\n[Footnote 618: The doctrine of Metempsychosis, or transmigration of\nsouls, can scarcely be regarded as part of the philosophic system of\nPlato. He seems to have accepted it as a venerable tradition, coming\nwithin the range of probability, rather than as a philosophic truth, and\nit is always presented by him in a highly mythical dress. Now of these\nmythical representations he remarks in the \"Phaedo\" (Sec. 145) that \"no man\nin his senses would dream of insisting _that they correspond to the\nreality_, but that, the soul having been shown to be immortal, this, or\nsomething like this, is true of individual souls or their habitations.\"\nIf, as in the opinions of the ablest critics, \"the Laws\" is to be placed\namongst the last and maturest of Plato's writings, the evidence is\nconclusive that whatever may have been his earlier opinions, he did not\nentertain the doctrine of \"Metempsychosis\" in his riper years. But when,\non the one hand, the soul shall remain having an intercourse with divine\nvirtue, it becomes divine pre-eminently; and pre-eminently, after having\nbeen conveyed to a _place_ entirely holy, it is changed for the better;\nbut when it acts in a contrary manner, it has, under contrary\ncircumstances, placed its existence in some _unholy spot_.\n\n     _This is the judgment of the gods, who hold Olympus._\n\n\"O thou young man,\" [know] \"that the person who has become more wicked,\n_departs to the more wicked souls;_ but he who has become better, to the\nbetter both in life and in all deaths, to do and suffer what is fitting\nfor the like.\"--\"Laws,\" bk. x. ch. xii. and xiii.]\n\n4. _Beyond all finite existences and secondary causes, all laws, ideas,\nand principles, there is an_ INTELLIGENCE _or_ MIND, _the First\nPrinciple of all Principles, the Supreme Idea on which all other ideas\nare grounded; the Monarch and Lawgiver of the universe, the ultimate\nSubstance from which all other things derive their being and essence,\nthe First and efficient Cause of all the order, and harmony, and beauty,\nand excellency, and goodness, which pervades the universe, who is called\nby way of pre-eminence and excellence the Supreme Good_, THE GOD (o\nTheos), \"_the God over all_,\" (o epi pasi Theos).\n\n_This_ SUPREME MIND,[619] Plato taught, is incorporeal,[620]\nunchangeable,[621] infinite,[622] absolutely perfect,[623] essentially\ngood,[624] unoriginated,[625] and eternal.[626] He is \"the Father, and\nArchitect, and Maker of the Universe,\"[627] \"the efficient Cause of all\nthings.\"[628] \"the Monarch and Ruler of the world,\"[629] \"the sovereign\nMind that orders all things, and pervades all things,\"[630] \"the sole\nPrinciple of all things,\"[631] and \"the Measure of all things,\"[632] He\nis \"the Beginning of all truth,\"[633] \"the Fountain of all law and\njustice,\"[634] \"the Source of all order and beauty,\"[635] \"the Cause of\nall good;\"[636] in short, \"he is the Beginning, the Middle, and End of\nall things.\"[637]\n\n[Footnote 619: \"Phaedo,\" Secs. 105-107.]\n\n[Footnote 620: Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives,\" bk. iii. ch. 77.]\n\n[Footnote 621: \"Republic,\" bk. ii. ch. xix.; \"Timaeus,\" ch. ix.]\n\n[Footnote 622: \"Apeleius,\" bk. i. ch. v.]\n\n[Footnote 623: \"Republic,\" bk. ii. ch. xx.]\n\n[Footnote 624: \"Timaeus,\" ch. x.; \"Republic,\" bk. ii. ch. xviii.]\n\n[Footnote 625: \"Timaeus,\" ch. ix.-x.]\n\n[Footnote 626: Ibid., ch. xii.]\n\n[Footnote 627: Ibid., ch. ix.]\n\n[Footnote 628: \"Phaedo,\" Sec. 105.]\n\n[Footnote 629: \"Laws,\" bk. x. ch. xii.; \"Republic,\" bk. vii. ch. iii.;\n\"Philebus,\" Sec. 50.]\n\n[Footnote 630: \"Philebus,\" Sec.51.]\n\n[Footnote 631: \"Republic,\" bk. vi. ch. xix.]\n\n[Footnote 632: \"Laws,\" bk. iv. ch. viii.]\n\n[Footnote 633: \"Republic,\" bk. ii. ch. xxi.]\n\n[Footnote 634: \"Laws,\" bk. iv. ch. vii.]\n\n[Footnote 635: \"Philebus,\" Sec. 51; \"Timaeus,\" ch. x.]\n\n[Footnote 636: \"Republic,\" bk. ii. ch. xviii.; \"Timaeus,\" ch. x.]\n\n[Footnote 637: \"Laws,\" bk. iv, ch. vii.]\n\nBeyond the sensible world, Plato conceived another world of\nintelligibles or _ideas_. These ideas are not, however, distinct and\nindependent existences. \"What general notions are to our own minds,\nideas are to the Supreme Reason (nous basileus); they are the _eternal\nthoughts_ of the Divine Intellect.\"[638] Ideas are not substances, they\nare qualities, and there must, therefore, be some ultimate substance or\nbeing to whom, as attributes, they belong. \"It must not be believed, as\nhas been taught, that Plato gave to ideas a substantial existence. When\nthey are not objects of pure conception for human reason, they are\nattributes of the Divine Reason. It is there they substantially\nexist.\"[639] These eternal laws and reasons of things indicate to us the\ncharacter of that Supreme Essence of essences, the Being of beings. He\nis not the simple aggregate of all laws, but he is the Author, and\nSustainer, and Substance of all laws. At the utmost summit of the\nintellectual world of Ideas blazes, with an eternal splendor, the idea\nof the _Supreme Good_ from which all others emanate.[640] This Supreme\nGood is \"far beyond all existence in dignity and power, and it is that\nfrom which all things else derive their being and essence.\"[641] The\nSupreme Good is not the truth, nor the intelligence; \"it is the Father\nof it.\" In the same manner as the sun, which is the visible image of the\ngood, reigns over the world, in that it illumes and vivifies it; so the\nSupreme Good, of which the sun is only the work, reigns over the\nintelligible world, in that it gives birth to it by virtue of its\ninexhaustible fruitfulness.[642] _The Supreme Good is_ GOD _himself_,\nand he is designated \"the good\" because this term seems most fittingly\nto express his essential character and essence.[643] It is towards this\nsuperlative perfection that the reason lifts itself; it is towards this\ninfinite beauty the heart aspires. \"Marvellous Beauty!\" exclaims Plato;\n\"eternal, uncreated, imperishable beauty, free from increase and\ndiminution... beauty which has nothing sensible, nothing corporeal, as\nhands or face: which does not reside in any being different from itself,\nin the earth, or the heavens, or in any other thing, but which exists\n_eternally and absolutely in itself, and by itself;_ beauty of which\nevery other beauty partakes, without their birth or destruction bringing\nto it the least increase or diminution.\"[644] The absolute being--God,\nis the last reason, the ultimate foundation, the complete ideal of all\nbeauty. God is, _par excellent_, the Beautiful.\n\n[Footnote 638: Thompson's \"Laws of Thought,\" p. 119.]\n\n[Footnote 639: Cousin, \"Lectures on the History of Philosophy,\" vol. i.\np. 415. \"There is no quintessential metaphysics which can prevail\nagainst common sense, and if such be the Platonic theory of ideas,\nAristotle was right in opposing it. But such a theory is only a chimera\nwhich Aristotle created for the purpose of combating it.\"--\"The True,\nthe Beautiful, and the Good,\" p. 77.]\n\n[Footnote 640: \"Republic,\" bk. vii. ch. iii.]\n\n[Footnote 641: \"Ibid.,\" bk. vi. ch. xviii. and xix.]\n\n[Footnote 642: \"Republic,\" bk. vii. ch. iii.]\n\n[Footnote 642: Ritter's \"History of Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. ii. p.\n275.]\n\n[Footnote 644: \"Banquet,\" Sec. 35. See Cousin, \"The True, the Beautiful,\nand the Good,\" Lecture IV., also Lecture VII. pp. 150-153; Denis,\n\"Histoire des Theories et Idees Morales dans l'Antiquite,\" vol. i. p.\n149.]\n\nGod is therefore, with Plato, _the First Principle of all Principles;_\nthe Divine energy or power is the _efficient cause_, the Divine beauty\nthe _formal cause_, and the Divine goodness the _final cause_ of all\nexistence.\n\n_The eternal unity of the principles of Order, Goodness, and Truth, in\nan ultimate reality--the_ ETERNAL MIND, is thus the fundamental\nprinciple which pervades the whole of the Platonic philosophy. And now,\nhaving attained this sublime elevation, he looks down from thence upon\nthe _sensible, the phenomenal world_, and upon _the temporal life of\nman;_ and in the light of this great principle he attempts to explain\ntheir meaning and purpose. The results he attained in the former case\nconstitute the Platonic _Physics_, in the latter, the Platonic _Ethics_.\n\nI. PLATONIC PHYSICS.\n\nFirmly believing in the absolute excellence of the Deity, and regarding\nthe Divine Goodness as the Final Cause of the universe, he pronounces\nthe physical world to be an _image_ of the perfection of God.\nAnaxagoras, no doubt, prepared the way for this theory. Every one who\nhas read the \"Phaedo,\" will remember the remarkable passage in which\nSocrates gives utterance to the disappointment which he had experienced\nwhen expecting from physical science an explanation of the universe.\n\"When I was young,\" he said--\"it is not to be told how eager I was about\nphysical inquiries, and curious to know _how the universe came to be as\nit is_; and when I heard that Anaxagoras was teaching that all was\narranged by _mind_, I was delighted with the prospect of hearing such a\ndoctrine unfolded; I thought to myself, if he teaches that mind made\nevery thing to be as it is, he will explain _how it is_ BEST _for it to\nbe_, and show that so it is.\" But Anaxagoras, it appears, lost sight of\nthis principle, and descended to the explanation of the universe by\nmaterial causes. \"Great was my hope,\" says Socrates, \"and equally great\nmy disappointment.\"[645]\n\n[Footnote 645: \"Phaedo,\" Secs. 105, 106.]\n\nPlato accepted this suggestion of Anaxagoras with all his peculiar\nearnestness, and devoted himself to its fuller development. It were a\nvain and profitless theory, which, whilst it assumed the existence of a\nSupreme Mind, did not represent that mind as operating in the universe\nby _design_, and as exhibiting his intelligence, and justice, and\ngoodness, as well as his power, in every thing. If it be granted that\nthere is a Supreme Mind, then, argued Plato, he must be regarded as \"the\nmeasure of all things,\" and all things must have been framed according\nto a plan or \"model\" which that mind supplied. Intelligence must be\nregarded as having a _purpose_, and as working towards an _end_, for it\nis this alone which distinguishes reason from unreason, and mind from\nmere unintelligent force. The only proper model which could be presented\nto the Supreme Intelligence is \"the eternal and unchangeable model\"[646]\nwhich his own perfection supplies, \"for he is the most excellent of\ncauses.\"[647] Thus God is not simply the maker of the universe, but the\nmodel of the universe, because he designed that it should be an IMAGE,\nin the sphere of sense, of his own perfections--a revelation of his\neternal beauty, and wisdom, and goodness, and truth. \"God was _good_,\nand being good, he desired that the universe should, as far as possible,\n_resemble_ himself.... Desiring that all things should be _good_, and,\nas far as might be, nothing evil, he took the fluctuating mass of things\nvisible, which had been in orderless confusion, and reduced it to\n_order_, considering this to be the _better_ state. Now it was and is\nutterly impossible for the supremely good to form any thing except that\nwhich is _most excellent_ (kalliston--most fair, most beautiful\").[648]\nThe object at which the supreme mind aimed being that which is \"_best_,\"\nwe must, in tracing his operations in the universe, always look for\n\"_the best_\" in every thing.[649] Starting out thus, upon the assumption\nthat the goodness of God is the final cause of the universe, Plato\nevolved a system of _optimism_.\n\nThe physical system of Plato being thus intended to illustrate a\nprinciple of optimism, the following results may be expected:\n\n1. That it will mainly concern itself with _final causes_. The universe\nbeing regarded chiefly, as indeed it is, an indication of the Divine\nIntelligence--every phenomenon will be contemplated in that light.\nNature is the volume in which the Deity reveals his own perfections; it\nis therefore to be studied solely with this motive, that we may learn\nfrom thence the perfection of God. The _Timaeus_ is a series of ingenious\nhypotheses designed to deepen and vivify our sense of the harmony, and\nsymmetry, and beauty of the universe, and, as a consequence, of the\nwisdom, and excellence, and goodness, of its Author.[650]\n\n[Footnote 646: \"Timaeus,\" ch. ix.]\n\n[Footnote 647: Ibid.]\n\n[Footnote 648: Ibid., ch. x.]\n\n[Footnote 649: Ibid., ch. xix.]\n\n[Footnote 650: \"Being is related to Becoming (the Absolute to the\nContingent) as Truth is to Belief; consequently we must not marvel\nshould we find it impossible to arrive at any certain and conclusive\nresults in our speculations upon the creation of the visible universe\nand its authors; it should be enough for us if the account we have to\ngive be as probable as any other, remembering that we are but men, and\ntherefore bound to acquiesce in merely probable results, without looking\nfor a higher degree of certainty than the subject admits of\"--\"Timaeus,\"\nch. ix.]\n\nWhatever physical truths were within the author's reach, took their\nplace in the general array: the vacancies were filled up with the best\nsuppositions admitted by the limited science of the time.[651] And it is\nworthy of remark that, whilst proceeding by this \"high _a priori_ road,\"\nhe made some startling guesses at the truth, and anticipated some of the\ndiscoveries of the modern inductive method, which proceeds simply by the\nobservation, comparison, and generalization of facts. Of these prophetic\nanticipations we may instance that of the definite proportions of\nchemistry,[652] the geometrical forms of crystallography,[653] the\ndoctrine of complementary colors,[654] and that grand principle that all\nthe highest laws of nature assume the form of a precise quantitative\nstatement.[655]\n\n2. It may be expected that a system of physics raised on optimistic\nprinciples will be _mathematical_ rather than experimental. \"Intended to\nembody conceptions of proportion and harmony, it will have recourse to\nthat department of science which deals with the proportions in space and\nnumber. Such applications of mathematical truths, not being raised on\nascertained facts, can only accidentally represent the real laws of the\nphysical system; they will, however, vivify the student's apprehension\nof harmony in the same manner as a happy parable, though not founded in\nreal history, will enliven his perceptions of moral truth.\"[656]\n\n[Footnote 651: Butler's \"Lectures on Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. ii. p.\n157.]\n\n[Footnote 652: \"Timaeus,\" ch. xxxi.]\n\n[Footnote 653: Ibid., ch. xxvii.]\n\n[Footnote 654: Ibid., ch. xlii.]\n\n[Footnote 655: \"It is Plato's merit to have discovered that the laws of\nthe physical universe are resolvable into numerical relations, and\ntherefore capable of being represented by mathematical\nformulae.\"--Butler's \"Lectures on Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. ii. p. 163.]\n\n[Footnote 656: Butler's \"Lectures on Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. ii. p.\n163.]\n\n3. Another peculiarity of such a system will be an impatience of every\nmerely _mechanical_ theory of the operations of nature.\n\n\"The psychology of Plato led him to recognize mind wherever there was\nmotion, and hence not only to require a Deity as first mover of the\nuniverse, but also to conceive the propriety of separate and subordinate\nagents attached to each of its parts, as principles of motion, no less\nthan intelligent directors. These agents were entitled '_gods_' by an\neasy figure, discernible even in the sacred language,[657] and which\nserved, besides, to accommodate philosophical hypotheses to the popular\nreligion. Plato, however, carefully distinguished between the sole,\nEternal Author of the Universe, on the one hand, and that 'soul,' vital\nand intelligent, which he attaches to the world, as well as the spheral\nintelligences, on the other. These 'subordinate deities,' though\nintrusted with a sort of deputed creation, were still only the deputies\nof the Supreme Framer and Director of all.\"[658] The \"gods\" of the\nPlatonic system are \"subordinate divinities,\" \"generated gods,\" brought\ninto existence by the will and wisdom of the Eternal Father and Maker of\nthe universe.[659] Even Jupiter, the governing divinity of the popular\nmythology, is a descendant from powers which are included in the\ncreation.[660] The offices they fulfill, and the relations they sustain\nto the Supreme Being, correspond to those of the \"angels\" of Christian\ntheology. They are the ministers of his providential government of the\nworld.[661]\n\n[Footnote 657: Psalm lxxxii. I; John x. 34.]\n\n[Footnote 658: Butler's \"Lectures on Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. ii. p.\n164.]\n\n[Footnote 659: \"Timaeus,\" ch. xv.]\n\n[Footnote 660: Ibid.]\n\n[Footnote 661: \"Laws,\" bk. x.]\n\nThe application of this fundamental conception of the Platonic\nsystem--_the eternal unity of the principles of Order, Goodness, and\nTruth in an ultimate reality, the Eternal Mind_--to the elucidation of\nthe _temporal life_ of man, yields, as a result--\n\nII. THE PLATONIC ETHICS.\n\nBelieving firmly that there are unchangeable, necessary, and absolute\nprinciples, which are the perfections of the Eternal Mind, Plato must,\nof course, have been a believer in an _immutable morality_. He held that\nthere is a rightness, a justice, an equity, not arbitrarily constituted\nby the Divine will or legislation, but founded in the nature of God, and\ntherefore eternal. The independence of the principles of morality upon\nthe mere will of the Supreme Governor is proclaimed in all his\nwritings.[662] The Divine will is the fountain of efficiency, the Divine\nreason, the fountain of law. God is no more the creator of _virtue_ than\nhe is the creator of _truth_.\n\nAnd inasmuch as man is a partaker of the Divine essence, and as the\nideas which dwell in the human reason are \"copies\" of those which dwell\nin the Divine reason, man may rise to the apprehension and recognition\nof the immutable and eternal principles of righteousness, and \"by\ncommunion with that which is Divine, and subject to the law of order,\nmay become himself a subject of order, and divine, so far as it is\npossible for man.\"[663]\n\n[Footnote 662: In \"Euthyphron\" especially.]\n\n[Footnote 663: \"Republic,\" bk. vi. ch. xiii.]\n\nThe attainment of this consummation is the grand purpose of the Platonic\nphilosophy. Its ultimate object is \"_the purification of the soul_,\" and\nits pervading spirit is the aspiration after perfection. The whole\nsystem of Plato has therefore an eminently _ethical_ character. It is a\nspeculative philosophy directed to a practical purpose.\n\nPhilosophy is the _love of wisdom_. Now wisdom (sophia) is expressly\ndeclared by Plato to belong alone to the Supreme Divinity,[664] who\nalone can contemplate reality in a direct and immediate manner, and in\nwhom, as Plato seems often to intimate, knowledge and being coincide.\nPhilosophy is the aspiration of the soul after this wisdom, this perfect\nand immutable truth, and in its realization it is a union with the\nPerfect Wisdom through the medium of a divine affection, the _love_ of\nwhich Plato so often speaks. The eternal and unchangeable Essence which\nis the proper object of philosophy is also endowed with _moral_\nattributes. He is not only \"the Being,\" but \"the Good\" (to agathon), and\nall in the system of the universe which can be the object of rational\ncontemplation, is an emanation from that goodness. The love of truth is\ntherefore the love of God, and the love of Good is the love of truth.\nPhilosophy and morality are thus coincident. Philosophy is the love of\nPerfect Wisdom; Perfect Wisdom and Perfect Goodness are identical; the\nPerfect Good is God; philosophy is the \"_Love of God_.\"[665] Ethically\nviewed, it is this one motive of _love_ for the Supreme Wisdom and\nGoodness, predominating over and purifying and assimilating every desire\nof the soul, and governing every movement of the man, raising man to a\nparticipation of and communion with Divinity, and restoring him to \"the\n_likeness_ of God.\" \"This flight,\" says Plato, \"consists in resembling\nGod (omoiosis Theo), and this resemblance is the becoming just and holy\nwith wisdom.\"[666] \"This assimilation to God is the enfranchisement of\nthe divine element of the soul. To approach to God as the substance of\ntruth is _Science_; as the substance of goodness in truth is _Wisdom_,\nand as the substance of Beauty in goodness and truth is _Love_.\"[667]\n\nThe two great principles which can be clearly traced as pervading the\nethical system of Plato are--\n\n1. _That no man is willingly evil_.[668]\n\n2. _That every man is endued with the power of producing changes in his\nmoral character_[669]\n\n[Footnote 664: \"Phaedrus,\" Sec. 145.]\n\n[Footnote 665: Butler's \"Lectures on Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. ii. p.\n61.]\n\n[Footnote 666: \"Theaetetus,\" Sec. 84.]\n\n[Footnote 667: Butler's \"Lectures on Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. ii. p.\n277.]\n\n[Footnote 668: \"Timaesus,\" ch. xlviii.]\n\n[Footnote 669: \"Laws,\" bk. v. ch. i., bk. ix. ch. vi., bk. x. ch. xii.]\n\nThe first of these principles is the counterpart ethical expression of\nhis theory of _immutable Being_. The second is the counterpart of his\ntheory of phenomenal change, or _mere Becoming_.\n\nThe soul of man is framed after the pattern of the immutable ideas of\nthe _just_, and the _true_, and the _good_, which dwell in the Eternal\nMind--that is, it is made in the image of God. The soul in its ultimate\nessence is formed of \"the immutable\" and \"the permanent.\" The presence\nof the ideas of the just, and the true, and the good in the reason of\nman, constitute him a moral nature; and it is impossible that he can\ncease to be a moral being, for these ideas, having a permanent and\nimmutable being, can not be changed. All the passions and affections of\nthe soul are merely phenomenal. They belong to the mortal, the\ntransitory life of man; they are in endless flow and change, and they\nhave no permanent reality. As phenomena, they must, however, have some\nground; and Plato found that ground in the mysterious, instinctive\nlonging for the _good_ and the _true_ which dwells in the very essence\nof the soul. These are the realities after which it strives, even when\npursuing pleasure, and honor, and wealth, and fame. All the restlessness\nof human life is prompted by a longing for the _good_. But man does not\nclearly perceive what the _good_ really is. The rational element of the\nsoul has become clouded by passion and ignorance, and suffered an\neclipse of its powers. Still, man longs for the good, and bears witness,\nby his restlessness and disquietude, that he instinctively desires it,\nand that he can find no rest and no satisfaction in any thing apart from\nthe knowledge and the participation of the Supreme, the Absolute Good.\n\nThis, then, is the meaning of the oft-repeated assertion of Plato \"_that\nno man is willingly evil_;\" viz., that no man deliberately chooses evil\nas evil. And Plato is, at the same time, careful to guard the doctrine\nfrom misconception. He readily grants that acts of wrong are\ndistinguished as voluntary and involuntary, without which there could be\nneither merit nor demerit, reward nor punishment.[670] But still he\ninsists that no man chooses evil in and by itself. He may choose it\nvoluntarily as a means, but he does not choose it as an end. Every\nvolition, by its essential nature, pursues, at least, an _apparent_\ngood; because the end of volition is not the immediate act, but the\nobject for the sake of which the act is undertaken.[671]\n\n[Footnote 670: \"Laws,\" bk. ix. ch. vi.]\n\n[Footnote 671: \"Gorgias,\" Secs. 52, 53.]\n\nHow is it, then, it may be asked, that men become evil? The answer of\nPlato is, that the soul has in it a principle of change, in the power of\nregulating the desires--in indulging them to excess, or moderating them\naccording to the demands of reason. The circumstances in which the soul\nis placed, as connected with the sensible world by means of the body,\npresent an occasion for the exercise of that power, the end of this\ntemporal connection being to establish a state of moral discipline and\nprobation. The humors and distempers of the body likewise deprave,\ndisorder, and discompose the soul.[672] \"Pleasures and pains are unduly\nmagnified; the democracy of the passions prevails; and the ascendency of\nreason is cast down.\" Bad forms of civil government corrupt social\nmanners, evil education effects the ruin of the soul. Thus the soul is\nchanged--is fallen from what it was when first it came from the\nCreator's hand. But the eternal Ideas are not utterly effaced, the image\nof God is not entirely lost. The soul may yet be restored by remedial\nmeasures. It may be purified by knowledge, by truth, by expiations, by\nsufferings, and by prayers. The utmost, however, that man can hope to do\nin this life is insufficient to fully restore the image of God, and\ndeath must complete the final emancipation of the rational element from\nthe bondage of the flesh. Life is thus a discipline and a preparation\nfor another state of being, and death the final entrance there.[673]\n\n[Footnote 672: \"Gorgias,\" Secs. 74-76.]\n\n[Footnote 673: \"Phaedo,\" Secs. 130, 131.]\n\nIndependent of all other considerations, virtue is, therefore, to be\npursued as the true good of the soul. Wisdom, Fortitude, Temperance,\nJustice, the four cardinal virtues of the Platonic system, are to be\ncultivated as the means of securing the purification and perfection of\nthe inner man. And the ordinary pleasures, \"the lesser goods\" of life,\nare only to be so far pursued as they are subservient to, and compatible\nwith, the higher and holier duty of striving after \"the resemblance to\nGod.\"\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XII.\n\nTHE PHILOSOPHERS OF ATHENS (_continued_).\n\nTHE SOCRATIC SCHOOL (_continued_).\n\nARISTOTLE.\n\n\nAristotle was born at Stagira, a Greek colony of Thrace, B.C. 384. His\nfather, Nicomachus, was a physician in the Court of Amyntas II., King of\nMacedonia, and is reported to have written several works on Medicine and\nNatural History. From his father, Aristotle seems to have inherited a\nlove for the natural sciences, which was fostered by the circumstances\nwhich surrounded him in early life, and which exerted a determining\ninfluence upon the studies of his riper years.\n\nImpelled by an insatiate desire for knowledge, he, at seventeen years of\nage, repaired to Athens, the city of Plato and the university of the\nworld. Plato was then absent in Sicily; on his return Aristotle entered\nhis school, became an ardent student of philosophy, and remained until\nthe death of Plato, B.C. 348. He therefore listened to the instructions\nof Plato for twenty years.\n\nThe mental characteristics of the pupil and the teacher were strikingly\ndissimilar. Plato was poetic, ideal, and in some degree mystical.\nAristotle was prosaic, systematic, and practical. Plato was intuitive\nand synthetical. Aristotle was logical and analytical. It was therefore\nbut natural that, to the mind of Aristotle, there should appear\nsomething confused, irregular, and incomplete in the discourses of his\nmaster. There was a strange commingling of questions concerning the\ngrounds of morality, and statements concerning the nature of science; of\ninquiries concerning \"real being,\" and speculations on the ordering of a\nmodel Republic, in the same discourse. Ethics, politics, ontology, and\ntheology, are all comprised in his Dialectic, which is, in fact, the one\ngrand \"science of the idea of the good.\" Now to the mind of Aristotle it\nseemed better, and much more systematic, that these questions should be\nseparated, and referred to particular heads; and, above all, that they\nshould be thoroughly discussed in an exact and settled terminology. To\narrange and classify all the objects of knowledge, to discuss them\nsystematically and, as far as possible, exhaustively, was evidently the\nambition, perhaps also the special function, of Aristotle. He would\nsurvey the entire field of human knowledge; he would study nature as\nwell as humanity, matter as well as mind, language as well as thought;\nhe would define the proper limits of each department of study, and\npresent a regular statement of the facts and principles of each science.\nAnd, in fact, he was the first who really separated the different\nsciences and erected them into distinct systems, each resting upon its\nown proper principles. He distributed philosophy into three\nbranches:--(i.) _Theoretic_; (ii.) _Efficient_; (iii.) _Practical_. The\nTheoretic he divided into--1. _Physics_; _2. Mathematics_; 3.\n_Theology_, or the Prime Philosophy--the science known in modern times\nas Metaphysics. The Efficient embraces what we now term the arts,--1.\n_Logic; 2. Rhetoric_; 3. _Poetics_. The Practical comprises--_1.\nEthics_; 2. _Politics_. On all these subjects he wrote separate\ntreatises. Thus, whilst Plato is the genius of abstraction, Aristotle is\neminently the genius of classification.\n\nSuch being the mental characteristics of the two men--their type of mind\nso opposite--we are prepared to expect that, in pursuing his inquiries,\nAristotle would develop a different _Organon_ from that of Plato, and\nthat the teachings of Aristotle will give a new direction to philosophic\nthought.\n\nARISTOTELIAN ORGANON.\n\nPlato made use of psychological and logical analysis in order to draw\nfrom the depth of consciousness certain fundamental ideas which are\ninherent in the mind--born with it, and not derived from sense or\nexperience. These ideas he designates \"the intelligible species\" (ta\nnooumena gene) as opposed to \"the visible species\"--the objects of\nsense. Such ideas or principles being found, he uses them as\n\"starting-points\" from which he may pass beyond the sensible world and\nascend to \"the absolute,\" that is, to God.[674] Having thus, by\nimmediate abstraction, attained to universal and necessary ideas, he\ndescends to the outer world, and attempts by these ideas to construct an\nintellectual theory of the universe.[675]\n\nAristotle will reverse this process. He will commence with _sensation_,\nand proceed, by induction, from the known to the unknown.\n\nThe repetition of sensations produces _recollection_, recollection\n_experience_, and experience produces _science_.[676] \"Science and art\nresult unto men by means of experience....\" \"Art comes into being when,\nfrom a number of experiences, one universal opinion is evolved, which\nwill embrace all similar cases. For example, if you know that a certain\nremedy has cured Callias of a certain disease, and that the same remedy\nhas produced the same effect on Socrates and on several other persons,\nthat is _Experience_; but to know that a certain remedy will cure all\npersons attacked with that disease, is _Art_. Experience is a knowledge\nof individual things (ton kathekasta); art is that of universals (ton\nkatholou).\"[677]\n\n[Footnote 674: \"Republic,\" bk. vi. ch. xx.]\n\n[Footnote 675: \"Timaeus,\" ch. ix.]\n\n[Footnote 676: \"Metaphysics,\" bk. i. ch. i.]\n\n[Footnote 677: Ibid.]\n\nDisregarding the Platonic notion of the unity of all Being in the\nabsolute idea, he fixed his immediate attention on the manifoldness of\nthe phenomenal, and by a classification of all the objects of experience\nhe sought to attain to \"general notions.\" Concentrating all his\nattention on the individual, the contingent, the particular, he ascends,\nby induction, from the particular to the _general_; and then, by a\nstrange paralogism, \"the _universal_\" is confounded with \"the _general_\"\nor, by a species of logical sleight-of-hand, the general is transmuted\ninto the universal. Thus \"induction is the pathway from particulars to\nuniversals.\"[678] But how universal and necessary principles can be\nobtained by a generalization of limited experiences is not explained by\nAristotle. The experiences of a lifetime, the experiences of the whole\nrace, are finite and limited, and a generalization of these can only\ngive the finite, the limited, and at most, the general, but not the\nuniversal.\n\n[Footnote 679: \"Topics,\" bk. i. ch. xii.; \"Ethics,\" bk. vi. ch. iii.]\n\nAristotle admits, however, that there are ideas or principles in the\nmind which can not be explained by experience, and we are therefore\nentitled to an answer to the question--how are these obtained? \"Sensible\nexperience gives us what is _here_, _there_, _now_, in such and such a\nmanner, but it is impossible for it to give what is _everywhere_ and _at\nall times_.\"[680] He tells us further, that \"science is a conception of\nthe mind engaged in universals, and in those things which exist of\nnecessity, and since there are _principles of things demonstrable and of\nevery science_ (for science is joined with reason), it will be neither\nscience, nor art, nor prudence, which discovers the principles of\nscience;... it must therefore be (nous) pure intellect,\" or the\nintuitive reason.[681] He also characterizes these principles as\n_self-evident_. \"First truths are those which obtain belief, not through\nothers, but through themselves, as there is no necessity to investigate\nthe '_why_' in scientific principles, but each principle ought to be\ncredible by itself.\"[682] They are also _necessary_ and _eternal_.\n\"Demonstrative science is from necessary principles, and those which are\n_per se_ inherent, are necessarily so in things.\"[683] \"We have all a\nconception of that which can not subsist otherwise than it does.... The\nobject of science has a necessary existence, therefore it is _eternal_.\nFor those things which exist in themselves, by necessity, are all\neternal.\"[684] But whilst Aristotle admits that there are \"immutable and\nfirst principles,\"[685] which are not derived from sense and\nexperience--\"principles which are the foundation of all science and\ndemonstration, but which are themselves indemonstrable,\"[686] because\nself-evident, necessary, and eternal; yet he furnishes no proper account\nof their genesis and development in the human mind, neither does he\nattempt their enumeration. At one time he makes the intellect itself\ntheir source, at another he derives them from sense, experience, and\ninduction. This is the defect, if not the inconsistency, of his\nmethod.[687]\n\n[Footnote 680: \"Post. Analytic,\" bk. i. ch. xxxi.]\n\n[Footnote 681: \"Ethics,\" bk. vi. ch. vi.]\n\n[Footnote 682: \"Topics,\" bk. i. ch. i.]\n\n[Footnote 683: \"Post. Analytic,\" bk. i. ch. vi.]\n\n[Footnote 684: \"Ethics,\" bk. vi. ch. iii.]\n\n[Footnote 685: Ibid., bk. vi. ch. xi.]\n\n[Footnote 686: \"Post. Analytic,\" bk. i. ch. iii.]\n\n[Footnote 687: Hamilton attempts the following mode of reconciling the\ncontradictory positions of Aristotle:\n\n\"On the supposition of the mind virtually containing, antecedent to all\nexperience, certain universal principles of knowledge, in the form of\ncertain necessities of thinking; still it is only by repeated and\ncomparative experiments that we compass the certainty; on the one hand,\nthat such and such cognitions can not but be thought as necessary,\nnative generalities; and, on the other, that such and such cognitions\nmay or may not be thought, and are, therefore, as contingent, factitious\ngeneralizations. To this process of experiment, analysis, and\nclassification, through which we attain to a scientific knowledge of\nprinciples, it might be shown that Aristotle, not improperly, applies\nthe term _Induction_.\"--\"Philosophy,\" p. 88.]\n\nThe human mind, he tells us, has two kinds of intelligence--the\n_passive_ intelligence (nous pathetikos), which is the receptacle of\nforms (dectikon tou eidous); and the _active_ intelligence (nous\npoietikos), which impresses the seal of thought upon the data furnished\nby experience, and combines them into the unity of a single judgment,\nthus attaining \"general notions.\"[688] The passive intelligence (the\n\"external perception\" of modern psychology) perceives the individual\nforms which appear in the external world, and the active intelligence\n(the intellect proper) classifies and generalizes according to fixed\nlaws or principles inherent in itself; but of these fixed laws--prota\nnoemata--first thoughts, or _a priori_ ideas, he offers no proper\naccount; they are, at most, purely subjective. This, it would seem, was,\nin effect, a return to the doctrine of Protagoras and his school, \"that\nman--the individual--is the measure of all things.\" The aspects under\nwhich objects present themselves in consciousness, constitute our only\nground of knowledge; we have no direct, intuitive knowledge of Being _in\nse_. The noetic faculty is simply a _regulative_ faculty; it furnishes\nthe laws under which we compare and judge, but it does not supply any\noriginal elements of knowledge. Individual things are the only real\nentities,[689] and \"universals\" have no separate existence apart from\nindividuals in which they inhere as attributes or properties. They are\nconsequently pure mental conceptions, which are fixed and recalled by\ngeneral names. He thus substitutes a species of conceptual-nominalism in\nplace of the realism of Plato. It is true that \"real being\" (to on) is\nwith Aristotle a subject of metaphysical inquiry, but the proper, if not\nthe only subsistence, or ouaia, is the form or abstract nature of\nthings. \"The essence or very nature of a thing is inherent in the _form_\nand _energy_\"[690] The science of Metaphysics is strictly conversant\nabout these abstract intellectual forms just as Natural Philosophy is\nconversant about external objects, of which the senses give us\ninformation. Our knowledge of these intellectual forms is, however,\nfounded upon \"beliefs\" rather than upon immediate intuition, and the\nobjective certainty of science, upon the subjective necessity of\nbelieving, and not upon direct apperception.\n\n[Footnote 688: \"On the Soul,\" ch. vi.; \"Ethics,\" bk. vi. ch. i.]\n\n[Footnote 689: \"Metaphysics,\" bk. vi. ch. xiii.]\n\n[Footnote 690: Ibid., bk. vii. ch. iii.]\n\nThe points of contrast between the two methods may now be presented in a\nfew sentences. Plato held that all our cognitions are reducible to two\nelements--one derived from _sense_, the other from _pure reason_; one\nelement particular, contingent, and relative, the other universal,\nnecessary, and absolute. By an act of _immediate abstraction_ Plato will\neliminate the particular, contingent, and relative phenomena, and\ndisengage the universal, necessary, and absolute _ideas_ which underlie\nand determine all phenomena. These ideas are the thoughts of the Divine\nMind, according to which all particular and individual existences are\ngenerated, and, as divine thoughts, they are real and permanent\nexistences. Thus by a process of immediate abstraction, he will rise\nfrom particular and contingent phenomena to universal and necessary\nprinciples, and from these to the First Principle of all principles, the\nFirst Cause of all causes--that is, to _God_.\n\nAristotle, on the contrary, held that all of our knowledge begins with\n\"the singular,\" that is, with the particular and the relative, and is\nderived from sensation and experience. The \"sensible object,\" taken as\nit is without any sifting and probing, is the basis of science, and\nreason is simply the architect constructing science according to certain\n\"forms\" or laws inherent in mind. The object, then, of metaphysical\nscience is to investigate those \"universal notions\" under which the mind\nconceives of and represents to itself external objects, and speculates\nconcerning them. Aristotle, therefore, agrees with Plato in teaching\n\"that science can only be a science of universals,\"[691] and \"that\nsensation alone can not furnish us with scientific knowledge.\"[692] How,\nthen, does he propose to attain the knowledge of universal principles?\nHow will he perform that feat which he calls \"passing from the known to\nthe unknown?\" The answer is, by _comparative abstraction_. The universal\nbeing constituted by a relation of the object to the thinking subject,\nthat is, by a property recognized by the intelligence alone, in virtue\nof which it can be retained as an object of thought, and compared with\nother objects, he proposes to _compare, analyze, define,_ and _classify_\nthe primary cognitions, and thus evoke into energy, and clearly present\nthose principles or forms of the intelligence which he denominate\n\"universals.\" As yet, however, he has only attained to \"general\nnotions,\" which are purely subjective, that is, to logical definitions,\nand these logical definitions are subsequently elevated to the dignity\nof \"universal principles and causes\" by a species of philosophic\nlegerdemain. Philosophy is thus stripped of its metaphysical character,\nand assumes a strictly _logical_ aspect. The key of the Aristotelian\nmethod is therefore the\n\nARISTOTELIAN LOGIC.\n\nPure Logic is the science of the formal laws of thought. Its office is\nto ascertain the rules or conditions under which the mind, by its own\nconstitution, reasons and discourses. The office of Applied Logic--of\nlogic as an art--is \"to form and judge of conclusions, and, through\nconclusions, to establish proof. The conclusions, however, arise from\npropositions, and the propositions from conceptions.\" It is chiefly\nunder the latter aspect that logic is treated by Aristotle. According to\nthis natural point of view he has divided the contents of the logical\nand dialectic teaching in the different treatises of the _Organon_.\n\n[Footnote 691: \"Ethics,\" bk. vi. ch. vi.]\n\n[Footnote 692: \"Post. Analytic,\" bk. i. ch. xxxi.]\n\nThe first treatise is the \"_Categories_\" or \"Predicaments\"--a work which\ntreats of the universal determinations of Being. It is a classification\nof all our mental conceptions. As a matter of fact, the mind forms\nnotions or conceptions about those natures and essences of things which\npresent an outward image to the senses, or those, equally real, which\nutter themselves to the mind. These may be defined and classified; there\nmay be general conceptions to which all particular conceptions are\nreferable. This classification has been attempted by Aristotle, and as\nthe result we have the ten \"Categories\" of _Substance, Quantity,\nQuality, Relation, Time, Place, Position, Possession, Action, Passion_.\nHe does not pretend that this classification is complete, but he held\nthese \"Predicaments\" to be the most universal expressions for the\nvarious relations of things, under some one of which every thing might\nbe reduced.\n\nThe second treatise, \"_On Interpretation_,\" investigates language as the\nexpression of thought; and inasmuch as a true or false thought must be\nexpressed by the union or separation of a subject and a predicate, he\ndeems it necessary to discuss the parts of speech--the general term and\nthe verb--and the modes of affirmation and denial. In this treatise he\ndevelops the nature and limitations of propositions, the meaning of\ncontraries and contradictions, and the force of affirmations and denials\nin _possible, contingent_, and _necessary_ matter.\n\nThe third are the \"_Analytics_,\" which show how conclusions are to be\nreferred back to their principles, and arranged in the order of their\nprecedence.\n\nThe First or Prior Analytic presents the universal doctrine of the\nSyllogism, its principles and forms, and teaches how must reason, if we\nwould not violate the laws of our own mind. The theory of reasoning,\ngenerally, with a view to accurate demonstration, depends upon the\nconstruction of a perfect syllogism, which is defined as \"a discourse in\nwhich, certain things being laid down, something else different from the\npremises necessarily results, in consequence of their existence.\"[693]\nConclusions are, according to their own contents and end, either\n_Apodeictic_, which deal with necessary and demonstrable matter, or\n_Dialectic_, which deal with probable matter, or _Sophistical_, which\nare imperfect in matter or form, and announced, deceptively, as correct\nconclusions, when they are not. The doctrine of Apodeictic conclusions\nis given in the \"_Posterior Analytic_,\" that of Dialectic conclusions in\nthe \"_Topics_,\" and that of the Sophistical in the \"_Sophistical\nElenchi_.\"\n\nNow, if Logic is of any value as an instrument for the discovery of\ntruth, the attainment of certitude, it must teach us not only how to\ndeduce conclusions from premises, but it must certify to us the validity\nof the principles from whence we reason and this is attempted by\nAristotle in the Posterior Analytic. This treatise opens with the\nfollowing statement: All doctrine, and all intellectual discipline,\narises from a prior or pre-existent knowledge. This is evident, if we\nsurvey them all; for both mathematical sciences, and also each of the\narts, are obtained in this manner. The same holds true in the case of\nreasonings, whether through [deductive] _Syllogism_ or through\n_Induction_, for both accomplish the instruction they afford from\ninformation previously known--the former (syllogistic reasoning)\nreceiving it, as it were, from the traditions of the intelligent, the\nlatter (inductive reasoning) manifesting the universal through the light\nof the singular.[694] Induction and Syllogism are thus the grand\ninstruments of logic.[695]\n\n[Footnote 693: \"Prior Analytic,\" bk. i. ch. i.; \"Topics,\" bk. i. ch. i.]\n\n[Footnote 694: \"Post. Analytic,\" bk. i. ch. i.]\n\n[Footnote 695: \"We believe all things through syllogism, or from\ninduction.\"--\"Prior Analytic,\" bk. ii. ch. xxiii.]\n\nBoth these processes are based upon an _anterior_ knowledge.\nDemonstrative science must be from things true, first, immediate, more\nknown than, prior to, and the causes of, the conclusion, for thus there\nwill be the appropriate first principles of whatever is\ndemonstrated.[696] The first principles of demonstration, the material\nof thought, must, consequently, be supplied by some power or faculty of\nthe mind other than that which is engaged in generalization and\ndeductive reasoning. Whence, then, is this \"anterior knowledge\" derived,\nand what tests or criteria have we of its validity?\n\n1. In regard to deductive or syllogistic reasoning, the views of\nAristotle are very distinctly expressed.\n\nSyllogistic reasoning \"proceeds from generals to particulars.\"[697] The\ngeneral must therefore be supplied as the foundation of the deductive\nreasoning. Whence, then, is this knowledge of \"the general\" derived? The\nanswer of Aristotle is that the universal major proposition, out of\nwhich the conclusion of the syllogism is drawn, _is itself necessarily\nthe conclusion of a previous induction, and mediately or immediately an\ninference_--a collection from individual objects of sensation or of\nself-consciousness. \"Now,\" says he, \"demonstration is from universals,\nbut induction from particulars. It is impossible, however, to\ninvestigate universals except through induction, since things which are\nsaid to be from abstraction will be known only by induction.\"[698] It is\nthus clear that Aristotle makes _deduction necessarily dependent upon\ninduction_. He maintains that the highest or most universal principles\nwhich constitute the primary and immediate propositions of the former\nare furnished by the latter.\n\n[Footnote 696: \"Post. Analytic,\" bk. i. ch. ii.]\n\n[Footnote 697: Ibid., bk. i. ch. xviii.; \"Ethics,\" bk. vi. ch. iii.]\n\n[Footnote 698: \"Post. Analytic,\" bk. i. ch. xviii.]\n\n2. General principles being thus furnished by induction, we may now\ninquire whence, according to Aristotle, are the materials for induction\nderived? What is the character of that \"anterior knowledge\" which is the\nbasis of the inductive process?\n\nInduction, says Aristotle, is \"the progression from singulars to\nuniversals.\"[699] It is an illation of the universal from the singular\nas legitimated by the laws of thought. All knowledge, therefore, begins\nwith singulars--that is, with individual objects. And inasmuch as all\nknowledge begins with \"individual objects,\" and as the individual is\nconstantly regarded by Aristotle as the \"object of sense,\" it is claimed\nthat his doctrine is that all knowledge is derived from _sensation_, and\nthat science and art result to man (_solely_) by means of _experience._\nHe is thus placed at the head of the empirical school of philosophy, as\nPlato is placed at the head of the ideal school.\n\n[Footnote 699: \"Post. Analytic,\" bk. i. ch. xviii.]\n\nThis classification, however, is based upon a very superficial\nacquaintance with the philosophy of Aristotle as a whole. The practice,\nso commonly resorted to, of determining the character of the\nAristotelian philosophy by the light of one or two passages quoted from\nhis \"Metaphysics,\" is unjust both to Aristotle and to the history of\nphilosophic thought. We can not expect to attain a correct understanding\nof the views of Aristotle concerning the sources and grounds of all\nknowledge without some attention to his psychology. A careful study of\nhis writings will show that the terms \"sensation\" (aisthesis) and\n\"experience\" (empeira) are employed in a much more comprehensive sense\nthan is usual in modern philosophic writings.\n\n\"Sensation,\" in its lowest form, is defined by Aristotle as \"an\nexcitation of the soul through the body,\"[700] and, in its higher form,\nas the excitation of the soul by any object of knowledge. In this latter\nform it is used by him as synonymous with \"intuition,\" and embraces all\nimmediate intuitive perceptions, whether of sense, consciousness, or\nreason. \"The universe is derived from particulars, therefore we ought to\nhave a sensible perception (aisthesis) of these; and this is intellect\n(nous).\"[701] Intelligence proper, the faculty of first principles, is,\nin certain respects, a sense, because it is the source of a class of\ntruths which, like the perceptions of the senses, are immediately\nrevealed as facts to be received upon their own evidence. It thus\nanswers to the \"sensus communis\" of Cicero, and the \"Common Sense\" of\nthe Scottish school. Under this aspect, \"Sense is equal to or has the\nforce of Science.\"[702] The term \"Experience\" is also used to denote,\nnot merely the perception and remembrance of the impressions which\nexternal objects make upon the mind, but as co-extensive with the whole\ncontents of consciousness--all that the mind _does_ of its own native\nenergy, as well as all that it _suffers_ from without. It is evidently\nused in the Posterior Analytic (bk. ii. ch. xix.) to describe the whole\nprocess by which the knowledge of universals is obtained. \"From\nexperience, or from every universal remaining in the soul, the\nprinciples of art and science arise.\" The office of experience is \"to\nfurnish the principles of every science\"[703]--that is, to evoke them\ninto energy in the mind. 'Experience thus seems to be a thing almost\nsimilar to science and art.[704] In the most general sense, \"sensation\"\nwould thus appear to be the immediate perception or intuition of facts\nand principles, and \"experience\" the operation of the mind upon these\nfacts and principles, elaborating them into scientific form according to\nits own inherent laws. The \"experience\" of Aristotle is analogous to the\n\"reflection\" of Locke.\n\n[Footnote 700: \"De Somn.,\" bk. i.]\n\n[Footnote 701: \"Ethics,\" bk. vi. ch. xi.; see also ch. vi.]\n\n[Footnote 702: \"De Cen. Anim.\"]\n\n[Footnote 703: \"Prior Analytic,\" bk. i. ch. xix.]\n\n[Footnote 704: \"Metaphysics,\" bk. i. ch. i.]\n\nSo much being premised, we proceed to remark that there is a distinction\nperpetually recurring in the writings of Aristotle between the elements\nor first principles of knowledge which are \"clearest in their own\nnature\" and those which \"are clearest to our perception.\"[705] The\ncauses or principles of knowledge \"are _prior_ and _more known_ to us in\ntwo ways, for what is prior in nature is not the same as that which is\nprior to us, nor that which is more known (simply in itself) the same as\nthat which is more known to us. Now I call things prior and more known\nto us, those which are _nearer to sense_; and things prior and more\nknown simply in themselves, those which are _remote from sense_; and\nthose things are most remote which are especially _universal_, and those\nnearest which are _singular_; and these are mutually opposed.\"[706] Here\nwe have a distribution of the first or prior elements of knowledge into\ntwo fundamentally opposite classes.\n\n(i.) _The immediate or intuitive perceptions of sense,_\n\n(ii.) _The immediate or intuitive apperceptions of pure reason,_\n\n[Footnote 705: \"Ethics,\" bk. i. ch. iv.; \"Metaphysics,\" bk. ii. ch. i.;\n\"Rhetoric,\" bk. i. ch. ii.; \"Prior Analytic,\" bk. ii. ch. xxiii.]\n\n[Footnote 706: \"Post. Analytic,\" bk. i. ch. ii.]\n\nThe objects of sense-perception are external, individual, \"nearest to\nsense,\" and occasionally or contingently present to sense. The objects\nof the intellect are inward, universal, and the essential property of\nthe soul. They are \"remote from sense,\" \"prior by nature;\" they are\n\"forms\" essentially inherent in the soul previous to experience; and it\nis the office of experience to bring them forward into the light of\nconsciousness, or, in the language of Aristotle, \"to evoke them from\npotentiality into actuality.\" And further, from the \"prior\" and\nimmediate intuitions of sense and intellect, all our secondary, our\nscientific and practical knowledge is drawn by logical processes.\n\nThe Aristotelian distribution of the intellectual faculties corresponds\nfully to this division of the objects of knowledge. The human intellect\nis divided by Aristotle into,\n\n1. The Passive or Receptive Intellect (nous paphetikos).--Its office is\nthe reception of sensible impressions or images (Phantasmata) and their\nretention in the mind (myeme). These sensible forms or images are\nessentially immaterial. \"Each sensoriurn (aistheteron) is receptive of\nthe sensible quality _without the matter_, and hence when the sensibles\nthemselves are absent, sensations and phantasikos remain.\"[707]\n\n[Footnote 707: \"De Anima,\" bk. iii. ch. ii.]\n\n2. The Active or Creative Intellect (nous pointikos).--This is the power\nor faculty which, by its own inherent power, impresses \"form\" upon the\nmaterial of thought supplied by sense-perception, exactly as the First\nCause combines it, in the universe, with the recipient matter.\n\n\"It is necessary,\" says Aristotle, \"that these two modes should be\nopposed to each other, as matter is opposed to form, and to all that\ngives form. The receptive reason, which is as matter, becomes all things\nby receiving their forms. The creative reason gives existence to all\nthings, as light calls color into being. The creative reason transcends\nthe body, being capable of separation from it, and from all things; it\nis an everlasting existence, incapable of being mingled with matter, or\naffected by it; prior, and subsequent to the individual mind. The\nreceptive reason is necessary to individual thought, but it is\nperishable, and by its decay all memory, and therefore individuality, is\nlost to the higher and immortal reason.\"[708]\n\nThis \"Active or Creative Intellect\" is again further subdivided, by\nAristotle--\n\n1. The _Scientific_ (epistemonikon) part--the \"virtue,\" faculty, or\n\"habit of principles.\" He also designates it as the \"place of\nprinciples,\" and further defines it as the power \"which apprehends those\nexistences whose principles can not be otherwise than they are\"--that\nis, self-evident, immutable, and necessary truths[709]--the _intuitive\nreason_.\n\n2. The _Reasoning_ (logistikon) part--the power by which we draw\nconclusions from premises, and \"contemplate contingent matter\"[710]--the\n_discursive reason_.\n\nThe correlatives _noetic_ and _dianoetic_, says Hamilton, would afford\nthe best philosophic designation of these two faculties; the knowledge\nattained by the former is an \"intuitive principle\"--a truth at first\nhand; that obtained by the latter is a \"demonstrative proposition\"--a\ntruth at second hand.\n\nThe preceding notices of the psychology of Aristotle will aid us\nmaterially in interpreting his remarks \"_Upon the Method and Habits\nnecessary to the ascertainment of Principles_.\"[711]\n\n[Footnote 708: \"De Anima,\" bk. iii. ch. v.]\n\n[Footnote 709: \"Ethics,\" bk. vi. ch. i.]\n\n[Footnote 710: Ibid.]\n\n[Footnote 711: \"Post. Analytic,\" bk. ii, ch. xix., the concluding\nchapter of the Organon.]\n\n\"That it is impossible to have scientific knowledge through\ndemonstration without a knowledge of first immediate principles, has\nbeen elucidated before.\" This being established, he proceeds to explain\nhow that \"knowledge of first, immediate principles\" is developed in the\nmind.\n\n1. The knowledge of first principles is attained by the _intuition of\nsense_--the immediate perception of external objects, as the _exciting_\nor _occasional cause_ of their development in the mind.\n\n\"Now there appears inherent in all animals an innate power called\n_sensible perception_ (aisthesis); but sense being inherent, in some\nanimals a permanency of the sensible object is engendered, but in others\nit is not engendered. Those, therefore, wherein the sensible object does\nnot remain have no knowledge without sensible perception, but others,\nwhen they perceive, retain one certain thing in the soul,... with some,\n_reason_ is produced from the permanency (of the sensible impression),\n[as in man], but in others it is not [as in the brute]. From sense,\ntherefore, as we say, memory is produced, and from the repeated\nremembrance of the same thing we get experience.... From experience, or\n_from every universal remaining in the soul_--the one besides the many\nwhich in all of them is _one_ and the _same_--the principles of art and\nscience arise. If experience is conversant with generation, the\nprinciples of art; if with being, the principles of science.... Let us\nagain explain: When one thing without difference abides, there is then\nthe first universal (notion) [developed] in the soul; for the singular\nindeed is perceived by sense, _but sense is [also] of the\nuniversal_\"--that is, the universal is immanent in the sensible object\nas a property giving it \"form.\" \"It is manifest, then, that primary\nthings become necessarily known by induction, for thus sensible\nperception produces [develops or evokes] the _universal_.\" 2. The\nknowledge of first principles is attained by the _intuition of pure\nintellect_ (nous)--that is, \"_intellect itself is the principle of\nscience_\" or, in other words, intellect is the _efficient, essential\ncause_ of the knowledge of first principles.\n\n\"Of those habits which are about intellect by which we ascertain truth,\n_some[712] are always true_, but others[713] admit the false, as opinion\nand reasoning. But science and (pure) intellect are always true, and no\nother kind of knowledge, except intellect [intellectual intuition], is\nmore accurate than science. And since the principles of demonstration\nare more known, and all science is connected with reason, there could\nnot be a science of principles. But since nothing can be more true than\nscience, except intellect, intellect will belong to principles. From\nthese [considerations] it is evident that, as demonstration is not the\nprinciple of demonstration, so neither is science the principle of\nscience. If, then, we have no other true genus (of habit) besides\nscience, _intellect will be the principle of science_; it will also be\nthe principle (or cause of the knowledge) of the principle.\"\n\n[Footnote 712: The \"noetic.\"]\n\n[Footnote 713: The \"dianaetic.\"]\n\nThe doctrine of Aristotle regarding \"first principles\" may perhaps be\nsummed up as follows: All demonstrative science is based upon\n_universals_ \"prior in nature\"--that is, upon _a priori_, self-evident,\nnecessary, and immutable principles. Our knowledge of these \"first and\nimmediate principles\" is dependent primarily on _intellect_ (nous) or\nintuitive reason, and secondarily on sense, experience, and induction.\nPrior to experience, the intellect contains these principles in itself\npotentially, as \"forms,\" \"laws,\" \"habitudes,\" or \"predicaments\" of\nthought; but they can not be \"evoked into energy,\" can not be revealed\nin consciousness, except on condition of experience, and they can only\nbe scientifically developed by logical abstraction and definition. The\nultimate ground of all truth and certainty is thus a mode of our own\nmind, a subjective necessity of thinking, and truth is not in things,\nbut in our own minds.[714] \"Ultimate knowledge, as well as primary\nknowledge, the most perfect knowledge which the philosopher can attain,\nas well as the point from which he starts, is still a proposition. All\nknowledge seems to be included under two forms--knowledge _that_ it is\nso; knowledge _why_ it is so. Neither of these can, of course, include\nthe knowledge at which Plato is aiming--knowledge which is correlated\nwith Being--a knowledge, not _about_ things or persons, but _of_\nthem.\"[715]\n\n[Footnote 714: \"Metaphysics,\" bk. v. ch. iv.]\n\n[Footnote 715: Maurice's \"Ancient Philosophy,\" p. 190.]\n\nARISTOTELIAN THEOLOGY\n\nTheoretical philosophy, \"the science which has truth for its end,\" is\ndivided by Aristotle into Physics, Mathematics, and Theology, or the\nFirst Philosophy, now commonly known as \"Metaphysics,\" because it is\nbeyond or above physics, and is concerned with the primitive ground and\ncause of all things.[716]\n\nIn the former two we have now no immediate interest, but with Theology,\nas \"the science of the Divine,\"[717] the _First Moving Cause_, which is\nthe source of all other causes, and the original ground of all other\nthings, we are specially concerned, inasmuch as our object is to\ndetermine, if possible, whether Greek philosophy exerted any influence\nupon Christian thought, and has bequeathed any valuable results to the\nTheology of modern times.\n\n\"The Metaphysics\" of Aristotle opens by an enumeration of \"the\nprinciples or causes\"[718] into which all existences can be resolved by\nphilosophical analysis. This enumeration is at present to be regarded as\nprovisional, and in part hypothetical--a verbal generalization of the\ndifferent principles which seem to be demanded to explain the existence\nof a thing, or constitute it what it is. These he sets down as--\n\n[Footnote 716: \"Physics are concerned with things which have a principle\nof motion in themselves; mathematics speculate on permanent, but not\ntranscendental and self-existent things; and there is another science\nseparate from these two, which treats of that which is immutable and\ntranscendental, if indeed there exists such a substance, as we shall\nendeavor to show that there does. This transcendental and permanent\nsubstance, if it exist at all, must surely be the sphere of the\n_divine_--it must be the first and highest principle. Hence it follows\nthat there are three kinds of speculative science--Physics, Mathematics,\nand Theology.\"--\"Metaphysics,\" bk. x. ch. vii.]\n\n[Footnote 717: \"Metaphysics,\" bk. i. ch. ii.]\n\n[Footnote 718: Aition--cause--is here used by Aristotle in the sense of\n\"account of\" or \"reason why.\"]\n\n1. The Material Cause (ten ylen kai to ypokeimenon)--the matter and\nsubject--that _out of_ which a given thing has been originated. \"From\nthe analogy which this principle has to wood or stone, or any actual\nmatter out of which a work of nature or of art is produced, the name\n'material' is assigned to this class.\" It does not always necessarily\nmean \"matter\" in the now common use of the term, but \"antecedents--that\nis, principles whose inherence and priority is implied in any existing\nthing, as, for example, the premises of a syllogism, which are the\nmaterial cause of the conclusion.\"[719] With Aristotle there is,\ntherefore, \"matter as an object of sense,\" and \"matter as an object of\nthought.\"\n\n2. The Formal Cause (Ten ausian kai to ti einai)--the being or abstract\nessence of a thing--that primary nature on which all its properties\ndepend. To this Aristotle gave the name of eidos--the form or exemplar\n_according to_ which a thing is produced.\n\n3. The Moving or Efficient Cause (othen e arche tes kineseos)--the\norigin and principle of motion--that _by which_ a thing is produced.\n\n4. The Final Cause (to ou eneken kai to agathon)--the good end answered\nby the existence of any thing--that for the sake of which_ any thing is\nproduced--the eneka tou, or reason for it.[720] Thus, for instance, in a\nhouse, the wood out of which it is produced is the _matter (yle), the\nidea or conception according to which it is produced is _the form_\n(eidos morphe), the builder who erects the house is the _efficient_\ncause, and the reason for its production, or the end of its existence is\nthe _final_ cause.\n\n[Footnote 719: Encyclopaedia Britannica, article \"Aristotle;\" \"Post.\nAnalytic,\" bk. ii. ch. xi.]\n\n[Footnote 720: \"Metaphysics,\" bk. i. ch. iii.]\n\nCauses are, therefore, the elements into which the mind resolves its\nfirst rough conception of an object. That object is what it is, by\nreason of the matter out of which it sprang, the moving cause which gave\nit birth, the idea or form which it realizes, and the end or object\nwhich it attains. The knowledge of a thing implies knowing it from these\nfour points of view--that is, knowing its four causes or principles.\n\nThese four determinations of being are, on a further and closer\nanalysis, resolved into the fundamental antithesis of MATTER and FORM.\n\n\"All things that are produced,\" says Aristotle,[721] \"are produced from\nsomething (that is, from _matter_), by something (that is, _form_), and\nbecome something (the totality--to synolon);\" as, for example, a statue,\na plant, a man. To every subject there belongs, therefore, first,\n_matter_ (yle); secondly, _form_ (morphe). The synthesis of these two\nproduces and constitutes _substance_, or ousia. Matter and form are thus\nthe two grand causes or principles whence proceed all things. The\nformative cause is, at the same time, the moving cause and the final\ncause; for it is evidently the element of determination which impresses\nmovement upon matter whilst determining it; and it is also the end of\nbeing, since being only really exists when it has passed from an\nindeterminate to a determinate state.\n\n[Footnote 721: \"Metaphysics,\" bk. vi. ch. vii.]\n\nIn proof that the eidos or form is an _efficient_ principle operating in\nevery object, which makes it, to our conception, what it is, Aristotle\nbrings forward the subject of generation or production.[722] There are\nthree modes of production--natural, artificial, and automatic. In\nnatural production we discern at once a matter; indeed Nature, in the\nlargest sense, may be defined as \"that out of which things are\nproduced.\" Now the result formed out of this matter or nature is a given\nsubstance--a vegetable, a beast, or a man. But what is the _producing_\ncause in each case? Clearly something akin to the result. A man\ngenerates a man, a plant produces another plant like to itself. There\nis, therefore, implied in the resulting thing a _productive force_\ndistinct from matter, upon which it works. And this is the eidos, or\nform. Let us now consider artificial production. Here again the form is\nthe producing power. And this is in the soul. The art of the physician\nis the eidos, which produces actual health; the plan of the architect is\nthe conception, which produces an actual house. Here, however, a\ndistinction arises. In these artificial productions there is supposed a\nnoesis and a poiesis. The noesis is the previous conception which the\narchitect forms in his own mind; the poiesis is the actual creation of\nthe house out of the given matter. In this case the conception is the\nmoving cause of the production. The form of the statue in the mind of\nthe artist is the motive or cause of the movement by which the statue is\nproduced; and health must be in the thought of the physician before it\ncan become the moving cause of the healing art. Moreover, that which is\ntrue of artificial production or change is also true of spontaneous\nproduction. For example, a cure may take place by the application of\nwarmth, and this result is accomplished by means of friction. This\nwarmth in the body is either itself a portion of health, or something is\nconsequent upon it which is like itself, which is a portion of health.\nEvidently this implies the previous presence either of nature or of an\nartificer. It is also clearly evident that this kind of generating\ninfluence (the automatic) should combine with another. There must be a\nproductive power, and there must be something out of which it is\nproduced. In this case, then, there will be a yle and an eidos.[723]\n\n[Footnote 722: Ibid.]\n\n[Footnote 723: Maurice's \"Ancient Philosophy,\" pp. 205, 206.]\n\nFrom the above it appears that the _efficient_ cause is regarded by\nAristotle as identical with the _formal_ cause. So also the _final_\ncause--the end for the sake of which any thing exists--can hardly be\nseparated from the perfection of that thing, that is, from its\nconception or form. The desire for the end gives the first impulse of\nmotion; thus the final cause of any thing becomes identical with the\ngood of that thing. \"The moving cause of the house is the builder, but\nthe moving cause of the builder is the end to be attained--that is, the\nhouse.\" From such examples as these it would seem that the\ndeterminations of form and end are considered by Aristotle as one, in so\nfar as both are merged in the conception of _actuality_; for he regarded\nthe end of every thing to be its completed being--the perfect\nrealization of its idea or form. The only fundamental determinations,\ntherefore, which can not be wholly resolved into each other are _matter\nand form_.[724]\n\n[Footnote 724: Schwegler's \"History of Philosophy,\" pp. 120, 123.]\n\nThe opposition of matter and form, with Aristotle, corresponds to the\nopposition between the element of _generality_ and the element of\n_particularity_. Matter is indeterminate; form is determinate. Matter,\nabstracted from form, in thought, is entirely without predicate and\ndistinction; form is that which enters into the definition of every\nsubject, and without which it could not be defined. Matter is capable of\nthe widest diversity of forms, but is itself without form. Pure form is,\nin fact, that which is without matter, or, in other words, it is the\npure conception of being. Matter is the necessary condition of the\nexistence of a thing; form is the essence of each thing, that in virtue\nof which substance is possible, and without which it is inconceivable.\nOn the one side is passivity, possibility of existence, capacity of\naction; on the other side is activity, actuality, thought. The unity of\nthese two in the realm of determined being constitutes every individual\nsubstance. The relation of matter and form, logically apprehended, is\nthus the relation of POTENTIALITY and ACTUALITY.\n\nThis is a further and indeed a most important step in the Aristotelian\ntheology. Matter, as we have seen, after all, amounts to merely capacity\nfor action, and if we can not discover some productive power to develop\npotentiality into actuality, we look in vain for some explanation of the\nphenomena around us. The discovery, however, of energy (energeia), as a\nprinciple of this description, is precisely what we wanted, and a\nmomentary glance at the actual phenomena will show its perfect identity\nwith the eidos, or form.[725] \"For instance, what is a calm? It is\nevenness in the surface of the sea. Here the sea is the subject, that\nis, the matter in _capacity_, but the evenness is the _energy_ or\nactuality;... energy is thus as form.\"[726] The form (or idea) is thus\nan energy or actuality (energeia); the matter is a capacity or\npotentiality (dynamis), requiring the co-operation of the energy to\nproduce a result.\n\nThese terms, which are first employed by Aristotle in their\nphilosophical signification, are characteristic of his whole system. It\nis, therefore, important we should grasp their precise philosophical\nimport; and this can only be done by considering them in the strictest\nrelation to each other. It is in this relation they are defined by\nAristotle. \"Now energeia is the existence of a thing not in the sense of\nits potentially existing. The term _potentially_ we use, for instance,\nof the statue in the block, and of the half in the whole (since it may\nbe subtracted), and of a person knowing a thing, even when he is not\nthinking of it, but might be so; whereas energeia is the opposite. By\napplying the various instances our meaning will be plain, and one must\nnot seek a definition in each case, but rather grasp the conception of\nthe analogy as a whole,--that it is as that which builds to that which\nhas a capacity for building; as the waking to the sleeping; as that\nwhich sees to that which has sight, but whose eyes are closed; as the\ndefinite form to the shapeless matter; as the complete to the\nunaccomplished. In this contrast, let the energeia be set off as forming\nthe one side, and on the other let the potential stand. Things are said\nto be in energeia not always in like manner (except so far as there is\nan analogy, that as this thing is in this, and related to this, so is\nthat in that, or related to that); for sometimes it implies _motion_ as\nopposed to the _capacity of motion_, and sometimes _complete existence_\nopposed to _undeveloped matter_\".[727] As the term dynamis has the\ndouble meaning of \"_possibility of existence_\" as well as \"_capacity of\naction_\" so there is the double contrast of \"_action_\" as opposed to the\ncapacity of action; and \"_actual existence_\" opposed to possible\nexistence or potentiality. To express accurately this latter antithesis,\nAristotle introduced the term entelecheia[728]--entelechy, of which the\nmost natural account is that it is a compound of en telei echein--\"being\nin a state of perfection.\"[729] This term, however, rarely occurs in the\n\"Metaphysics,\" whilst energeia is everywhere employed, not only to\nexpress activity as opposed to passivity, but complete existence as\nopposed to undeveloped matter.\n\n[Footnote 725: \"That which Aristotle calls 'form' is not to be\nconfounded with what we may perhaps call shape [or figure]; a hand\nsevered from the arm, for instance, has still the outward shape of a\nhand, but, according to Aristotelian apprehension, it is only a hand now\nas to matter, and not as to form; an actual hand, a hand as to form, is\nonly that which can do the proper work of a hand.\"--Schwegler's \"History\nof Philosophy,\" p. 122.]\n\n[Footnote 726: \"Metaphysics,\" bk. vii. ch. ii.]\n\n[Footnote 727: \"Metaphysics,\" bk. viii. ch. vi.]\n\n[Footnote 728: \"Entelechy indicates the perfected act, the completely\nactual.\"--Schw.]\n\n[Footnote 729: Grant's Aristotle's \"Ethics,\" vol. i. p. 184.]\n\n\"In Physics dynamis answers to the necessary conditions for the\nexistence of any thing before that thing exists. It thus corresponds to\nyle, both to the prote yle--the first matter, or matter devoid of all\nqualities, which is capable of becoming any definite substance, as, for\nexample, marble; and also to the eschate yle--or matter capable of\nreceiving form, as marble the form of the statue.\" Marble then exists\npotentially in the simple elements before it is marble. The statue\nexists potentially in the marble before it is carved. All objects of\nthought exist, either purely in potentiality, or purely in actuality, or\nboth in potentiality and in actuality. This division makes an entire\nchain of all existence. At the one end is matter, the prote yle which\nhas a merely potential existence, which is necessary as a condition, but\nwhich having no form and no qualities, is totally incapable of being\nrealized by the mind. At the other end of the chain is pure form, which\nis not at all matter, the absolute and the unconditioned, the eternal\nsubstance and energy without matter (ousia aldios kai energeia aneu\ndynameos), who can not be thought as non-existing--the self-existent\nGod. Between these two extremes is the whole row of creatures, which out\nof potentiality evermore spring into actual being.[730]\n\n[Footnote 730: Id., ib., vol. i. p. 185.]\n\nThe relation of actuality to potentiality is the subject of an extended\nand elaborate discussion in book viii., the general results of which may\nbe summed up in the following propositions:\n\n1. _The relation of Actuality to Potentiality is as the Perfect to the\nImperfect_.--The progress from potentiality to actuality is motion or\nproduction (kinesis or genesis). But this motion is transitional, and in\nitself imperfect--it tends towards an end, but does not include the end\nin itself. But actuality, if it implies motion, has an end in itself and\nfor itself; it is a motion desirable for its own sake.[731] The relation\nof the potential to the actual Aristotle exhibits by the relation of the\nunfinished to the finished work, of the unemployed builder to the one at\nwork upon his building, of the seed-corn to the tree, of the man who has\nthe capacity to think, to the man actually engaged in thought.[732]\nPotentially the seed-corn is the tree, but the grown-up tree is the\nactuality; the potential philosopher is he who is not at this moment in\na philosophic condition; indeed, every thing is potential which\npossesses a principle of development, or of change. Actuality or\nentelechy, on the other hand, indicates the _perfect act_, the end\ngained, the completed actual; that activity in which the act and the\ncompleteness of the act fall together--as, for example, to see, to\nthink, where the acting and the completed act are one and the same.\n\n2. _The Relation of Actuality to Potentiality is a causal Relation_.--A\nthing which is endued with a simple capacity of being may nevertheless\nnot actually exist, and a thing may have a capacity of being and really\nexist. Since this is the case, there must ensue between non-being and\nreal being some such principle as _energy_, in order to account for the\ntransition or change.[733] Energy has here some analogy to motion,\nthough it must not be confounded with motion. Now you can not predicate\neither motion or energy of things which are not. The moment energy is\nadded to them they are. This transition from potentiality to actuality\nmust be through the medium of such principles as propension or _free\nwill_, because propension or free will possess in themselves the power\nof originating motion in other things.[734]\n\n[Footnote 731: \"Metaphysics,\" bk. viii. ch. vi.]\n\n[Footnote 732: Ibid., bk. viii. ch. vi.]\n\n[Footnote 733: Ibid., bk. viii. ch. iii.]\n\n[Footnote 734: Ibid., bk. viii. ch. v.]\n\n3. _The Relation of Actuality and Potentiality is a Relation of\nPriority_.--Actuality, says Aristotle, is prior to potentiality in the\norder of reason, in the order of substance, and also (though not\ninvariably) in the order of time. The first of all capacities is a\ncapacity of energizing or assuming a state of activity; for example, a\nman who has the capacity of building is one who is skilled in building,\nand thus able to use his energy in the art of building.[735] The primary\nenergizing power must precede that which receives the impression of it,\nForm being older than Matter. But if you take the case of any particular\nperson or thing, we say that its capacity of being that particular\nperson or thing precedes its being so actually. Yet, though this is the\ncase in each particular thing, there is always a foregone energy\npresumed in some other thing (as a prior seed, plant, man) to which it\nowes its existence. One pregnant thought presents itself in the course\nof the discussion which has a direct bearing upon our subject. [Dynamis]\nhas been previously defined as \"a principle of motion or change in\nanother thing in so far forth as it is another thing\"[736]--that is, it\nis fitted by nature to have motion imparted to it, and to communicate\nmotion to something else. But this motion wants a resting-place. There\ncan be no infinite regression of causes. There is some primary [dynamis]\npresupposed in all others, which is the beginning of change. This is\n[Greek: physis], or nature. But the first and original cause of all\nmotion and change still precedes and surpasses nature. The final cause\nof all potentiality is energy or _actuality_. The one proposed is prior\nto the means through which the end is accomplished. A process of\nactualization, a tendency towards completeness or perfection ([Greek:\ntelos]) presupposes an absolute actuality which is at once its beginning\nand end. \"One energy is invariably antecedent to another in time, up to\nthat which is primarily and eternally the Moving Cause.\"[737]\n\n[Footnote 735: \"Metaphysics,\" bk. viii. ch. viii.]\n\n[Footnote 736: Ibid., bk. iv. ch. xii.]\n\n[Footnote 737: Ibid., bk. viii. ch. viii.]\n\nAnd now having laid down these fundamental principles of metaphysical\nscience, as preparatory to Theology, Aristotle proceeds to establish the\nconception of the Absolute or Divine Spirit _as the eternal, immutable\nSubstance, the immaterial Energy, the unchangeable Form of Forms, the\nfirst moving Cause_.\n\nI. _The Ontological Form of Proof_.--It is necessary to conceive an\neternal and immutable substance--an actuality which is absolute and\nprior, both logically and chronologically, to all potentiality; for that\nwhich is potential is simply contingent, it may just as easily not be as\nbe; that which exists only in capacity is temporal and corruptible, and\nmay cease to be. Matter we know subsists merely in capacity and\npassivity, and without the operation of Energy,(energeia), or the\nformative cause, would be to us as non-entity. The phenomena of the\nworld exhibits to us the presence of Energy, and energy presupposes the\nexistence of an eternal substance. Furthermore, matter and potentiality\nare convertible terms, therefore the primal Energy or Actuality must be\n_immaterial_.[738]\n\n2. _The Cosmological Form of Proof_.--It is impossible that there should\nbe _motion_, genesis, or a chain of causes, except on the assumption of\na first Moving Cause, since that which exists only in capacity can not,\nof itself energize, and consequently without a principle of motion which\nis essentially active, we have only a principle of immobility. The\nprinciple \"ex nihilo nihil\" forbids us to assume that motion can arise\nout of immobility, being out of non-being. \"How can matter be put in\nmotion if nothing that subsists in energy exist, and is its cause?\" All\nbecoming, therefore, necessarily supposes that which has not become,\nthat which is eternally self-active as the principle and cause of all\nmotion. There is no refuge from the notion that all things are \"born of\nnight and nothingness\" except in this belief.[739]\n\n[Footnote 738: \"Metaphysics,\" bk. xi. ch. vi.]\n\n[Footnote 739: Ibid., bk. xi. ch. vii., viii.]\n\nThe existence of an eternal principle subsisting in energy is also\ndemanded to explain the _order_ of the world. \"For how, let me ask, will\nthere prevail _order_ on the supposition that there is no subsistence of\nthat which is eternal, and which involves a separable existence, and is\npermanent.\"[740] \"All things in nature are constituted in the best\npossible manner.\"[741] All things strive after \"the good.\" \"The\nappearance of ends and means in nature is a proof of design.\"[742] Now\nan end or final cause presupposes intelligence,--implies a _mind_ to see\nand desire it. That which is \"fair,\" \"beautiful,\" \"good,\" an \"object of\ndesire,\" can only be perceived by Mind. The \"final cause\" must therefore\nsubsist in that which is prior and immovable and eternal; and _Mind_ is\n\"that substance which subsists absolutely, and according to\nenergy.\"[743] \"The First Mover of all things, moves all things without\nbeing moved, being an eternal substance and energy; and he moves all\nthings as the object of reason and of desire, or love.\"[744]\n\n[Footnote 740: Ibid., bk. x. ch. ii.]\n\n[Footnote 741: \"Ethics,\" bk. i. ch. ix.]\n\n[Footnote 742: \"Nat. Ausc.,\" bk. ii. ch. viii.]\n\n[Footnote 743: \"Metaphysics,\" bk. xi. ch. vii.]\n\n[Footnote 744: Ibid.]\n\n3. _The Moral Form of Proof_.--So far as the relation of potentiality\nand actuality is identical with the relation of matter and form, the\nargument for the existence of God may be thus presented: The conception\nof an absolute matter without form, involves the supposition of an\nabsolute form without matter. And since the conception of form resolves\nitself into _motion_, _conception_, _purpose_ or _end_, so the Eternal\nOne is the absolute principle of motion (the proton kinoun), the\nabsolute conception or pure intelligence (the pure ti en einai), and the\nabsolute ground, reason, or end of all being. All the other predicates\nof the First Cause follow from the above principles with logical\nnecessity.\n\n(i.) _He is, of course, pure intellect_, because he is absolutely\nimmaterial and free from nature. He is active intelligence, because his\nessence is pure actuality. He is self-contemplating and self-conscious\nintelligence, because the divine thought can not attain its actuality in\nany thing extrinsic; it would depend on something else than self--some\npotential existence for its actualization. Hence the famous definition\nof the absolute as \"the thought of thought\" (noesis noeseos).[745] \"And\ntherefore the first and actual perception by mind of Mind itself, doth\nsubsist in this way throughout all eternity.\"[746]\n\n[Footnote 745: Schwegler's \"History of Philosophy,\" p. 125.]\n\n[Footnote 746: \"Metaphysics,\" bk. xi. ch. ix.]\n\n(ii.) _He is also essential life_. \"The principle of life is inherent in\nthe Deity, for the energy or active exercise of mind constitutes life,\nand God constitutes this energy; and essential energy belongs to God as\nhis best and everlasting life. Now our statement is this--that the Deity\nis a living being that is everlasting and most excellent in nature, so\nthat with the Deity life and duration are uninterrupted and eternal; for\nthis constitutes the essence of God.\"[747]\n\n(iii.) _Unity belongs to him_, since multiplicity implies matter; and\nthe highest idea or form of the world must be absolutely\nimmaterial.[748] The Divine nature is \"devoid of parts and indivisible,\nfor magnitude can not in any way involve this Divine nature; for God\nimparts motion through infinite duration, and nothing finite--as\nmagnitude is--can be possessed of an infinite capacity.\"[749]\n\n(iv.) _He is immovable and ever abideth the same_; since otherwise he\ncould not be the absolute mover, and the cause of all becoming, if he\nwere subject to change.[750] God is impassive and unalterable ([Greek:\napathes kai analloioton]); for all such notions as are involved in\npassion or alteration are outside the sphere of the Divine\nexistence.[751]\n\n[Footnote 747: \"Metaphysics,\" bk. xi. ch. vii.]\n\n[Footnote 748: Ibid.]\n\n[Footnote 749: Ibid.]\n\n[Footnote 750: Ibid., bk. xi. ch. viii.]\n\n[Footnote 751: Ibid., bk. xi. ch. vii.]\n\n(v.) _He is the ever-blessed God_.--\"The life of God is of a kind with\nthose highest moods which, with us, last a brief space, it being\nimpossible they should be permanent; whereas, with Him they are\npermanent, since His ever-present consciousness is pleasure itself. And\nit is because they are vivid states of consciousness, that waking, and\nperception, and thought, are the sweetest of all things. Now essential\nperception is the perception of that which is most excellent,... and the\nmind perceives itself by participating of its own object of perception;\nbut it is a sort of coalescence of both that, in the Divine Mind,\ncreates a regular identity between the two, so that with God both (the\nthinker and the thought, the subject and object) are the same. In\npossession of this prerogative, He subsists in the exercise of energy;\nand the contemplation of his own perfections is what, to God, must be\nmost agreeable and excellent. This condition of existence, after so\nexcellent a manner, is what is \"so astonishing to us when we examine\nGod's nature, and the more we do so the more wonderful that nature\nappears to us. The mood of the Divine existence is essential energy,\nand, as such, it is a life that is most excellent, blessed, and\neverlasting.[752]\n\n[Footnote 752: \"Metaphysics,\" bk. xi. ch. vii.]\n\nThe theology of Aristotle may be summed up in the following sentences\nselected from book xi. of his \"Metaphysics:\"\n\n\"This motionless cause of motion is a necessary being; and, by virtue of\nsuch necessity, is the all-perfect being. This all-pervading principle\npenetrates heaven and all nature. It eternally possesses perfect\nhappiness; and its happiness is in action. This primal mover is\nimmaterial; for its essence is in energy. It is pure thought--thought\nthinking itself--the thought of thought. The activity of pure\nintelligence--such is the perfect, eternal life of God. This primal\ncause of change, this absolute perfection, moves the world by the\nuniversal desire for the absolute good, by the attraction exercised upon\nit by the Eternal Mind--the serene energy of Divine Intelligence.\"\n\nIt can not be denied that, so far as it goes, this conception of the\nDeity is admirable, worthy, and just. Viewed from a Christian\nstand-point, we at once concede that it is essentially defective. There\nis no clear and distinct recognition of God as Creator and Governor of\nthe universe; he is chiefly regarded as the Life of the universe--the\nIntellect, the Energy--that which gives excellence, and perfection, and\ngladness to the whole system of things. The Theology of Aristotle is, in\nfact, metaphysical rather than practical. He does not contemplate the\nDeity as a moral Governor. Whilst Plato speaks of \"being made like God\nthrough becoming just and holy,\" Aristotle asserts that \"all moral\nvirtues are totally unworthy of being ascribed to God.\"[753] He is not\nthe God of providence. He dwells alone, supremely indifferent to human\ncares, and interests, and sorrows. He takes no cognizance of individual\nmen, and holds no intercourse with man. The God of Aristotle is not a\nbeing that meets and satisfies the wants of the human heart, however\nwell it may meet the demands of the reason.\n\n[Footnote 753: \"Ethics,\" bk. x. ch. viii.]\n\nMorality has no basis in the Divine nature, no eternal type in the\nperfections and government of God, and no supports and aids from above.\nThe theology of Aristotle foreshadows the character of the\n\nARISTOTELIAN ETHICS.\n\nWe do not find in Aristotle any distinct recognition of an eternal and\nimmutable morality, an absolute right, which has its foundation in the\nnature of God. Plato had taught that there was \"an absolute Good, above\nand beyond all existence in dignity and power;\" which is, in fact, \"the\ncause of all existence and all knowledge,\" and which is God; that all\nother things are good in proportion as they \"partake of this absolute\nGood;\" and that all men are so far good as they \"resemble God.\" But with\nthis position Aristotle joins issue. After stating the doctrine of Plato\nin the following words--\"Some have thought that, besides all these\nmanifold goods upon earth, there is some _absolute good_, which is the\ncause to all these of their being good\"--he proceeds to criticise that\nidea, and concludes his argument by saying--\"we must dismiss the idea at\npresent, for if there is any one good, universal and generic, or\ntranscendental and absolute, it obviously can never be realized nor\npossessed by man; whereas something of this latter kind is what we are\ninquiring after.\" He follows up these remarks by saying that \"Perhaps\nthe knowledge of the idea may be regarded by some as useful, as a\npattern (paradeigma) by which to judge of relative good.\" Against this\nhe argues that \"There is no trace of the arts making use of any such\nconception; the cobbler, the carpenter, the physician, and the general,\nall pursue their vocations without respect to the _absolute good_, nor\nis it easy to see how they would be benefited by apprehending it.\"[754]\nThe good after which Aristotle would inquire is, therefore, a _relative\ngood_, since the knowledge of the absolute good can not possibly be\nrealized.\n\n[Footnote 754: \"Ethics,\" bk. i. ch. vi.]\n\nInstead, therefore, of seeking to attain to \"a transcendental and\nabsolute good \"--a fundamental idea of right, which may be useful as a\nparadigm by which we may judge of relative good, he addresses himself\nsolely to the question, \"what is good for man\"--what is the good\nattainable in action? And having identified the Chief Good with the\nfinal and perfect end of all action, the great question of the _Ethics_\nis, \"_What is the end of human action?_\" (ti esti to ton prakton\nteloa).[755]\n\n[Footnote 755: \"Ethics,\" bk. i. ch. xiii.]\n\nNow an end or final cause implies an intelligence--implies a mind to\nperceive and desire it. This is distinctly recognized by Aristotle. The\nquestion, therefore, naturally arises--is that end fixed for man by a\nhigher intelligence, and does it exist for man both as an idea and as an\nideal? Can man, first, intellectually apprehend the idea, and then\nconsciously strive after its realization? Is it the duty of man to aim\nat fulfilling the purposes of his Creator? To this it may be answered\nthat Aristotle is not at all explicit as to God's moral government of\nthe world. \"Moral government,\" in the now common acceptation of the\nterm, has no place in the system of Aristotle, and the idea of \"duty\" is\nscarcely recognized. He considers \"the good\" chiefly in relation to the\nconstitution and natural condition of man. \"_It is_\" says he, \"_the end\ntowards which nature tends_.\" As physical things strive unconsciously\nafter the end of their existence, so man strives after the good\nattainable in life. Socrates had identified virtue and knowledge, he had\ntaught that \"virtue is a Science.\" Aristotle contended that virtue is an\nart, like music and architecture, which must be attained by exercise. It\nis not purely intellectual, it is the bloom of the physical, which has\nbecome ethical. As the flower of the field, obeying the laws of its\norganization, springs up, blooms, and attains its own peculiar\nperfection, so there is an instinctive desire (orexis) in the soul which\nat first unconsciously yearns after the good, and subsequently the good\nis sought with full moral intent and insight. Aristotle assumes that the\ndesires or instincts of man are so framed as to imply the existence of\nthis end (telos).[756] And he asserts that man can only realize it in\nthe sphere of his own proper functions, and in accordance with the laws\nof his own proper nature and its harmonious development.[757] It is not,\nthen, through instruction, or through the perfection of knowledge, that\nman is to attain the good, but through exercise and habit (ephos). By\npractice of moral acts we become virtuous, just as by practice of\nbuilding and of music, we become architects and musicians; for the\nhabit, which is the ground of moral character, is only a fruit of\noft-repeated moral acts. Hence it is by these three things--nature,\nhabit, reason--that men become good.\n\n[Footnote 756: Ibid, bk. i. ch. ii.]\n\n[Footnote 757: \"Ethics,\" bk. i. ch. vii.]\n\nAristotle's question, therefore, is, _What is the chief good for man as\nman_? not what is his chief good as a spiritual and an immortal being?\nor what is his chief good as a being related to and dependent upon God?\nAnd the conclusion at which he arrives is, that it is _the absolute\nsatisfaction of our whole nature_--that which men are agreed in calling\n_happiness_. This happiness, however, is not mere sensual pleasure. The\nbrute shares this in common with man, therefore it can not constitute\nthe happiness of man. Human happiness must express the completeness of\nrational existence. And inasmuch as intelligence is essential activity,\nas the soul is the _entelechy_ of the body, therefore the happiness of\nman can not consist in a mere passive condition. It must, therefore,\nconsist in _perfect activity_ in well-doing, and especially in\ncontemplative thought,[758] or as Aristotle defines it--\"_It is a\nperfect practical activity in a perfect life_.\"[759] His conception of\nthe chief good has thus two sides, one internal, that which exists in\nand for the consciousness--a \"complete and perfect life,\" the other\nexternal and practical. The latter, however, is a means to the former.\nThat complete and perfect life is the complete satisfaction and\nperfection of our rational nature. It is a state of peace which is the\ncrown of exertion. It is the realization of the divine in man, and\nconstitutes the absolute and all-sufficient happiness.[760] A good\naction is thus an End-in-itself (teleion telos) inasmuch as it secures\nthe _perfection_ of our nature; it is that for the sake of which our\nmoral faculties before existed, hence bringing an inward pleasure and\nsatisfaction with it; something in which the mind can rest and fully\nacquiesce; something which can be pronounced beautiful, fitting,\nhonorable, and perfect.\n\n[Footnote 758: \"If it be true to say that happiness consists in doing\nwell, a life of action must be best both for the state and the\nindividual. But we need not, as some do, suppose that a life of action\nimplies relation to others, or that those only are active thoughts which\nare concerned with the results of action; but far rather we must\nconsider those speculations and thoughts to be so which have their _end\nin themselves_, and which are for their own sake.\"--\"Politics,\" bk. vii.\nch. iii.]\n\n[Footnote 759: \"Ethics,\" bk. i. ch. x.]\n\n[Footnote 760: \"Ethics,\" bk. x. ch. viii.]\n\nFrom what has been already stated, it will be seen that the Aristotelian\nconception of _Virtue_ is not conformity to an absolute and immutable\nstandard of right. It is defined by him as _the observation of the right\nmean (mesotes) in action_--that is, the right mean relatively to\nourselves. \"Virtue is a habit deliberately choosing, existing as a mean\n(meson) which refers to us, and is defined by reason, and as a prudent\nman would define it; and it is a mean between two evils, the one\nconsisting in excess, the other in defect; and further, it is a mean, in\nthat one of these falls short of, and the other exceeds, what is right\nboth in passions and actions; and that virtue both finds and chooses the\nmean.\"[761] The perfection of an action thus consists in its containing\nthe right degree--the true mean between too much, and too little. The\nlaw of the mesotes is illustrated by the following examples: Man has a\nfixed relation to pleasure and pain. In relation to pain, the true mean\nis found in neither fearing it nor courting it, and this is _fortitude_.\nIn relation to pleasure, the true mean stands between greediness and\nindifference; this is _temperance_. The true mean between prodigality\nand narrowness is _liberality_; between simplicity and cunning is\n_prudence_; between suffering wrong and doing wrong is _justice_.\nExtending this law to certain qualifications of temper, speech, and\nmanners, you have the portrait of a graceful Grecian gentleman. Virtue\nis thus _proportion, grace, harmony, beauty in action_.\n\n[Footnote 761: Ibid, bk. ii. ch. vi.]\n\nIt will at once be seen that this classification has no stable\nfoundation. It furnishes no ultimate standard of right. The _mean_ is a\nwavering line. It differs under different circumstances and relations,\nand in different times and places. That mean which is sufficient for one\nindividual is insufficient for another. The virtue of a man, of a slave,\nand of a child, is respectively different. There are as many virtues as\nthere are circumstances in life; and as men are ever entering into new\nrelations, in which it is difficult to determine the correct method of\naction, the separate virtues can not be limited to any definite number.\n\nImperfect as the ethical system of Aristotle may appear to us who live\nin Christian times, it must be admitted that his writings abound with\njust and pure sentiments. His science of Ethics is a _discipline of\nhuman character in order to human happiness_. And whilst it must be\nadmitted that it is directed solely to the improvement of man in the\npresent life, he aims to build that improvement on pure and noble\nprinciples, and seeks to elevate man to the highest perfection of which\nhe could conceive. \"And no greater praise can be given to a work of\nheathen morality than to say, as may be said of the ethical writings of\nAristotle, that they contain nothing which a Christian may dispense\nwith, no precept of life which is not an element of Christian character;\nand that they only fail in elevating the heart and the mind to objects\nwhich it needed Divine Wisdom to reveal.\"[762]\n\n[Footnote 762: Encyclopaedia Britannica, article \"Aristotle.\"]\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XIII.\n\nTHE PHILOSOPHERS OF ATHENS _(continued)_\n\nPOST-SOCRATIC SCHOOL.\n\nEPICURUS AND ZENO.\n\n\nPhilosophy, after the time of Aristotle, takes a new direction. In the\npre-Socratic schools, we have seen it was mainly a philosophy of nature;\nin the Socratic school it was characterized as a philosophy of mind; and\nnow in the post-Socratic schools it becomes a philosophy of life--a\nmoral philosophy. Instead of aiming at the knowledge of real Being--of\nthe permanent, unchangeable, eternal principles which underlie all\nphenomena, it was now content to aim, chiefly, at individual happiness.\nThe primary question now discussed, as of the most vital importance, is,\nWhat is the ultimate standard by which, amid all the diversities of\nhuman conduct and opinion, we may determine what is right and good in\nindividual and social life?\n\nThis remarkable change in the course of philosophic inquiry was mainly\ndue--\n\n1st. _To the altered circumstances of the times_. An age of civil\ndisturbance and political intrigue succeeded the Alexandrian period. The\ndifferent states of Greece lost their independence, and became gradually\nsubject to a foreign yoke. Handed over from one domination to another,\nin the struggles of Alexander's lieutenants, they endeavored to\nreconquer their independence by forming themselves into confederations,\nbut were powerless to unite in the defense of a common cause. The Achaean\nand Etolian leagues were weakened by internal discords; and it was in\nvain that Sparta tried to recover her ancient liberties.\n\nDivided amongst themselves, the smaller states invoked the aid of\ndangerous allies--at one time appealing to Macedon, at another to Egypt.\nIn this way they prepared for the total ruin of Greek liberty, which was\ndestined to be extinguished by Rome.[763]\n\n[Footnote 763: Pressense, \"Religions before Christ,\" pp. 136-140.]\n\nDuring this period of hopeless turmoil and social disorder, all lofty\npursuits and all great principles were lost sight of and abandoned. The\nphilosophic movement followed the downward course of society, and men\nbecame chiefly concerned for their personal interest and safety. The\nwars of the Succession almost obliterated the idea of society, and\nphilosophy was mainly directed to the securing of personal happiness; it\nbecame, in fact, \"the art of making one's self happy.\" The sad reverses\nto which the Grecian mind had been subjected produced a feeling of\nexhaustion and indifference, which soon reflected itself in the\nphilosophy of the age.\n\n2d. In connection with the altered circumstances of the age, we must\nalso take account of _the apparent failure of the Socratic method to\nsolve the problem of Being_.\n\nThe teaching of Aristotle had fostered the suspicion that the dialectic\nmethod was a failure, and thus prepared the way for a return to\nsensualism. He had taught that individuals alone have a real existence,\nand that the \"essence\" of things is not to be sought in the elements of\nunity and generality, or in the _idea_, as Plato taught, but in the\nelements of diversity and speciality. And furthermore, in opposition to\nPlato, he had taught his disciples to attach themselves to sensation, as\nthe source of all knowledge. As the direct consequence of this teaching,\nwe find his immediate successors, Dicearchus and Straton, deliberately\nsetting aside \"the god of philosophy,\" affirming \"that a _divinity_ was\nunnecessary to the explanation of the existence and order of the\nuniverse.\" Stimulated by the social degeneracy of the times, the\ncharacteristic skepticism of the Greek intellect bursts forth anew. As\nthe skepticism of the Sophists marked the close of the first period of\nphilosophy, so the skepticism of Pyrrhonism marked the close of the\nsecond. The new skepticism arrayed Aristotle against Plato as the\nearlier skeptics arrayed atomism against the doctrine of the Eleatics.\nThey naturally said: \"We have been seeking a long time; what have we\ngained? Have we obtained any thing certain and determinate? Plato says\nwe have. But Aristotle and Plato do not agree. May not our opinion be as\ngood as theirs? What a diversity of opinions have been presented during\nthe past three hundred years! One may be as good as another, or they may\nbe all alike untrue!\" Timon and Pyrrhon declared that, of each thing, it\nmight be said to be, and not to be; and that, consequently, we should\ncease tormenting ourselves, and seek to obtain an _absolute calm_, which\nthey dignified with the name of _ataraxie_. Beholding the overthrow and\ndisgrace of their country, surrounded by examples of pusillanimity and\ncorruption, and infected with the spirit of the times themselves, they\nwrote this maxim: \"Nothing is infamous; nothing is in itself just; laws\nand customs alone constitute what is justice and what is iniquity.\"\nHaving reached this extreme, nothing can be too absurd, and they cap the\nclimax by saying, \"We assert nothing; no, not even that we assert\nnothing!\"\n\nAnd yet there must some function, undoubtedly, remain for the \"wise man\"\n(sophos).\n\nReason was given for some purpose. Philosophy must have some end. And\ninasmuch as it is not to determine speculative questions, it must be to\ndetermine practical questions. May it not teach men to _act_ rather than\nto _think_? The philosopher, the schools, the disciples, survive the\ndarkening flood of skepticism.\n\nThree centuries before Christ, the Peripatetic and Platonic schools are\nsucceeded by two other schools, which inherit their importance, and\nwhich, in other forms, and by an under-current, perpetuate the disputes\nof the Peripatetics and Platonists, namely, the Epicureans and Stoics.\nWith Aristotle and Plato, philosophy embraced in its circle nature,\nhumanity, and God; but now, in the systems of Epicurus and \"Zeno\", moral\nphilosophy is placed in the foreground, and assumes the chief, the\novershadowing pre-eminence. The conduct of life--morality--is now the\ngrand subject of inquiry, and the great theme of discourse.\n\nIn dealing with _morals_ two opposite methods of inquiry were possible:\n\n1. _To judge of the quality of actions by their_ RESULTS.\n\n2. _To search for the quality of actions in the actions them selves_.\n\nUtility, which in its last analysis is _Pleasure_, is the test of right,\nin the first method; an assumed or discovered _Law of Nature_, in the\nsecond. If the world were perfect, and the balance of the human\nfaculties undisturbed, it is evident that both systems would give\nidentical results. As it is, there is a tendency to error on each side,\nwhich is fully developed in the rival schools of the Epicureans and\nStoics, who practically divided the suffrages of the mass of educated\nmen until the coming of Christ.\n\nEPICUREANS.\n\nEpicurus was born B.C. 342, and died B.C. 270. He purchased a Garden\nwithin the city, and commenced, at thirty-six years of age, to teach\nphilosophy. The Platonists had their academic Grove: the Aristotelians\nwalked in the Lyceum: the Stoics occupied the Porch: the Epicureans had\ntheir Garden, where they lived a tranquil life, and seem to have had a\ncommunity of goods.\n\nThere is not one of all the various founders of the ancient\nphilosophical schools whose memory was cherished with so much veneration\nby his disciples as that of Epicurus. For several centuries after his\ndeath, his portrait was treated by them with all the honors of a sacred\nrelic: it was carried about with them in their journeys, it was hung up\nin their schools, it was preserved with reverence in their private\nchambers; his birthday was celebrated with sacrifices and other\nreligious observances, and a special festival in his honor was held\nevery month.\n\nSo much honor having been paid to the memory of Epicurus, we naturally\nexpect that his works would have been preserved with religious care. He\nwas one of the most prolific of the ancient Greek writers. Diogenes\ncalls him \"a most voluminous writer,\" and estimates the number of works\ncomposed by him at no less than three hundred, the principal of which he\nenumerates.[764] But out of all this prodigious collection, not a single\nbook has reached us in a complete, or at least an independent form.\nThree letters, which contain some outlines of his philosophy, are\npreserved by Diogenes, who has also embodied his \"Fundamental\nMaxims\"--forty-four propositions, containing a summary of his ethical\nsystem. These, with part of his work \"On Nature,\" found during the last\ncentury among the Greek MSS. recovered at Herculaneum, constitute all\nthat has survived the general wreck.\n\n[Footnote 764: Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives of the Philosophers,\" bk. x.\nch. xvi., xvii.]\n\nWe are thus left to depend mainly on his disciples and successors for\nany general account of his system. And of the earliest and most\nimmediate of these the writings have perished.[765] Our sole original\nauthority is Diogenes Laertius, who was unquestionably an Epicurean. The\nsketch of Epicurus which is given in his \"Lives\" is evidently a \"labor\nof love.\" Among all the systems of ancient philosophy described by him,\nthere is none of whose general character he has given so skillful and so\nelaborate an analysis. And even as regards the particulars of the\nsystem, nothing could be more complete than Laertius's account of his\nphysical speculations. Additional light is also furnished by the\nphilosophic poem of Lucretius \"On the Nature of Things,\" which was\nwritten to advocate the physical theory of Epicurus. These are the chief\nsources of our information.\n\n[Footnote 765: Some fragments of the writings of Metrodorus, Phaedrus,\nPolystratus, and Philodemus, have been found among the Herculanean\nPapyri, and published in Europe, which are said to throw some additional\nlight on the doctrines of Epicurus. See article on \"Herculanean Papyri,\"\nin Edinburgh Review, October, 1862.]\n\nIt is said of Epicurus that he loved to hearken to the stories of the\nindifference and apathy of Pyrrhon, and that, in these qualities, he\naspired to imitate him. But Epicurus was not, like Pyrrhon, a skeptic;\non the contrary, he was the most imperious dogmatist. No man ever showed\nso little respect for the opinions of his predecessors, or so much\nconfidence in his own. He was fond of boasting that he had made his own\nphilosophy--_he_ was a \"self-taught\" man! Now \"Epicurus might be\nperfectly honest in saying he had read very little, and had worked out\nthe conclusions in his own mind, but he was a copyist, nevertheless; few\nmen more entirely so.\"[766] His psychology was certainly borrowed from\nthe Ionian school. From thence he had derived his fundamental maxim,\nthat \"sensation is the source of all knowledge, and the standard of all\ntruth.\" His physics were copied from Democritus. With both, \"atoms are\nthe first principle of all things.\" And in Ethics he had learned from\nAristotle, that if an absolute good is not the end of a practical life,\n_happiness_ must be its end.[767] All that is fundamental in the system\nof Epicurus was borrowed from his predecessors, and there is little that\ncan be called new in his teaching.\n\n[Footnote 766: Maurice's \"Ancient Philosophy,\" p. 236.]\n\n[Footnote 767: \"Ethics,\" bk. i. ch. vi]\n\nThe grand object of philosophy, according to Epicurus, _is the\nattainment of a happy life_. \"Philosophy,\" says he, \"is the power by\nwhich reason conducts men to happiness.\" Truth is a merely relative\nthing, a variable quantity; and therefore the pursuit of truth for its\nown sake is superfluous and useless. There is no such thing as absolute,\nunchangeable right: no action is intrinsically right or wrong. \"We\nchoose the virtues, not on their own account, but for the sake of\npleasure, just as we seek the skill of the physician for the sake of\nhealth.\"[768] That which is nominally right in morals, that which is\nrelatively good in human conduct, is, therefore, to be determined by the\neffects upon ourselves; that which is agreeable--pleasurable, is right;\nthat which is disagreeable--painful, is wrong. \"The virtues are connate\nwith living pleasantly.\"[769] Pleasure (edone), then, is the great end\nto be sought in human action. \"Pleasure is the chief good, the beginning\nand end of living happily.\"[770]\n\n[Footnote 768: \"Fundamental Maxims,\" preserved in Diogenes Laertius,\n\"Lives of the Philosophers,\" bk. x. ch. xxx.]\n\n[Footnote 769: \"Epicurus to Menaeceus,\" in Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives of\nthe Philosophers,\" bk. x. ch. xxvii.]\n\n[Footnote 770: Id., ib.]\n\nThe proof which Epicurus offers in support of his doctrine, \"that\npleasure is the chief good,\" is truly characteristic. \"All animals from\nthe moment of their birth are delighted with pleasure and offended with\npain, by their natural instincts, and without the employment of reason.\nTherefore we, also, of our own inclination, flee from pain.\"[771] \"All\nmen like pleasure and dislike pain; they naturally shun the latter and\npursue the former.\" \"If happiness is present, we have every thing, and\nwhen it is absent, we do every thing with a view to possess it.\"[772]\nVirtue thus consists in man's doing deliberately what the animals do\ninstinctively--that is, choose pleasure and avoid pain.\n\n[Footnote 771: Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives of the Philosophers,\" bk. x.\nch. xxix.]\n\n[Footnote 772: Id., ib., bk. x. ch. xxvii.]\n\n\"Every kind of pleasure\" is, in the estimation of Epicurus, \"alike\ngood,\" and alike proper. \"If those things which make the pleasures of\ndebauched men put an end to the fears of the mind, and to those which\narise about the heavenly bodies [supernatural powers], and death and\npain,... we should have no pretense for blaming those who wholly devote\nthemselves to pleasure, and who never feel any pain, or grief (which is\nthe chief evil) from any quarter.\"[773] Whilst, however, all pleasures\nof the body, as well as the mind, are equal in dignity, and alike good,\nthey differ in intensity, in duration, and, especially, in their\nconsequences. He therefore divides pleasure into two classes; and in\nthis, as Cousin remarks, is found the only element of originality in his\nphilosophy. These two kinds of pleasure are:\n\n1. _The pleasure of movement, excitement, energy_ (edone en\nkinesei).[774] This is the most lively pleasure; it supposes the\ngreatest development of physical and mental power. \"Joy and cheerfulness\nare beheld in motion and energy.\" But it is not the most enduring\npleasure, and it is not the most perfect. It is accompanied by\nuneasiness; it \"brings with it many perturbations,\" and it yields some\nbitter fruits.\n\n[Footnote 773: \"Fundamental Maxims,\" No. 9, in Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives\nof the Philosophers,\" bk. x. ch. xxxi.]\n\n[Footnote 774: Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives of the Philosophers,\" bk. x.\nch. xxviii.]\n\n2. _The second kind of pleasure is the pleasure of repose, tranquillity,\nimpassibility_ (edone katastematike). This is a state, a \"condition,\"\nrather than a motion. It is \"the freedom of the body from pain, and the\nsoul from confusion.\"[775] This is perfect and unmixed happiness--the\nhappiness of God; and he who attains it \"will be like a god among men.\"\n\"The storm of the soul is at an end, and body and soul are perfected.\"\n\nNow, whilst \"no pleasure is intrinsically bad,\"[776] prudence\n(phronesis), or practical wisdom, would teach us to choose the highest\nand most perfect happiness. Morality is therefore the application of\nreason to the conduct of life, and virtue is wisdom. The office of\nreason is to \"determine our choices\"--to take account of the duration of\npleasures, to estimate their consequences, and to regard the happiness\nof a whole lifetime, and not the enjoyment of a single hour. Without\nwisdom men will choose the momentary excitements of passion, and follow\nafter agitating pleasures, which are succeeded by pain; they will\nconsequently lose \"tranquillity of mind.\" \"It is not possible,\" says\nEpicurus, \"to live pleasantly without living prudently and honorably and\njustly.\"[777] The difference, then, between the philosopher and the\nordinary man is this--that while both seek pleasure, the former knows\nhow to forego certain indulgences which cause pain and vexation\nhereafter, whereas the ordinary man seeks only immediate enjoyment.\nEpicurus does not dispense with virtue, but he simply employs it as a\nmeans to an end, namely, the securing of happiness.[778]\n\n[Footnote 775: Id., ib.]\n\n[Footnote 776: \"Fundamental Maxims,\" No. 7.]\n\n[Footnote 777: Ibid., No. 5.]\n\n[Footnote 778: Pressense, \"Religions before Christ,\" p. 141.]\n\nSocial morality is, like private morality, founded upon _utility._ As\nnothing is intrinsically right or wrong in private life, so nothing is\nintrinsically just or unjust in social life. \"Justice has no independent\nexistence: it results from mutual contracts, and establishes itself\nwherever there is a mutual engagement to guard against doing or\nsustaining any injury. Injustice is not intrinsically bad; it has this\ncharacter only because there is joined with it the fear of not escaping\nthose who are appointed to punish actions marked with this\ncharacter.\"[779] Society is thus a contract--an agreement to promote\neach other's happiness. And inasmuch as the happiness of the individual\ndepends in a great degree upon the general happiness, the essence of his\nethical system, in its political aspects, is contained in inculcating\n\"the greatest happiness of the greatest number.\"\n\nIf you ask Epicurus what a man shall do when it is clearly his immediate\ninterest to violate the social contract, he would answer, that if your\ngeneral interest is secured by always observing it, you must make\nmomentary sacrifices for the sake of future good. But \"when, in\nconsequence of new circumstances, a thing which has been pronounced just\ndoes not any longer appear to agree with utility, the thing which was\njust... ceases to be just the moment it ceases to be useful.\"[780] So\nthat self-interest is still the basis of all virtue. And if, by the\nperformance of duty, you are exposed to great suffering, and especially\nto death, you are perfectly justified in the violation of any and all\ncontracts. Such is the social morality of Epicurus.\n\nWith coarse and energetic minds the doctrine of Epicurus would\ninevitably lead to the grossest sensuality and crime; with men whose\ntemperament was more apathetic, or whose tastes were more pure, it would\ndevelop a refined selfishness--a perfect egoism, which Epicurus has\nadorned with the name \"tranquillity of mind--impassibility,\"\n(ataraxia).[781]\n\n[Footnote 779: \"Fundamental Maxims,\" Nos. 35, 36.]\n\n[Footnote 780: Ibid., No. 41.]\n\n[Footnote 781: It is scarcely necessary to discuss the question whether,\nby making pleasure the standard of right, Epicurus intended to encourage\nwhat is usually called sensuality. He earnestly protested against any\nsuch unfavorable interpretation of his doctrine:--\"When we say that\npleasure is a chief good, we are not speaking of the pleasures of the\ndebauched man, or those which lie in sensual enjoyment, as some think\nwho are ignorant, and who do not entertain our opinions, or else\ninterpret them perversely; but we mean the freedom of the body from\npain, and the soul from confusion\" (\"Epicurus to Menaeceus,\" in Diogenes\nLaertius, \"Lives,\" bk. x. ch. xxvii.). The most obvious tendency of this\ndoctrine is to extreme selfishness, rather than extreme sensuality--a\nselfishness which prefers one's own comfort and case to every other\nconsideration.\n\nAs to the personal character of Epicurus, opinions have been divided\nboth in ancient and modern times. By some the garden has been called a\n\"sty.\" Epicurus has been branded as a libertine, and the name\n\"Epicurean\" has, in almost all languages, become the synonym of\nsensualism. Diogenes Laertius repels all the imputations which are cast\nupon the moral character of his favorite author, and ascribes them to\nthe malignity and falsehood of the Stoics. \"The most modern criticism\nseems rather inclined to revert to the vulgar opinion respecting him,\nrejecting, certainly with good reason, the fanatical panegyrics of some\nFrench and English writers of the last century. Upon the whole, we are\ninclined to believe that Epicurus was an apathetic, decorous, formal\nman, who was able, without much difficulty, to cultivate a measured and\neven habit of mind, who may have occasionally indulged in sensual\ngratifications to prove that he thought them lawful, but who generally\npreferred, as a matter of taste, the exercises of the intellect to the\nmore violent forms of self-indulgence. And this life, it seems to us,\nwould be most consistent with his opinions. To avoid commotion, to make\nthe stream of life flow on as easily as possible, was clearly the aim of\nhis philosophy.\"--Maurice's \"Ancient Philosophy,\" p. 236.]\n\nTo secure this highest kind of happiness--this pure impassivity, it was\nnecessary to get rid of all superstitious fears of death, of\nsupernatural beings, and of a future retribution.[782] The chief causes\nof man's misery are his illusions, his superstitions, and his\nprejudices. \"That which principally contributes to trouble the spirit of\nmen, is the persuasion which they cherish that the stars are beings\nimperishable and happy (_i.e.,_ that they are gods), and that then our\nthoughts and actions are contrary to the will of those superior beings;\nthey also, being deluded by these fables, apprehend an eternity of\nevils, they fear the insensibility of death, as though that could affect\nthem....\" \"The real freedom from this kind of trouble consists in being\nemancipated from all these things.\"[783] And this emancipation is to be\nsecured by the study of philosophy--that is, of that philosophy which\nexplains every thing on natural or physical principles, and excludes all\nsupernatural powers.\n\n[Footnote 782: Lucretius, \"On the Nature of Things,\" bk. i. 1. 100-118.]\n\n[Footnote 783: Epicurus to Herodotus, in Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives of\nthe Philosophers,\" p. 453 (Bohn's edition).]\n\nThat ignorance which occasions man's misery is two-fold, (i.) _Ignorance\nof the external world, which leads to superstition._ All unexplained\nphenomena are ascribed to unseen, supernatural powers; often to\nmalignant powers, which take pleasure in tormenting man; sometimes to a\nSupreme and Righteous Power, which rewards and punishes men for their\ngood or evil conduct. Hence a knowledge of Physics, particularly the\nphysics which Democritus taught, was needful to deliver men from false\nhopes and false fears.[784] (ii.) _Ignorance of the nature of man, of\nhis faculties, powers, and the sources and limits of his knowledge_,\nfrom whence arise illusions, prejudices, and errors. Hence the need of\nPsychology to ascertain the real grounds of human knowledge, to explain\nthe origin of man's illusions, to exhibit the groundlessness of his\nfears, and lead him to a just conception of the nature and end of his\nexistence.\n\n[Footnote 784: \"The study of physics contributes more than any thing\nelse to the tranquillity and happiness of life.\"--Diogenes Laertius,\n\"Lives,\" bk. x. ch. xxiv. \"For thus it is that _fear_ restrains all men,\nbecause they observe many things effected on the earth and in heaven, of\nwhich effects they can by no means see the causes, and therefore think\nthat they are wrought by a _divine_ power. For which reasons, when we\nhave clearly seen that _nothing can be produced from nothing_, we shall\nhave a more accurate perception of that of which we are in search, and\nshall understand whence each individual thing is generated, and how all\nthings are done without the agency of the gods.\"--Lucretius, \"On the\nNature of Things,\" bk. i. l. 145-150.]\n\nPhysics and Psychology are thus the only studies which Epicurus would\ntolerate as \"conducive to the happiness of man.\" The pursuit of truth\nfor its own sake was useless. Dialectics, which distinguish the true\nfrom the false, the good from the bad, on _a priori_ grounds, must be\nbanished as an unnecessary toil, which yields no enjoyment. Theology\nmust be cancelled entirely, because it fosters superstitious fears. The\nidea of God's taking knowledge of, disapproving, condemning, punishing\nthe evil conduct of men, is an unpleasant thought. Physics and\nPsychology are the most useful, because the most \"agreeable,\" the most\n\"comfortable\" sciences.\n\nEPICUREAN PHYSICS.\n\nIn his physical theories Epicurus followed Leucippus and Democritus. He\nexpounds these theories in his letters to Herodotus and Pythocles, which\nare preserved in Diogenes Laertius.[785] We shall be guided mainly by\nhis own statements, and when his meaning is obscure, or his exposition\nis incomplete, we shall avail ourselves of the more elaborate statements\nof Lucretius,[786] who is uniformly faithful to the doctrine of\nEpicurus, and universally regarded as its best expounder.\n\nThe fundamental principle of his philosophy is the ancient maxim--\"_de\nnihilo nihil, in nihilum nil fosse reverti_;\" but instead of employing\nthis maxim in the sense in which it is used by Parmenides, Anaxagoras,\nEmpedocles, and others, to prove there must be something self-existent\nand eternal, or in other words, \"that nothing which once was not can\never of itself come into being,\" he uses it to disprove a divine\ncreation, and even presents the maxim in an altered form--viz., \"nothing\nis ever _divinely_ generated from nothing;\"[787] and he thence concludes\nthat the world was by no means made for us by _divine_ power.[788]\nNature is eternal. \"The universal whole always was such as it now is,\nand always will be such.\" \"The universe also is infinite, for that which\nis finite has a limit, but the universe has no limit.\"[789]\n\n[Footnote 785: \"Lives of the Philosophers,\" bk. x.]\n\n[Footnote 786: \"De Natura Rerum.\"]\n\n[Footnote 787: Lucretius, \"On the Nature of Things,\" bk. i.]\n\n[Footnote 788: Ibid.]\n\n[Footnote 789: Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives of the Philosophers,\" bk. x.\nch. xxiv.]\n\nThe two great principles of nature are a _vacuum_, and a _plenum._ The\nplenum is _body_, or tangible nature; the vacuum is _space_, or\nintangible nature. \"We know by the evidences of the senses (which are\nour only rule of reasoning) that _bodies_ have a real existence, and we\ninfer from the evidence of the senses that the vacuum has a real\nexistence; for if space have no real existence, there would be nothing\nin which bodies can move, as we see they really do move. Let us add to\nthis reflection that one can not conceive, either in virtue of\nperception, or of any analogy founded on perception, any general quality\npeculiar to all beings, which is not either an attribute, or an\naccident, of the body or of the vacuum.\"[790]\n\nOf bodies some are \"combinations\"--concrete bodies--and some are\nprimordial \"elements,\" out of which combinations are formed. These\nprimordial elements, out of which the universe is generated, are\n\"_atoms_\" (atomoi). These atoms are \"the first principles\" and \"seeds\"\nof all things.[791] They are \"_infinite_ in number,\" and, as their name\nimplies, they are \"_infrangible\" \"unchangeable_\" and\n\"_indestructible.\"_[792] Matter is, therefore, not infinitely divisible;\nthere must be a point at which division ends.[793]\n\nThe only qualities of atoms are _form_, _magnitude_, and _density._ All\nthe other sensible qualities of matter--the secondary qualities--as\ncolor, odor, sweetness, bitterness, etc.--are necessarily inherent in\nform. All secondary qualities are changeable, but the primary atoms are\nunchangeable; \"for in the dissolution of combined bodies there must be\nsomething _solid_ and _indestructible,_ of such a kind that it will not\nchange, either into what does not exist, or out of what does not exist,\nbut the change results from a simple displacement of parts, which is the\nmost usual case, or from an addition or subtraction of particles.\"[794]\n\n[Footnote 790: Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives of the Philosophers,\" bk. x.\nch. xxiv.]\n\n[Footnote 791: Id., ib., bk. x. ch. xxv.]\n\n[Footnote 792: Id., ib., bk. x. ch. xxiv.]\n\n[Footnote 793: Id., ib.; Lucretius, \"On the Nature of Things,\" bk. i. l.\n616-620.]\n\n[Footnote 794: Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives of the Philosophers,\" bk. x.\nch. xxiv.]\n\nThe atoms are not all of one _form_, but of different forms suited to\nthe production of different substances by combination; some are square,\nsome triangular, some smooth and spherical, some are hooked with points.\nThey are also diversified in _magnitude_ and _density_. The number of\noriginal forms is \"incalculably varied,\" but not infinite. \"Every\nvariety of forms contains an infinitude of atoms, but there is not, for\nthat reason, an infinitude of forms; it is only the number of them which\nis beyond computation.\"[795] To assert that atoms are of every kind of\nform, magnitude, and density, would be \"to contradict the phenomena;\n\"for experience teaches us that objects have a finite magnitude, and\nform necessarily supposes limitation.\n\n[Footnote 795: Id., ib.]\n\nA variety of these primordial forms enter into the composition of all\nsensible objects, because sensible objects possess different qualities,\nand these diversified qualities can only result from the combination of\ndifferent original forms. \"The earth has, in itself, primary atoms from\nwhich springs, rolling forth cool _water_, incessantly recruit the\nimmense sea; it has also atoms from which _fire_ arises.... Moreover,\nthe earth contains atoms from which it can raise up rich _corn_ and\ncheerful _groves_ for the tribes of men....\" So that \"no object in\nnature is constituted of one kind of elements, and whatever possesses in\nitself must numerous powers and energies, thus demonstrates that it\ncontains more numerous kinds of primary particles,\"[796] or primordial\n\"seeds of things.\"\n\n\"The atoms are in a continual state of _motion_\" and \"have moved with\n_equal rapidity_ from all eternity, since it is evident the vacuum can\noffer no resistance to the heaviest, any more than the lightest.\" The\nprimary and original movement of all atoms is _in straight lines, by\nvirtue of their own weight_. The vacuum separates all atoms one from\nanother, at greater or less distances, and they preserve their own\npeculiar motion in the densest substances.[797]\n\n[Footnote 796: Lucretius, \"On the Nature of Things,\" bk. i. l. 582-600.]\n\n[Footnote 797: Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives of the Philosophers,\" bk. x.\nch. xxiv.; Lucretius, \"On the Nature of Things,\" bk. i. l. 80-92.]\n\nAnd now the grand crucial question arises--_How do atoms combine so as\nto form concrete bodies?_ If they move in straight lines, and with equal\nrapidity from all eternity, then they can never unite so as to form\nconcrete substances. They can only coalesce by deviating from a straight\nline.[798] How are they made to deviate from a straight line? This\ndeviation must be introduced _arbitrarily_, or by some _external cause_.\nAnd inasmuch as Epicurus admits of no causes \"but space and matter,\" and\nrejects all divine or supernatural interposition, the _new_ movement\nmust be purely arbitrary. They deviate _spontaneously,_ and of their own\naccord. \"The system of nature immediately appears _as a free agent_,\nreleased from tyrant masters, to do every thing of itself spontaneously,\nwithout the help of the gods.\"[799] The manner in which Lucretius proves\nthis doctrine is a good example of the petitio principii. He assumes, in\nopposition to the whole spirit and tendency of the Epicurean philosophy,\nthat man has \"a free will,\" and then argues that if man who is nothing\nbut an aggregation of atoms, can \"turn aside and alter his own\nmovements,\" the primary elements, of which his soul is composed, must\nhave some original spontaneity. \"If all motion is connected and\ndependent, and a new movement perpetually arises from a former one in a\ncertain order, and if the primary elements do not produce any\ncommencement of motion by deviating from the straight line to break the\nlaws of fate, so that cause may not follow cause in infinite succession,\n_whence comes this freedom of will_ to all animals in the world? whence,\nI say, is this liberty of action wrested from the fates, by means of\nwhich we go wheresoever inclination leads each of us? whence is it that\nwe ourselves turn aside, and alter our motions, not at any fixed time,\nnor in any fixed part of space, but just as our own minds prompt?....\nWherefore we must necessarily confess that the same is the case with the\nseeds of matter, and there is some other cause besides strokes and\nweight [resistance and density] from which this power [of free movement]\nis innate in them, since we see that _nothing is produced from\nnothing_.\"[800] Besides form, extension, and density, Epicurus has found\nanother inherent or essential quality of matter or atoms, namely,\n\"_spontaneous\" motion._\n\n[Footnote 798: \"At some time, though at no fixed and determinate time,\nand at some point, though at no fixed and determinate point, they turn\naside from the right line, but only so far as you can call the least\npossible deviation.\"--Lucretius, \"On the Nature of Things,\" bk. ii. l.\n216-222.]\n\n[Footnote 799: Lucretius, \"On the Nature of Things\" bk. ii. 1.\n1092-1096.]\n\n[Footnote 800: Id., ib., bk. ii. l. 250-290.]\n\nBy a slight \"voluntary\" deflection from the straight line, atoms are now\nbrought into contact with each other; \"they strike against each other,\nand by the percussion new movements and new complications\narise\"--\"movements from high to low, from low to high, and horizontal\nmovements to and fro, in virtue of this reciprocal percussion.\" The\natoms \"jostling about, _of their own accord_, in infinite modes, were\noften brought together confusedly, irregularly, and to no purpose, but\nat length they _successfully coalesced_; at least, such of them as were\nthrown together suddenly became, in succession, the beginnings of great\nthings--as earth, and air, and sea, and heaven.\"[801]\n\n[Footnote 801: Lucretius, \"On the Nature of Things,\" bk. ii. l.\n1051-1065.]\n\nAnd now Lucretius shall describe the formation of the different parts of\nthe world according to the cosmogony of Epicurus. We quote from Good's\ntranslation:\n\n     But from this boundless mass of matter first\n     How heaven, and earth, and ocean, sun, and moon,\n     Rose in nice order, now the muse shall tell.\n     For never, doubtless, from result of thought,\n     Or mutual compact, could primordial seeds\n     First harmonize, or move with powers precise.\n     But countless crowds in countless manners urged,\n     From time eternal, by intrinsic weight\n     And ceaseless repercussion, to combine\n     In all the possibilities of forms,\n     Of actions, and connections, and exert\n     In every change some effort to create--\n     Reared the rude frame at length, abruptly reared,\n     Which, when once gendered, must the basis prove\n     Of things sublime; and whence eventual rose\n     Heaven, earth, and ocean, and the tribes of sense.\n\n     Yet now nor sun on fiery wheel was seen\n     Riding sublime, nor stars adorned the pole,\n     Nor heaven, nor earth, nor air, nor ocean lived,\n     Nor aught of prospect mortal sight surveyed;\n     But one vast chaos, boisterous and confused.\n     Yet order hence began; congenial parts\n     Parts joined congenial; and the rising world\n     Gradual evolved: its mighty members each\n     From each divided, and matured complete\n     From seeds appropriate; whose wild discortderst,\n     Reared by their strange diversities of form,\n     With ruthless war so broke their proper paths,\n     Their motions, intervals, conjunctions, weights,\n     And repercussions, nought of genial act\n     Till now could follow, nor the seeds themselves\n     E'en though conjoined in mutual bonds, co\n     Thus air, secreted, rose o'er laboring earth;\n     Secreted ocean flowed; and the pure fire,\n     Secreted too, toward ether sprang sublime.\n\n     But first the seeds terrene, since ponderous most\n     And most perplext, in close embraces clung,\n     And towards the centre conglobating sunk.\n     And as the bond grew firmer, ampler forth\n     Pressed they the fluid essences that reared\n     Sun, moon, and stars, and main, and heaven's high wall.\n     For those of atoms lighter far consist,\n     Subtiler, and more rotund than those of earth.\n     Whence, from the pores terrene, with foremost haste\n     Rushed the bright ether, towering high, and swift\n     Streams of fire attracting as it flowed.\n\n     Then mounted, next, the base of sun and moon,\n     'Twixt earth and ether, in the midway air\n     Rolling their orbs; for into neither these\n     Could blend harmonious, since too light with earth\n     To sink deprest, while yet too ponderous far\n     To fly with ether toward the realms extreme:\n     So 'twixt the two they hovered; _vital_ there\n     Moving forever, parts of the vast whole;\n     As move forever in the frame of man\n     Some active organs, while some oft repose.[802]\n\n[Footnote 802: Lucretius, \"On the Nature of Things,\" b. v. l. 431-498]\n\nAfter explaining the origin and causes of the varied celestial\nphenomena, he proceeds to give an account of the production of plants,\nanimals, and man:\n\n     Once more return we to the world's pure prime,\n     Her fields yet liquid, and the tribes survey\n     First she put forth, and trusted to the winds.\n\n     And first the race she reared of verdant herbs,\n     Glistening o'er every hill; the fields at large\n     Shone with the verdant tincture, and the trees\n     Felt the deep impulse, and with outstretched arms\n     Broke from their bonds rejoicing. As the down\n     Shoots from the winged nations, or from beasts\n     Bristles or hair, so poured the new-born earth\n     Plants, fruits, and herbage. Then, in order next,\n     Raised she the sentient tribes, in various modes,\n     By various powers distinguished: for not heaven\n     Down dropped them, nor from ocean's briny waves\n     Sprang they, terrestrial sole; whence, justly _Earth_\n     Claims the dear name of mother, since alone\n     Flowed from herself whate'er the sight surveys.\n\n     E'en now oft rears she many a sentient tribe\n     By showers and sunshine ushered into day.[803]\n     Whence less stupendous tribes should then have risen\n     More, and of ampler make, herself new-formed,\n     In flower of youth, and _Ether_ all mature.[804]\n\n     Of these birds first, of wing and plume diverse,\n     Broke their light shells in spring-time: as in spring\n     Still breaks the grasshopper his curious web,\n     And seeks, spontaneous, foods and vital air.\n\n     Then rushed the ranks of mortals; for the soil,\n     Exuberant then, with warmth and moisture teemed.\n     So, o'er each scene appropriate, myriad wombs\n     Shot, and expanded, to the genial sward\n     By fibres fixt; and as, in ripened hour,\n     Their liquid orbs the daring foetus broke\n     Of breath impatient, nature here transformed\n     Th' assenting earth, and taught her opening veins\n     With juice to flow lacteal; as the fair\n     Now with sweet milk o'erflows, whose raptured breast\n     First hails the stranger-babe, since all absorbed\n     Of nurture, to the genial tide converts.\n     Earth fed the nursling, the warm ether clothed,\n     And the soft downy grass his couch compressed.[805]\n\n[Footnote 803: The doctrine of \"spontaneous generations\" is still more\nexplicitly announced in book ii. \"Manifest appearances compel us to\nbelieve that animals, though possessed of sense, are generated from\nsenseless atoms. For you may observe living worms proceed from foul\ndung, when the earth, moistened with immoderate showers, has contracted\na kind of putrescence; and you may see all other things change\nthemselves, similarly, into other things.\"--Lucretius, \"On the Nature of\nThings,\" bk. i. l. 867-880.]\n\n[Footnote 804: Ether is the father, earth the mother of all organized\nbeing.--Id., ib., bk. i. l. 250-255.]\n\n[Footnote 805: Id., ib., bk. v. l. 795-836.]\n\nA state of pure savagism, or rather of mere animalism, was the primitive\ncondition of man. He wandered naked in the woods, feeding on acorns and\nwild fruits, and quenched his thirst at the \"echoing waterfalls,\" in\ncompany with the wild beast.\n\nThrough the remaining part of book v. Lucretius describes how speech was\ninvented; how society originated, and governments were instituted; how\ncivilization commenced; and how religion arose out of ignorance of\nnatural causes; how the arts of life were discovered, and how science\nsprang up. And all this, as he is careful to tell us, without any divine\ninstruction, or any assistance from the gods.\n\nSuch are the physical theories of the Epicureans. The primordial\nelements of matter are infinite, eternal, and self-moved. After ages\nupon ages of chaotic strife, the universe at length arose out of an\n_infinite_ number of atoms, and a _finite_ number of forms, by a\nfortuitous combination. Plants, animals, and man were spontaneously\ngenerated from ether and earth. Languages, society, governments, arts\nwere gradually developed. And all was achieved simply by blind,\nunconscious nature-forces, without any designing, presiding, and\ngoverning Intelligence--that is, without a God.\n\nThe evil genius which presided over the method of Epicurus, and\nperverted all his processes of thought, is clearly apparent. The end of\nhis philosophy was not the discovery of truth. He does not commence his\ninquiry into the principles or causes which are adequate to the\nexplanation of the universe, with an unprejudiced mind. He everywhere\ndevelops a malignant hostility to religion, and the avowed object of his\nphysical theories is to rid the human mind of all fear of supernatural\npowers--that is, of all fear of God.[806] \"The phenomena which men\nobserve to occur in the earth and the heavens, when, as often happens,\nthey are perplexed with fearful thoughts, overawe their minds with a\ndread of the gods, and humble and depress them to the earth. For\nignorance of natural causes obliges them to refer all things to the\npower of the divinities, and to resign the dominion of the world to\nthem; because of those effects they can by no means see the origin, and\naccordingly suppose that they are produced by divine influence.\"[807]\n\n[Footnote 806: \"Let us trample religion underfoot, that the victory\ngained over it may place us on an equality with heaven\" (book i.). See\nDiogenes Laertius, \"Lives of the Philosophers,\" bk. x. ch. xxiv. pp.\n453,454 (Bohn's edition); Lucretius, \"On the Nature of Things,\" bk. i.\nl. 54-120.]\n\n[Footnote 807: Lucretius, \"On the Nature of Things,\" bk. vi. l. 51-60.]\n\nTo \"expel these fancies from the mind\" as \"inconsistent with its\ntranquillity and opposed to human happiness,\" is the end, and, as\nLucretius believes, the glory of the Epicurean philosophy. To accomplish\nthis, God must be placed at an infinite distance from the universe, and\nmust be represented as indifferent to every thing that transpires within\nit. We \"must beware of making the Deity interpose here, for that Being\nwe ought to suppose _exempt from all occupation_, and perfectly\nhappy,\"[808]--that is, absolutely impassible. God did not make the\nworld, and he does not govern the world. There is no evidence of design\nor intelligence in its structure, and \"such is the faultiness with which\nit stands affected, that it can not be the work of a Divine power.\"[809]\n\nEpicurus is, then, an unmistakable Atheist. He did not admit a God in\nany rational sense. True, he _professed_ to believe in gods, but\nevidently in a very equivocal manner, and solely to escape the popular\ncondemnation. \"They are not pure spirits, for there is no spirit in the\natomic theory; they are not bodies, for where are the bodies that we may\ncall gods? In this embarrassment, Epicurus, compelled to acknowledge\nthat the human race believes in the existence of gods, addresses himself\nto an old theory of Democritus--that is, he appeals to dreams. As in\ndreams there are images that act upon and determine in us agreeable or\npainful sensations, without proceeding from exterior bodies, so the gods\nare images similar to those of dreams, but greater, having the human\nform; images which are not precisely bodies, and yet not deprived of\nmateriality which are whatever you please, but which, in short, must be\nadmitted, since the human race believes in gods, and since the\nuniversality of the religious sentiment is a fact which demands a\ncause.\"[810]\n\n[Footnote 808: Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives of the Philosophers,\" bk. x.\nch. xxv.; Lucretius, \"On the Nature of Things,\" bk. i. l. 55-60.]\n\n[Footnote 809: Lucretius, \"On the Nature of Things,\" bk. v. l. 195-200.]\n\n[Footnote 810: Cousin's \"Lectures on the History of Philosophy,\" vol. i.\np. 431.]\n\nIt is needless to offer any criticism on the reasoning of Epicurus. One\nfact will have obviously presented itself to the mind of the reflecting\nreader. He starts with atoms having form, magnitude, and density, and\nessays to construct a universe; but he is obliged to be continually\nintroducing, in addition, a \"_nameless something_\" which \"remains in\nsecret,\" to help him out in the explanation of the phenomena.[811] He\nmakes life to arise out of dead matter, sense out of senseless atoms,\nconsciousness out of unconsciousness, reason out of unreason, without an\nadequate cause, and thus violates the fundamental principle from which\nhe starts, \"_that nothing can arise from nothing_.\"\n\nEPICUREAN PSYCHOLOGY.\n\nIn the system of Epicurus, the soul is regarded as corporeal or\nmaterial, like the body; they form, together, one nature or substance.\nThe soul is composed of atoms exceedingly diminutive, smooth, and round,\nand connected with or diffused through the veins, viscera, and nerves.\nThe substance of the soul is not to be regarded as simple and\nuncompounded; its constituent parts are _aura_, heat, and air. These are\nnot sufficient, however, even in the judgment of Epicurus, to account\nfor _sensation_; they are not adequate to generate sensible motives such\nas revolve any thoughts in the mind. \"A certain fourth nature, or\nsubstance, must, therefore, necessarily be added to these, _that is\nwholly without a name_; it is a substance, however, than which nothing\nexists more active or more subtile, nor is any thing more essentially\ncomposed of small and smooth elementary particles; and it is this\nsubstance which first distributes sensible motions through the\nmembers.\"[812]\n\n[Footnote 811: As, _e.g._, Lucretius, \"On the Nature of Things,\" bk.\niii. l. 260-290.]\n\n[Footnote 812: Id., ib., bk. iii. l. 237-250.]\n\nEpicurus is at great pains to prove that the soul is material; and it\ncan not be denied that he marshals his arguments with great skill.\nModern materialism may have added additional illustrations, but it has\ncontributed no new lines of proof. The weapons are borrowed from the old\narsenal, and they are not wielded with any greater skill than they were\nby Epicurus himself, I. The soul and the body act and react upon each\nother; and mutual reaction can only take place between substances of\nsimilar nature. \"Such effects can only be produced by _touch_, and touch\ncan not take place without _body_.\"[813] 2. The mind is produced\ntogether with the body, it grows up along with it, and waxes old at the\nsame time with it.[814] 3. The mind is diseased along with the body, \"it\nloses its faculties by material causes, as intoxication, or by severe\nblows; and is sometimes, by a heavy lethargy, borne down into a deep\neternal sleep.\"[815] 4. The mind, like the body, is healed by medicines,\nwhich proves that it exists only as a mortal substance.[816] 5. The mind\ndoes not always, and at the same time, continue _entire_ and\n_unimpaired_, some faculties decay before the others, \"the substance of\nthe soul is therefore divided.\" On all these grounds the soul must be\ndeemed mortal; it is dissolved along with the body, and has no conscious\nexistence after death.\n\n[Footnote 813: Lucretius, \"On the Nature of Things,\" bk. iii. l.\n138-168.]\n\n[Footnote 814: Id., ib., bk. iii. l. 444-460.]\n\n[Footnote 815: Id., ib., bk. iii. l. 438-490.]\n\n[Footnote 816: Id., ib., bk. iii. l. 500-520.]\n\nSuch being the nature of the soul, inasmuch as it is material, all its\nknowledge must be derived from sensation. The famous doctrine of\nperception, as taught by Epicurus, is grounded upon this pre-supposition\nthat the soul is corporeal. \"The eidola aporroiai--_imagines, simulacra\nrerum, etc_., are, like pellicles, continually flying off from objects;\nand these material 'likenesses,' diffusing themselves everywhere in the\nair, are propelled to the perceptive organs.\" These images of things\ncoming in contact with the senses produce _sensation_ (aisthesis). A\nsensation may be considered either as regards its object, or as regards\nhim who experiences it. As regards him who experiences it, it is simply\na passive affection, an agreeable or disagreeable feeling, passion, or\nsentiment (to pathos). But along with sensation there is inseparably\nassociated some knowledge of the object which excites sensation; and it\nis for this reason that Epicurus marked the intimate relation of these\ntwo phenomena by giving them analogous names. Because the second\nphenomenon is joined to the first, he calls it\nepaisthesis--_perception_. It is sensation viewed especially in regard\nto its object--_representative sensation_, or the \"sensible idea\" of\nmodern philosophy. It is from perception that we draw our general ideas\nby a kind of prolepsis (prolepsis) an anticipation or laying hold by\nreason of that which is implied in sensation. Now all sensations are\nalike true in so far as they are sensations, and error arises from false\nreasoning about the testimony of sense. All knowledge is purely relative\nand contingent, and there is no such thing as necessary and absolute\ntruth.\n\nThe system of Epicurus is thus a system of pure materialism, but not a\nsystem of materialism drawn, as a logical consequence, from a careful\nand unprejudiced study of the whole phenomena of mind. His openly avowed\ndesign is to deliver men from the fear of death, and rid them of all\napprehension of a future retribution. \"Did men but know that there was a\nfixed limit to their woes, they would be able, in some measure, to defy\nthe religious fictions and menaces of the poets; but now, since we must\nfear eternal punishment at death, there is no mode, no means of\nresisting them.\"[817] To emancipate men from \"these terrors of the\nmind,\" they must be taught \"that the soul is mortal, and dissolves with\nthe body\"--that \"death is nothing to us, for that which is dissolved is\ndevoid of sensation, and that which is devoid of sensation is nothing to\nus.\"[818] Starting with the fixed determination to prove that\n\n     \"Death is nothing, and naught after death,\"\n\nhe will not permit any mental phenomena to suggest to him the idea of an\nincorporeal spiritual substance. Matter, under any form known to\nEpicurus, is confessedly insufficient to explain sensation and thought;\na \"nameless something\" must be _supposed_. But may not \"that principle\nwhich _lies entirely hid, and remains in secret_\"[819]--and about which\neven Epicurus does not know any thing--be a spiritual, an _immaterial_\nprinciple? For aught that he knows it may as properly be called\n\"_spirit_\" as matter. May not _sensation_ and _cognition_ be the result\nof the union of matter and spirit; and if so, may not their mutual\naffections, their common sympathies, be the necessary conditions of\nsensation and cognition in the present life? A reciprocal relation\nbetween body and mind appears in all mental phenomena. A certain\nproportion in this relation is called mental health. A deviation from it\nis termed disease. This proportion is by no means an equilibrium, but\nthe perfect adaptation of the body, without injury to its integrity, to\nthe purposes of the mind. And if this be so, all the arguments of\nmaterialism fall to the ground.\n\n[Footnote 817: Lucretius, \"On the Nature of Things,\" bk. i. l. 100-118.]\n\n[Footnote 818: Diogenes Laertius, Maxim 2, in \"Lives of the\nPhilosophers,\" bk. x. ch. xxxi.]\n\n[Footnote 819: Lucretius, \"On the Nature of Things,\" bk. iii. l.\n275-280.]\n\nThe concluding portion of the third book, in which Lucretius discourses\non _death_, is a mournful picture of the condition of the heathen mind\nbefore Christianity \"brought life and immortality fully to light.\" It\ncomes to us, like a voice from the grave of two thousand years, to prove\nthey were \"without hope.\" To be delivered from the fear of future\nretribution, they would sacrifice the hope of an immortal life. To\nextintinguish guilt they would annihilate the soul. The only way in\nwhich Lucretius can console man in prospect of death is, by reminding\nhim that he will _escape the ills of life_.\n\n     \"'But thy dear home shall never greet thee more!\n     No more the best of wives!--thy babes beloved,\n     Whose haste half-met thee, emulous to snatch\n     The dulcet kiss that roused thy secret soul,\n     Again shall never hasten!--nor thine arm,\n     With deeds heroic, guard thy country's weal!--\n     Oh mournful, mournful fate!' thy friends exclaim!\n     'One envious hour of these invalued joys\n     Robs thee forever!--But they add not here,\n     '_It robs thee, too, of all desire of joy_'--\n     A truth, once uttered, that the mind would free\n     From every dread and trouble. 'Thou art safe\n     The sleep of death protects thee, _and secures\n     From all the unnumbered woes of mortal life!_\n     While we, alas! the sacred urn around\n     That holds thine ashes, shall insatiate weep,\n     Nor time destroy the eternal grief we feel!'\n     What, then, has death, if death be mere repose,\n     And quiet only in a peaceful grave,--\n     What has it thus to mar this life of man?\"[820]\n\n[Footnote 820: Lucretius, \"On the Nature of Things,\" bk. iii. l.\n906-926.]\n\nThis is all the comfort that Epicureanism can offer; and if \"the wretch\nstill laments the approach of death,\" she addresses him \"with voice\nsevere\"--\n\n     \"Vile coward! dry thine eyes--\n     Hence with thy snivelling sorrows, and depart!\"\n\nIt is evident that such a system of philosophy outrages the purest and\nnoblest sentiments of humanity, and, in fact, condemns itself. It was\nborn of selfishness and social degeneracy, and could perpetuate itself\nonly in an age of corruption, because it inculcated the lawfulness of\nsensuality and the impunity of injustice. Its existence at this precise\nperiod in Grecian history forcibly illustrates the truth, that Atheism\nis a disease of the heart rather than the head. It seeks to set man free\nto follow his own inclinations, by ridding him of all faith in a\nDivinity and in an immortal life, and thus exonerating him from all\naccountability and all future retribution. But it failed to perceive\nthat, in the most effectual manner, it annihilated all real liberty, all\ntrue nobleness, and made of man an abject slave.\n\nSTOICISM.\n\nThe Stoical school was founded by Zeno of Citium, who flourished B.C.\n290. He taught in the Stoa Poecile, or Painted Porch; and his disciples\nthence derived the name of Stoics. Zeno was succeeded by Cleanthes (B.C.\n260); and Cleanthes by Chrysippus (B.C. 240), whose vigorous intellect\ngave unity and completeness to the Stoical philosophy. He is reported to\nhave said to Cleanthes,--\"Give me your doctrines, and I will find the\ndemonstrations.\"[821]\n\n[Footnote 821: Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives of the Philosophers,\" bk. vii.\nch. vii.]\n\nNone of the writings of the early Stoics, save a \"Hymn to Jupiter,\" by\nCleanthes, have survived. We are chiefly indebted to Diogenes\nLaertius[822] and Cicero[823] for an insight into their system. The Hymn\nof Cleanthes sheds some light on their Theology, and their moral\nprinciples are exhibited in \"The Fragments\" of Epictetus, and \"The Life\nand Meditations\" of Marcus Aurelius.\n\n[Footnote 822: \"Lives of the Philosophers,\" bk. vii.]\n\n[Footnote 823: \"De Fm.,\" and \"De Natura Deorum.\"]\n\nThe philosophy of the Stoics, like that of the Epicureans, was mainly a\nphilosophy of life--that is, a _moral_ philosophy. The manner in which\nthey approached the study of morals, and the principles upon which they\ngrounded morality, were, however, essentially different.\n\nThe grand object of Epicurus was to make the current of life flow on as\ncomfortably as possible, without any distracting thoughts of the past or\nany disturbing visions of the future. He therefore starts with this\nfundamental principle, that the true philosophy of life is to enjoy\none's self--the aim of existence is to be happy. Whatever in a man's\nbeliefs or conduct tends to secure happiness is _right_; whatever\nawakens uneasiness, apprehension, or fear, is _wrong_. And inasmuch as\nthe idea of a Divine Creator and Governor of the universe, and the\nbelief in a future life and retribution, are uncomfortable thoughts,\nexciting superstitious fears, they ought to be rejected. The Physics and\nthe Psychology of Epicurus are thus the natural outgrowth of his\nMorality.\n\nZeno was evidently a more earnest, serious, and thoughtful man. He\ncherished a nobler ideal of life than to suppose \"man must do\nvoluntarily, what the brute does instinctively--eschew pain, and seek\npleasure.\" He therefore seeks to ascertain whether there be not some\n\"principle of nature,\" or some law of nature, which determines what is\nright in human action--whether there be not some light under which, on\ncontemplating an action, we may at once pronounce upon its intrinsic\n_rightness_, or otherwise. This he believes he has found in the\n_universal reason_ which fashioned, and permeates, and vivifies the\nuniverse, and is the light and life of the human soul. The chief good\nis, confessedly, to live according to nature; which is to live according\nto virtue, for nature leads us to that point.... For our individual\nnatures are all part of the universal nature; on which account, the\nchief good is to live in a manner corresponding to one's own nature, and\nto universal nature; doing none of those things which the common law of\nmankind (the universal conscience of our race) forbids. _That common law\nis identical with_ RIGHT REASON _which pervades every thing, being the\nsame with Jupiter_ (Zeus), _who is the regulator and chief manager of\nall existing things_.[824] The foundation of the ethical system of the\nStoics is thus laid in their philosophy of nature--their Physiology and\nPsychology. If, therefore, we would apprehend the logical connection and\nunity of Stoicism, we must follow their order of thought--that is, we\nmust commence with their\n\nPHYSIOLOGY.\n\nDiogenes Laertius tells us that the Stoics held \"that there are two\ngeneral principles in the universe--the _passive_ principle (to\nnaschon), which is matter, an existence without any distinctive quality,\nand the _active_ principle (to poioun), which is the reason existing in\nthe passive, that is to say, God. For that He, being eternal, and\nexisting throughout all matter, makes every thing.\"[825] This Divine\nReason, acting upon matter, originates the necessary and unchangeable\nlaws which govern matter--laws which the Stoics called logoi\nspermatikoi--generating reasons or causes of things. The laws of the\nworld are, like eternal reason, necessary and immutable; hence the\neimarmene--the _Destiny_ of the Stoics, which is also one of the names\nof the Deity.[826] But by Destiny the Stoics could not understand a\nblind unconscious necessity; it is rather the highest reason in the\nuniverse. \"Destiny (eimarmene) is a connected (eiromene) cause of\nthings, or the reason according to which the world is regulated.\"[827]\n\n[Footnote 824: Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives of the Philosophers,\" bk. vii.\nch. liii.]\n\n[Footnote 825: Id., ib., bk. vii. ch. lxviii.]\n\n[Footnote 826: \"They teach that God is unity, and that he is called\nMind, and _Fate_, and Jupiter.\"--Id., ib., bk. vii. ch. lxviii.]\n\n[Footnote 827: Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives of the Philosophers,\" bk. vii.\nch. lxxiv.]\n\nThese two principles are not, however, regarded by the Stoics as having\na distinct, separate, and independent existence. One is substance\n(ousia); the other is quality (poios). The primordial matter is the\npassive ground of all existence--the original substratum for the Divine\nactivity. The Divine Reason is the active or formative energy which\ndwells within, and is essentially united to, the primary substance. The\nStoics, therefore, regarded all existence as reducible, in its last\nanalysis, to _one substance_, which on the side of its passivity and\ncapacity of change, they called _hyle_ (yle);[828] and on the side of\nits changeless energy and immutable order, they called God. The\ncorporeal world--physical nature--is \"a peculiar manifestation\" of God,\ngenerated from his own substance, and, after certain periods, absorbed\nin himself. Thus God, considered in the evolution of His power, is\nnature. And nature, as attached to its immanent principle, is called\nGod.[829] The fundamental doctrine of the Stoics was a spiritual, ideal,\nintellectual pantheism, of which the proper formula is, _All things are\nGod, but God is not all things_.\n\n[Footnote 828: Or \"matter.\" A good deal of misapprehension has arisen\nfrom confounding the intellectual yle of Aristotle and the Stoics with\nthe gross physical \"matter\" of the modern physicist. By \"matter\" we now\nunderstand that which is corporeal, tangible, sensible; whereas by yle,\nAristotle and the Stoics (who borrowed the term from him) understood\nthat which is incorporeal, intangible, and inapprehensible to sense,--an\n\"unknown something\" which must necessarily be _supposed_ as the\ncondition of the existence of things. The _formal_ cause of Aristotle is\n\"the substance and essence\"--the primary nature of things, on which all\ntheir properties depend. The _material_ cause is \"the matter or subject\"\nthrough which the primary nature manifests itself. Unfortunately the\nterm \"material\" misleads the modern thinker. He is in danger of\nsupposing the _hyle_ of Aristotle to be something sensible and physical,\nwhereas it is an intellectual principle whose inherence is implied in\nany physical thing. It is something distinct from _body_, and has none\nof those properties we are now accustomed to ascribe to matter. Body,\ncorporeity, is the result of the union of \"hyle\" and \"form.\" Stobaeus\nthus expounds the doctrine of Aristotle: Form alone, separate from\nmatter (yle) is _incorporeal_; so matter alone, separated from form, is\nnot _body_. But there is need of the joint concurrence of both\nthese--matter and form--to make the substance of body. Every individual\nsubstance is thus a totality of matter and form--a sinolon.\n\nThe Stoics taught that God is _oneliness_ (Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives of\nthe Philosophers,\" bk. vii. ch. lxviii.); that he is _eternal_ and\n_immortal_ (bk. vii. ch. lxxii.); he could not, therefore, be corporeal,\nfor \"body _infinite, divisible,_ and _perishable_\" (bk. vii. ch.\nlxxvii.). \"All the parts of the world are perishable, for they change\none into another; therefore the world is perishable\" (bk. vii. ch.\nlxx.). The Deity is not, therefore, absolutely identified with the world\nby the Stoics. He permeates all things, creates and dissolves all\nthings, and is, therefore, _more_ than all things. The world is finite;\nGod is infinite.]\n\n[Footnote 829: Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives of the Philosophers,\" bk. vii.\nch. lxx.]\n\nSchwegler affirms that, in physics, the Stoics, for the most part,\nfollowed Heraclitus, and especially \"carried out the proposition that\nnothing incorporeal exists; every thing is essentially _corporeal_.\" The\npantheism of Zeno is therefore \"_materialistic._\"[830] This is not a\njust representation of the views of the early Stoics, and can not be\nsustained by a fair interpretation of their teaching. They say that\nprinciples and elements differ from each other. Principles have no\ngeneration or beginning, and will have no end; but elements may be\ndestroyed. Also, that elements have bodies, and have forms, _but\nprinciples have no bodies, and no forms_.[831] Principles are,\ntherefore, _incorporeal._ Furthermore, Cicero tells us that they taught\nthat the universal harmony of the world resulted from all things being\n\"contained by one _Divine_ SPIRIT;\"[832] and also, that reason in man is\n\"nothing else but part of the _Divine_ SPIRIT merged into a human\nbody.\"[833] It thus seems evident that the Stoics made a distinction\nbetween corruptible _elements_ (fire, air, earth, water) and\nincorruptible _principles_, by which and out of which elements were\ngenerated, and also between corporeal and incorporeal substances.\n\n[Footnote 830: Schwegler's \"History of Philosophy,\" p. 140.]\n\n[Footnote 831: Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives of the Philosophers,\" bk. vii.\nch. lxviii.]\n\n[Footnote 832: \"De Natura Deorum,\" bk. ii. ch. xiii.]\n\n[Footnote 833: Ibid, bk. ii. ch. xxxi.]\n\nOn a careful collation of the fragmentary remains of the early Stoics,\nwe fancy we catch glimpses of the theory held by some modern pantheists,\nthat the material elements, \"having body and form,\" are a vital\ntransformation of the Divine substance; and that the forces of\nnature--\"the generating causes or reasons of things\" (logoi\nspermatikoi)--are a conscious transmutation of the Divine energy. This\ntheory is more than hinted in the following passages, which we slightly\ntranspose from the order in which they stand in Diogenes Laertius,\nwithout altering their meaning. \"They teach that the Deity was in the\nbeginning by _himself_\".... that \"first of all, he made the four\nelements, fire, water, air, and earth.\" \"The fire is the highest, and\nthat is called aether, in which, first of all, the sphere was generated\nin which the fixed stars are set...; after that the air; then the water;\nand the sediment, as it were, of all, is the earth, which is placed in\nthe centre of the rest.\" \"He turned into water the whole substance which\npervaded the air; and as the seed is contained in the product, so, too,\nHe, being the seminal principle of the world, remained still in\nmoisture, making matter fit to be employed by himself in the production\nof things which were to come after.\"[834] The Deity thus draws the\nuniverse out of himself, transmuting the divine substance into body and\nform. \"God is a being of a certain quality, having for his peculiar\nmanifestation universal substance. He is a being imperishable, and who\nnever had any generation, being the maker of the arrangement and order\nthat we see; and who at certain periods of time _absorbs all substance\nin himself and then reproduces it from himself_.\"[835] And now, in the\nlast analysis, it would seem as though every thing is resolved into\n_force_. God and the world are _power, and its manifestation_, and these\nare ultimately one. \"This identification of God and the world, according\nto which the Stoics regarded the whole formation of the universe as but\na period in the development of God, renders their remaining doctrine\nconcerning the world very simple. Every thing in the world seemed to be\npermeated by the Divine life, and was regarded as the flowing out of\nthis most perfect life through certain channels, until it returns, in a\nnecessary circle, back to itself.\"[836]\n\n[Footnote 834: Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives of the Philosophers,\" bk. vii.\nch. lxviii., lxix.]\n\n[Footnote 835: Id., ib., bk. vii. ch. lxx.]\n\n[Footnote 836: Schwegler's \"History of Philosophy,\" p. 141.]\n\nThe God of the Stoics is not, however, a mere principle of life\nvitalizing nature, but an _intelligent_ principle directing nature; and,\nabove all, a _moral_ principle, governing the human race. \"God is a\nliving being, immortal, rational, perfect, and intellectual in his\nhappiness, unsusceptible of any kind of evil; having a foreknowledge of\nthe world, and of all that is in the world.\"[837] He is also the\ngracious Providence which cares for the individual as well as for the\nwhole; and he is the author of that natural law which commands the good\nand prohibits the bad. \"He made men to this end that they might be\nhappy; as becomes his fatherly care of us, he placed our good and evil\nin those things which are in our own power.\"[838] The Providence and\nFatherhood of God are strikingly presented in the \"Hymn of Cleanthes\" to\nJupiter--\n\n[Footnote 837: Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives of the Philosophers,\" bk. vii.\nch. lxxii.]\n\n[Footnote 838: Marcus Aurelius, bk. iii. ch. xxiv.]\n\n     Most glorious of the immortal Powers above!\n     O thou of many names! mysterious Jove:\n     For evermore almighty! Nature's source!\n     Thou governest all things in their order'd course!\n     All hail to thee! since, innocent of blame,\n     E'en mortal creatures may address thy name;\n     For all that breathe, and creep the lowly earth,\n     Echo thy being with reflected birth--\n     Thee will I sing, thy strength for aye resound:\n     The universe, that rolls this globe around,\n     Moves wheresoe'er thy plastic influence guides,\n     And, ductile, owns the god whose arm presides.\n     The lightnings are thy ministers of ire;\n     The double-forked and ever-living fire;\n     In thy unconquerable hands they glow,\n     And at the flash all nature quakes below.\n     Thus, thunder-armed, thou dost creation draw\n     To one immense, inevitable law:\n     And, with the various mass of breathing souls,\n     Thy power is mingled, and thy spirit rolls.\n     Dread genius of creation! all things bow\n     To thee: the universal monarch thou!\n\n     Nor aught is done without thy wise control,\n     On earth, or sea, or round the ethereal pole,\n     Save when the wicked, in their frenzy blind,\n     Act o'er the follies of a senseless mind,\n     Thou curb'st th' excess; confusion, to thy sight,\n     Moves regular; th' unlovely scene is bright.\n     Thy hand, educing good from evil, brings\n     To one apt harmony the strife of things.\n     One ever-during law still binds the whole,\n     Though shunned, resisted, by the sinner's soul.\n     Wretches! while still they course the glittering prize\n     The law of God eludes their ears and eyes.\n     Life, then, were virtue, did they thus obey;\n     But wide from life's chief good they headlong stray.\n     Now glory's arduous toils the breast inflame;\n     Now avarice thirsts, insensible of shame;\n     Now sloth unnerves them in voluptuous ease,\n     And the sweet pleasures of the body please.\n     With eager haste they rush the gulf within,\n     And their whole souls are centred in their sin.\n     But, oh, great Jove! by whom all good is given!\n     Dweller with lightnings and the clouds of heaven!\n     Save from their dreadful error lost mankind!\n     Father! disperse these shadows of the mind!\n     Give them thy pure and righteous law to know;\n     Wherewith thy justice governs all below.\n     Thus honored by the knowledge of thy way,\n     Shall men that honor to thyself repay;\n     And bid thy mighty works in praises ring,\n     As well befits a mortal's lips to sing:\n     More blest, nor men, nor heavenly powers can be,\n     Than when their songs are of thy law and thee.[839]\n\n[Footnote 839: Sir C. A. Elton's version, published in \"Specimens of\nAncient Poets,\" edited by William Peters, A. M., Christ Church, Oxford.]\n\nPSYCHOLOGY.\n\nAs in the world there are two principles, the passive and the active, so\nin the understanding there are two elements: a passive\nelement--_sensation_, and an active element--_reason_.\n\nAll knowledge commences with the phenomena of sensation (aisthesis).\nThis produces in the soul an image (phantasia), which corresponds to the\nexterior object, and which Chrysippus regarded as a modification of the\nmind (alloiosis).[840]\n\nAssociate with sensibility is thought--the faculty of general ideas--the\northos logos, or right reason, as the supreme power and the guiding\nlight of humanity. This active principle is of divine origin, \"a part or\nshred of the Divinity.\"\n\n[Footnote 840: Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives of the Philosophers,\" bk. vii.\nch. xxxiv.]\n\nThis \"right reason,\" or \"common reason,\" is the source and criterion of\nall truth; \"for our individual natures are all parts of the universal\nnature,\" and, therefore, all the dictates of \"common reason\" are\n\"identical with that right reason which pervades every thing, being the\nsame with Jupiter, who is the regulator and chief manager of all\nthings.\"\n\nThe fundamental canon of the logic of the Stoics, therefore, was that\n\"what appears to all, that is to be believed, for it is apprehended by\nthe reason, which is common and Divine.\"\n\nIt is needless to remark that the Stoics were compelled by their\nphysiological theory to deny the proper immortality of the soul. Some of\nthem seem to have supposed that it might, for a season, survive the\ndeath of the body, but its ultimate destination was absorption into the\nDivine essence. It must return to its original source.\n\nETHICS.\n\nIf reason be the great organizing and controlling law of the universe,\nthen, to live conformable to reason is the great practical law of life.\nAccordingly, the fundamental ethical maxim of the Stoics is, \"Live\nconformably with nature--that is, with reason, or the will of the\nuniversal governor and manager of all things.\"[841] Thus the chief good\n(eudaimonia) is the conformity of man's actions to reason--that is, to\nthe will of God, \"for nothing is well done without a reference to\nGod.\"[842]\n\n[Footnote 841: Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives of the Philosophers,\" bk. vii.\nch. liii.]\n\n[Footnote 842: Marcus Aurelius, bk. iii. Sec. II.]\n\nIt is obvious that this doctrine must lead to a social morality and a\njurisprudence the very opposite of the Epicurean. If we must do that\nwhich is good--that is, that which is reasonable, regardless of all\nconsequences, then it is not for the pleasurable or useful results which\nflow from it that justice should be practised, but because of its\nintrinsic excellence. Justice is constituted good, not by the law of\nman, but by the law of God. The highest pleasure is to do right; \"this\nvery thing is the virtue of the happy man, and the perfect happiness of\nlife, when every thing is done according to a harmony of the genius of\neach individual to the will of the Universal Governor and Manager of all\nthings.\"[843] Every thing which interferes with a purely rational\nexistence is to be eschewed; the pleasures and pains of the body are to\nbe despised. To triumph over emotion, over suffering, over passion; to\ngive the fullest ascendency to reason; to attain courage, moral energy,\nmagnanimity, constancy, was to realize true manhood, nay, \"to be\ngodlike; for they have something in them which is, as it were, a\ngod\"[844]\n\nThe sublime heroism of the Stoic school is well expressed in the manly\nprecept, \"Anechou\"--_sustine_--endure. \"Endure the sorrows engendered by\nthe bitter struggle between the passions support all the evils which\nfortune shall send thee--calumny, betrayal, poverty, exile, irons, death\nitself.\" In Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius this spirit seems to rise\nalmost to the grandeur of Christian resignation. \"Dare to lift up thine\neyes to God and say, 'Use me hereafter to whatsoever thou pleasest. I\nagree, and am of the same mind with thee, indifferent to all things.\nLead me whither thou pleasest. Let me act what part thou wilt, either of\na public or a private person, of a rich man or a beggar.'\"[845] \"Show\nthose qualities,\" says Marcus Aurelius, \"which God hath put in thy\npower--sincerity, gravity, endurance of labor, aversion to pleasure,\ncontentment with thy portion and with few things, benevolence,\nfrankness, no love of superfluity, freedom from trifling,\nmagnanimity.\"[846]\n\n[Footnote 843: Diogenes Laertius, \"Lives of the Philosophers,\" bk. vii.\nch. liii.]\n\n[Footnote 844: Id., ib., bk. vii. ch. xliv.]\n\n[Footnote 845: Arrian, \"Diss. Epict.,\" bk. ii. ch. xviii.]\n\n[Footnote 846: \"I read to-day part of the 'Meditations of Marcus\nAntonius' [Aurelius]. What a strange emperor! And what a strange\nheathen! Giving thanks to God for all the good things he enjoyed! In\nparticular for his good inspirations, and for twice revealing to him, in\ndreams, things wherby he was cured of (otherwise) incurable distempers.\nI make no doubt but this is one of the 'many' who shall come from the\neast and the west, and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,' while\nthe 'children of the kingdom'--nominal Christians--are 'shut\nout.'\"--Wesley's \"Journal,\" vol. i, p. 353.]\n\nAmid the fearful moral degeneracy of imperial Rome, Stoicism became the\nrefuge of all noble spirits. But, in spite of its severity, and its\napparent triumph over the feelings, it brought no real freedom and\npeace. \"Stoical morality, strictly speaking, is, at bottom, only a\nslavish morality, excellent in Epictetus; admirable still, but useless\nto the world, in Marcus Aurelius.\" Pride takes the place of real\ndisinterestedness. It stands alone in haughty grandeur and solitary\nisolation, tainted with an incurable egoism. Disheartened by its\nmetaphysical impotence, which robs God of all personality, and man of\nall hope of immortality; defeated in its struggle to obtain purity of\nsoul, it sinks into despair, and often terminates, as in the case of its\ntwo first leaders, Zeno and Cleanthes, and the two Romans, Cato and\nSeneca, in self-murder. \"Thus philosophy is only an apprenticeship of\ndeath, and not of life; it tends to death by its image, _apathy_ and\n_ataraxy._\"[847]\n\n[Footnote 847: Cousin's \"Lectures on the History of Philosophy,\" vol. i.\np. 439.]\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XIV.\n\nTHE PROPAEDEUTIC OFFICE OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY.\n\n\n\"Philosophy, before the coming of the Lord, was necessary to the Greeks\nfor righteousness, and it now proved useful for godliness, being in some\npart a preliminary discipline (propaideia tis ousa) for those who reap\nthe fruits of faith through demonstration. Perhaps we may say it was\ngiven to the Greeks with this special object; for philosophy was to the\nGreeks what the Law was to the Jews, 'a schoolmaster to bring them to\nChrist.'\"--CLEMENS ALEXANDRINUS.\n\nPhilosophy, says Cousin, is the effort of _reflection_--the attempt of\nthe human mind to develop in systematic and logical form that which has\ndimly revealed itself in the spontaneous thought of ages, and to account\nto itself in some manner for its native and instinctive beliefs. We may\nfurther add, it is the effort of the human mind to attain to truth and\ncertitude on purely rational grounds, uncontrolled by traditional\nauthorities. The sublime era of Greek philosophy was, in fact, an\nindependent effort of human reason to solve the great problems of\nexistence, of knowledge, and of duty. It was an attempt to explain the\nphenomenal history of the universe, to interpret the fundamental ideas\nand laws of human reason, to comprehend the utterances of conscience,\nand to ascertain what Ultimate and Supreme Reality underlies the world\nof phenomena, of thought, and of moral feeling.[848] And it is this\nwhich, for us, constitutes its especial value; that it was, as far as\npossible, a result of simple reason; or, if at any time Faith asserted\nits authority, the distinction is clearly marked: If this inquiry was\nfully, and honestly, and logically conducted, we are entitled to presume\nthat the results attain by this effort of speculative thought must\nharmonize with the positive utterances of the Divine Logos--the Eternal\nReason, whose revelations are embalmed and transmitted to us in the Word\nof God. If the great truth that man is \"the _offspring of God\"_ and as\nsuch \"_the image and glory of God_\" which is asserted, alike, by Paul\nand the poet-philosophers of Tarsus and Mysia, be admitted, then we may\nexpect that the reason of man shall have some correlation with the\nDivine reason. The mind of man is the _chef-d'oeuvre_ of Divine art. It\nis fashioned after the model which the Divine nature supplies. \"Let us\nmake man in _our_ image after _our_ likeness.\" That image consists in\nepignosis--_knowledge;_ dikalosyne--_justice_; and\nosiotes--_benevolence._ It is not merely the _capacity_ to know, to be\njust, and to be beneficent; it is _actual_ knowledge, justice, and\nbenevolence. It supposes, first, that the fundamental ideas of the true,\nthe just, and the good, are connate to the human mind; second, that the\nnative determination of the mind is towards the realization of these\nideas in every mental state and every form of human activity; third,\nthat there is a constitutional sympathy of reason with the ideas of\ntruth, and righteousness, and goodness, as they dwell in the reason of\nGod. And though man be now fallen, there is still within his heart some\nvestige of his primal nature. There is still a sense of the divine, a\nreligious aptitude, \"a feeling after God,\" and some longing to return to\nHim. There are still ideas in the reason, which, in their natural and\nlogical development compel him to recognize a God. There is within his\nconscience a sense of duty, of obligation, and accountability to a\nSuperior Power--\"a law of the mind,\" thought opposed and antagonized by\ndepraved passions and appetites--\"the law in the members.\" There is yet\na natural, constitutional sympathy of reason with the law of God--\"it\ndelights in that law,\" and consents \"that it is good,\" but it is\noverborne and obstructed by passion. Man, even as unregenerate, \"wills\nto do that which is good,\" but \"how to perform that which is good he\nfinds not,\" and in the agony of his soul he exclaims, \"Oh, wretched man\nthat I am, who shall deliver me!\"[849]\n\n[Footnote 848: Plato sought also to attain to the Ultimate Reality\nunderlying all aesthetic feeling--the Supreme Beauty as well as the\nSupreme Good.]\n\n[Footnote 849: Romans, ch. vii.]\n\nThe Author of nature is also the Author of revelation. The Eternal\nFather of the Eternal Son, who is the grand medium of all God's direct\ncommunications to our race--the revealer of God, is also \"the Father of\nthe spirits of all flesh.\" That divine inbreathing which first\nconstituted man \"a living soul\"--that \"inspiration of the Almighty\nwhich giveth man understanding,\" and still \"teacheth him knowledge,\"\nproceeds from the same Spirit as that which inspires the prophets and\nseers of the Old Testament Church, and the Apostles and teachers of the\nnew. That \"true light which lighteth every man that cometh into the\nworld\" shone on the mind of Anaxagoras, and Socrates, and Plato, as well\nas on the mind of Abraham and Rahab, Cornelius and the Syro-Phoenician\nwoman, and, in a higher form, and with a clearer and richer effulgence,\non the mind of Moses, Isaiah, Paul and John. It is not to be wondered\nat, then, if, in the teaching of Socrates and Plato, we should find a\nstriking _harmony_ of sentiment, and even form of expression, with some\nparts of the Christian revelation. No short-sighted jealousy ought to\nimpugn the honesty of our judgment, if, in the speculations of Plato, we\ncatch glimpses of a world of ideas not unlike that which Christianity\ndiscloses, and hear words not unfamiliar to those who spake as they were\nmoved by the Holy Ghost.\n\nIf, then, there exists some correlation between Divine and human reason,\nand if the light which illuminates all minds in Christian and in heathen\nlands is the _same_ \"true light,\" though differing in degrees of\nbrightness, it is most natural and reasonable to expect some connection\nand some correspondence between the discoveries of philosophy and the\nrevelations of the Sacred Oracles.\n\nAlthough Christianity is confessedly something which is above reason and\nnature--something communicated from above, and therefore in the fullest\nsense supernatural and superhuman, yet it must stand in _relation_ to\nreason and nature, and to their historic development; otherwise it could\nnot operate on man at all. \"We have no knowledge of a dynamic influence,\nspiritual or natural, without a dynamic reaction.\" Matter can only be\nmoved by forces, and according to laws, as it has properties which\ncorrelate it with these forces and laws. And mind can not be determined\nfrom without to any specific form of cognition, unless it have powers of\napprehension and conception which are governed by uniform laws. If man\nis to be instructed by a verbal revelation, he must, at least, be\ncapacitated for the reception of divine communication--must have a power\nof forming supersensuous conceptions, and there must be some original\ncommunity of thought and idea between the mind that teaches and the mind\nthat is taught. A revelation from an invisible God--a being \"whom no man\nhas ever seen or ever can see\" with the eye of sense--would have no\naffinity for, and no power to affect and enlighten, a being who had no\npresentiment of an invisible Power to which he is in some way related. A\nrevealed law promulgated from an unseen and utterly unknown Power would\nhave no constraining authority, if man had no idea of right, no sense of\nduty, no feeling of obligation to a Supreme Being. If, therefore,\nreligious instruction be not already preceded by an innate consciousness\nof God, and of obligation to God, as an operative predisposition, there\nwould be nothing for revelation to act upon. Some relation between the\nreason which planned the universe, and which has expressed its thoughts\nin the numerical relations and archetypal forms which are displayed\ntherein, and the reason of man, with its ideas of form and number,\nproportion and harmony, is necessarily supposed in the statement of Paul\nthat \"the invisible things of God from the creation are seen.\" Nature to\nus could be no symbol of the Divine Thought, if there were no\ncorrelation between the reason of man and the reason of God. All\nrevelation, indeed, supposes some community of nature, some affinities\nof thought, some correlation of ideas, between the mind communicating\nspiritual knowledge, and the mind to which the communication is made. In\napproaching man, it must traverse ground already occupied by man; it\nmust employ phrases already employed, and assume forms of thought\nalready familiar to man. It must address itself to some ideas,\nsentiments, and feelings already possessed by man. If religion is the\ngreat end and destination of man, then the nature of man must be\nconstituted for religion. Now religion, in its inmost nature, is a\ncommunion, a fellowship with God. But no creature can be brought into\nthis communion \"save one that is constitutionally related to God in\nterms that admit of correspondence.\" There must be intelligence offered\nto his intelligence, sentiment to his sentiment, reason to his reason,\nthought to his thought. There must be implanted in the human mind some\nfundamental ideas and determinations grounded upon this fact, that the\nreal end and destination of man is for religion, so that when that\nhigher sphere of life and action is presented to man, by an outward\nverbal revelation, there shall be a recognized harmony between the inner\nidea and determination, and the outer revelation. We can not doubt that\nsuch a relation between human nature and reason, and Christianity,\nexists. We see evidences of this in the perpetual strivings of humanity\nto attain to some fuller and clearer apprehension of that Supreme Power\nwhich is consciously near to human thought, and in the historic\ndevelopment of humanity towards those higher forms of thought and\nexistence which demand a revelation in order to their completion. This\noriginal capacity, and this historical development, have unquestionably\nprepared the way for the reception of Christianity.\n\nChristianity, then, must have some connection with the reason of man,\nand it must also have some relation to the progressive developments of\nhuman thought in the ages which preceded the advent of Christ.\nChristianity did not break suddenly upon the world as a new commencement\naltogether unconnected with the past, and wanting in all points of\nsympathy and contact with the then present. It proceeded along lines of\nthought which had been laid through ages of preparation; it clothed\nitself in forms of speech which had been moulded by centuries of\neducation, and it appropriated to itself a moral and intellectual\nculture which had been effected by long periods of severest discipline.\nIt was, in fact, the consummation of the whole moral and religious\nhistory of the world.\n\nA revelation of new truths, presented in entirely new forms of thought\nand speech, would have defeated its own ends, and, practically, would\nhave been no revelation at all. The divine light, in passing through\nsuch a medium, would have been darkened and obscured. The lens through\nwhich the heavenly rays are to be transmitted must first be prepared and\npolished. The intellectual eye itself must be gradually accustomed to\nthe light. Hence it is that all revelation has been _progressive_,\ncommencing, in the infancy of our race, with images and symbols\naddressed to sense, and advancing, with the education of the race, to\nabstract conceptions and spiritual ideas. The first communications to\nthe patriarchs were always accompanied by some external, sensible\nappearance; they were often made through some preternatural personage in\nhuman form. Subsequently, as human thought becomes assimilated to the\nDivine idea, God uses man as his organ, and communicates divine\nknowledge as an internal and spiritual gift. The theistic conception of\nthe earliest times was therefore more or less anthropomorphic, in the\nprophetic age it was unquestionably more spiritual. The education of\nHebraic, Mosaic, and prophetic ages had gradually developed a purer\ntheism, and prepared the Jewish mind for that sublime announcement of\nour Lord's--\"God is a spirit, and they that worship him must worship in\nspirit.\" For ages the Jews had worshipped in Samaria and Jerusalem, and\nthe inevitable tendency of thought was to localize the divine presence;\nbut the gradual withdrawment from these localities of all visible tokens\nof Jehovah's presence, prepared the way for the Saviour's explicit\ndeclaration that \"neither in this mountain of Samaria, nor yet at\nJerusalem, shall men worship the Father,\" to the exclusion of any other\nspot on earth; the real temple of the living God is now the heart of\nman. The _Holiness_ of God was an idea too lofty for human thought to\ngrasp at once. The light of God's ineffable purity was too bright and\ndazzling to burst at once on human eyes. Therefore it was gradually\ndisplayed. The election of a chosen seed in Abraham's race to a nearer\napproach to God than the rest of pagan humanity; the announcement of the\nDecalogue at Sinai amidst awe-inspiring wonders; the separation of a\nsingle tribe to the priestly office, who were dedicated to, and purified\nin an especial manner for the service of the tabernacle; the\nsanctification of the High-priest by sacrifice and lustration before he\ndared to enter \"the holiest place\"--the presence-chamber of Jehovah: and\nthen the direct and explicit teaching of the prophets--were all\nadvancing steps by which the Jewish mind was lifted up to the clearer\napprehension of the holiness of God, the impurity of man, the distance\nof man from God, and the need of Mediation.\n\nThe ideas of _Redemption_ and _Salvation_--of atonement, expiation,\npardon, adoption, and regeneration--are unique and _sui-generis_. Before\nthese conceptions could be presented in the fullness and maturity of the\nChristian system, there was needed the culture and education of the ages\nof Mosaic ritualism, with its sacrificial system, its rights of\npurification, its priestly absolution, and its family of God.[850]\nRedemption itself, as an economy, is a development, and has\nconsequently, a history--a history which had its commencement in the\nfirst Eden, and which shall have its consummation in the second Eden of\na regenerated world. It was germinally infolded in the first promise,\ngradually unfolded in successive types and prophecies, more fully\ndeveloped in the life, and sayings, and sufferings of the Son of God,\nand its ripened fruit is presented to the eye of faith in the closing\nscenic representations of the grand Apocalypse of John. \"Judaism was not\ngiven as a perfect religion. Whatever may have been its superiority over\nsurrounding forms of worship, it was, notwithstanding, a provisional\nform only. The consciousness that it was a preparatory, and not a\ndefinite dispensation, is evident throughout. It points to an end beyond\nitself, suggests a grander thought than any in itself; its glory\nprecisely consists in its constant looking forward to a glorious future\ndestined to surpass it.\"[851]\n\n[Footnote 850: Romans, IX 4-6.]\n\n[Footnote 851: Pressense, \"Religions before Christ,\" p. 202.]\n\nThus the determinations which, through Redemption, fall to the lot of\nhistory, as Nitzsch justly remarks, obey the emancipating law of\n_gradual progress_.[852] Christianity was preceded by ages of\npreparation, in which we have a gradual development of religious phrases\nand ideas, of forms of social life and intellectual culture, and of\nnational and political institutions most favorable to its advent and its\npromulgation; and \"in the fullness of time\"--the maturity and fitness of\nthe age--\"God sent his own Son into the world.\"\n\n[Footnote 852: \"System of Doctrine,\" p. 73.]\n\nThis work of preparation was not confined alone to Judaism. The divine\nplan of redemption comprehended all the race; its provisions are made in\nview of the wants of all the race; and we must therefore believe that\nthe entire history of the race, previous to the coming of the Redeemer,\nwas under a divine supervision, and directed towards the grand centre of\nour world's history. Greek philosophy and Grecian civilization must\ntherefore have a place in the divine plan of history, and they must\nstand in an important relation to Christianity. He who \"determined the\ntime of each nation's existence, and fixed the geographical boundaries\nof their habitation in order that they may seek the Lord,\" can not have\nbeen unmindful of the Greek nation, and of its grandest age of\nphilosophy. \"The Father of the spirits of all flesh\" could not be\nunconcerned in the moral and spiritual welfare of any of his children.\nHe was as deeply interested in the Athenian as in the Hebrew. He is the\nGod of the Gentile as well as the Jew. His tender mercies are over all\nhis works. If the Hebrew race was selected to be the agent of his\nprovidence in one special field, and if the Jewish theocracy was one\ngrand instrument of preparatory discipline, it was simply because,\nthrough these, God designed to bless all the nations of the earth. And\nsurely no one will presume to say that a civilization and an\nintellectual culture which was second only to the Hebrew, and, in some\nof its aspects, even in advance of the Hebrew, was not determined and\nsupervised by Divine Providence, and made subservient to the education\nand development of the whole race. The grand results of Hebrew\ncivilization were appropriated and assimilated by Christianity, and\nremain to this day. And no one can deny that the same is true of Greek\ncivilization. Through a kind of historic preparation the heathen world\nwas made ready for Christ, as a soil is prepared to receive the seed,\nand some precious fruits of knowledge, of truth, and of righteousness,\neven, were largely matured, which have been reaped, and appropriated,\nand vitalized by the heaven-descended life of Christianity.\n\nThe chief points of excellence in the civilization of the Greeks are\nstrikingly obvious, and may be readily presented. High perfection of the\nintellect and the imagination displaying itself in the various forms of\nart, poetry, literature, and philosophy. A wonderful freedom and\nactivity of body and of mind, developed in trade, and colonization, in\nmilitary achievement, and in subtile dialectics. A striking love of the\nbeautiful, revealing itself in their sculpture and architecture, in the\nfree music of prosaic numbers, and the graceful movement and measure of\ntheir poetry. A quickness of perception, a dignity of demeanor, a\nrefinement of taste, a delicacy of moral sense, and a high degree of\nreverence for the divine in nature and humanity. And, in general, a ripe\nand all-pervading culture, which has made Athens a synonym for all that\nis greatest and best in the genius of man; so that literature, in its\nmost flourishing periods has rekindled its torch at her altars, and art\nhas looked back to the age of Pericles for her purest models.[853] All\nthese enter into the very idea of Greek civilization. We can not resist\nthe conviction that, by a Divine Providence, it was made subservient to\nthe purpose of Redemption; it prepared the way for, and contributed to,\nthe spread of the Gospel.\n\n[Footnote 853: In Lord Brougham's celebrated letter to the father of the\nhistorian Macaulay in regard to the education of the latter, we read:\n\"If he would be a great orator, he must go at once to the fountain-head,\nand be familiar with every one of the great orations of Demosthenes....\nI know from experience that nothing is half so successful in these times\n(bad though they be) as what has been formed on the Greek models. I use\npoor illustrations in giving my own experience, but I do assure you that\nboth in courts and Parliament, and even to mobs, I have never made so\nmuch play (to use a very modern phrase) as when I was almost translating\nfrom the Greek. I composed the peroration of my speech for the Queen, in\nthe Lords, after reading and repeating Demosthenes for three or four\nweeks.\"]\n\nIts subserviency to this grand purpose is seen in the Greek tendency to\ntrade and colonization. Their mental activity was accompanied by great\nphysical freedom of movement. They displayed an inherent disposition to\nextensive emigration. \"Without aiming at universal conquest, they\ndeveloped (if we may use the word) a remarkable catholicity of\ncharacter, and a singular power of adaptation to those whom they called\nBarbarians. In this respect they were strongly contrasted with the\nEgyptians, whose immemorial civilization was confined to the long valley\nwhich extended from the cataracts to the mouth of the Nile. The Hellenic\ntribes, on the other hand, though they despised the foreigners, were\nnever unwilling to visit them and to cultivate their acquaintance. At\nthe earliest period at which history enables us to discover them, we see\nthem moving about in their ships on the shores and among the islands of\ntheir native seas; and, three or four centuries before the Christian\nera, Asia Minor, beyond which the Persians had not been permitted to\nadvance, was bordered by a fringe of Greek colonies; and lower Italy,\nwhen the Roman Republic was just becoming conscious of its strength, had\nreceived the name of Greece itself. To all these places they carried\ntheir arts and literature, their philosophy, their mythology, and their\namusements.... They were gradually taking the place of the Phoenicians\nin the empire of the Mediterranean. They were, indeed, less exclusively\nmercantile than those old discoverers. Their voyages were not so long.\nBut their influence on general civilization was greater and more\npermanent. The earliest ideas of scientific navigation and geography are\ndue to the Greeks. The later Greek travellers, Pausanias and Strabo, are\nour best sources of information on the topography of St. Paul's\njourneys.\n\n\"With this view of the Hellenic character before us, we are prepared to\nappreciate the vast results of Alexander's conquests. He took the meshes\nof the net of Greek civilization which were lying in disorder on the\nedge of the Asiatic shore, and spread them over all the countries he\ntraversed in his wonderful campaigns. The East and the West were\nsuddenly brought together. Separate tribes were united under a common\ngovernment. New cities were built as the centres of political life. New\nlines of communication were opened as the channels of commercial\nactivity. The new culture penetrated the mountain ranges of Pisidia and\nLycaonia. The Tigris and Euphrates became Greek rivers. The language of\nAthens was heard among the Jewish colonies of Babylonia, and a Grecian\nBabylon was built by the conqueror in Egypt, and called by his name.\n\n\"The empire of Alexander was divided, but the effects of his campaigns\nand policy did not cease. The influence of these fresh elements of\nsocial life was rather increased by being brought into independent\naction within the sphere of distinct kingdoms. Our attention is\nparticularly directed to two of the monarchical lines which descended\nfrom Alexander's generals--the Ptolemies, or the Greek kings of Egypt,\nand the Seleucidae, or the Greek kings of Syria. Their respective\ncapitals, Alexandria and Antioch, became the metropolitan centres of\ncommercial and civilized life in the East.\"[854] Antioch was for ages\nthe home of science and philosophy. Here the religious opinions of the\nEast and the West were blended and mutually modified. Here it was\ndiscovered by the heathen mind that a new religion had appeared, and a\nnew revelation had been given.[855] In Alexandria all nations were\ninvited to exchange their commodities and, with equal freedom, their\nopinions. The representatives of all religions met here. \"Beside the\nTemple of Jupiter there rose the white marble Temple of Serapis, and\nclose at hand stood the synagogue of the Jews.\" The Alexandrian library\ncontained all the treasures of ancient culture, and even a copy of the\nHebrew Scriptures.\n\n[Footnote 854: Conybeare and Howson, \"Life and Epistles of St. Paul,\"\nvol. i. pp. 8-10.]\n\n[Footnote 855: Acts, xi. 26.]\n\nThe spread of the Greek _language_ was one of the most important\nservices which the cities of Antioch and Alexandria rendered to\nChristianity. The Greek tongue is intimately connected with the whole\nsystem of Christian doctrine.\n\nThis language, which, in symmetry of structure, in flexibility and\ncompass of expression, in exactness and precision, in grace and\nelegance, exceeds every other language, became the language of theology.\nNext in importance to the inspiration which communicates the superhuman\nthought, must be the gradual development of the language in which the\nthought can clothe itself. That development by which the Greek language\nbecame the adequate vehicle of Divine thought, the perfect medium of the\nmature revelation of truth contained in the Christian Scriptures, must\nbe regarded as the subject of a Divine providence. Christianity waited\nfor that development, and it awaited Christianity. \"The Greek tongue\nbecame to the Christian more than it had been to the Roman or the Jew.\nThe mother-tongue of Ignatius at Antioch was that in which Philo\ncomposed his treatises at Alexandria, and which Cicero spoke at Athens.\nIt is difficult to state in a few words the important relation which\nAlexandria, more especially, was destined to bear to the whole Christian\nChurch.\" In that city, the Old Testament was translated into Greek;\nthere the writings of Plato were diligently studied; there Philo, the\nPlatonizing Jew, had sought to blend into one system the teachings of\nthe Old Testament theology and the dialectic speculations of Plato.\nNumenius learns of Philo, and Plotinus of Numenius, and the ecstasy of\nPlotinus is the development of Philo's intuitions. A _theological\nlanguage_ by this means was developed, rich in the phrases of various\nschools, and suited to convey the spiritual revelation of Christian\nideas to all the world. \"It was not an accident that the New Testament\nwas written in Greek, the language which can best express the highest\nthoughts and worthiest feelings of the intellect and heart, and which is\nadapted to be the instrument of education for all nations; nor was it an\naccident that the composition of these books and the promulgation of the\nGospels were delayed till the instruction of our Lord, and the writings\nof his Apostles could be expressed in the dialect [of Athens and] of\nAlexandria.\"[856] This must be ascribed to the foreordination of Him\nwho, in the history of nations and of civilizations, \"worketh all things\naccording to the counsel of his own will.\"\n\n[Footnote 856: Conybeare and Howson, \"Life and Epistles of St. Paul,\"\nvol. i. p. 10.]\n\nNow it is the doctrine of the best philologists that language is a\n_growth_. Gradually, and by combined efforts of successive generations,\nit has been brought to the perfection which we so much admire in the\nidioms of the Bible, the poetry of Homer, Dante, and Shakspeare, and the\nprose compositions of Demosthenes, Cicero, Johnson, and Macaulay. The\nmaterial or root-element of language may have been the product of mental\ninstinct, or perhaps the immediate gift of God by revelation; but the\nformal element must have been the creation of thought, and the result of\nrational combination. Language is really the incarnation of thought;\nconsequently the growth of a language, its affluence, comprehension, and\nfullness must depend on the vigor and activity of thought, and the\nacquisition of general ideas. Language is thus the best index of\nintellectual progress, the best standard of the intellectual attainment\nof an age or nation. The language of barbaric tribes is exceedingly\nsimple and meagre; the paucity of general terms clearly indicating the\nabsence of all attempts at classification and all speculative thought.\nWhilst the language of educated peoples is characterized by great\nfullness and affluence of terms, especially such as are expressive of\ngeneral notions and abstract ideas. All grammar, all philology, all\nscientific nomenclature are thus, in fact, _psychological deposits_,\nwhich register the progressive advancement of human thought and\nknowledge in the world of mind, as the geological strata bear testimony\nto the progressive development of the material world. \"Language,\" says\nTrench, \"is fossil poetry, fossil history,\" and, we will add, fossil\nphilosophy. Many a single word is a concentrated poem. The record of\ngreat social and national revolutions is embalmed in a single term.[857]\nAnd the history of an age of philosophic thought is sometimes condensed\nand deposited in one imperishable word.[858]\n\n[Footnote 857: See Trench \"On the Study of Words,\" p. 20, where the word\n\"frank\" is given as an illustration.]\n\n[Footnote 858: For example, the cosmos of the Pythagoreans, the eide of\nthe Platonists, and the ataraxia of the Stoics.]\n\nIf, then, language is the creation of thought, the sensible vesture with\nwhich it clothes itself, and becomes, as it were, incarnate--if the\nperfection and efficiency of language depends on the maturity and\nclearness of thought, we conclude that the wonderful adequacy and\nfitness of the Greek language to be the vehicle of the Divine thought,\nthe medium of the most perfect revelation of God to men, can only be\nexplained on the assumption that the ages of philosophic thought which,\nin Greece, preceded the advent of Christianity, were under the immediate\nsupervision of a providence, and, in some degree, illuminated by the\nSpirit of God.\n\nGreek philosophy must therefore have fulfilled a propaedeutic office for\nChristianity. \"As it had been intrusted to the Hebrews to preserve and\ntransmit the heaven-derived element of the Monotheistic religion, so it\nwas ordained that, among the Greeks, all seeds of human culture should\nunfold themselves in beautiful harmony, and then Christianity, taking up\nthe opposition between the divine and human, was to unite both in one,\nand show how it was necessary that both should co-operate to prepare for\nthe appearance of itself and the unfolding of what it contains.\"[859]\nDuring the period of Greek philosophy which preceded the coming of\nChrist, human reason, unfolding itself from beneath, had aspired after\nthat knowledge of divine things which is from above. It had felt within\nitself the deep-seated consciousness of God--the sporadic revelation of\nHim \"who is not far from any one of us\"--the immanent thought of that\nBeing \"in whom we live and move and are,\" and it had striven by analysis\nand definition to attain a more distinct and logical apprehension. The\nheart of man had been stirred with \"the feeling after God\"--the longing\nfor a clearer sense of the divine, and had struggled to attain, by\nabstraction or by ecstasy, a more immediate communion with God. Man had\nbeen conscious of an imperative obligation to conform to the will of the\ngreat Supreme, and he sought to interpret more clearly the utterances of\nconscience as to what duty was. He had felt the sense of sin and guilt,\nand had endeavored to appease his conscience by expiatory offerings, and\nto deliver himself from the power of sin by intellectual culture and\nmoral discipline. And surely no one, at all familiar with the history of\nthat interesting epoch in the development of humanity, will have the\nhardihood to assert that no steps were taken in the right direction, and\nno progress made towards the distant goal of human desire and hope. The\nlanguage, the philosophy, the ideals of moral beauty and excellence, the\nnoble lives and nobler utterances of the men who stand forth in history\nas the representatives of Greek civilization, all attest that their\nnoble aspiration and effort did not end in ignominious failure and utter\ndefeat. It is true they fell greatly beneath the realization of even\ntheir own moral ideals, and they became painfully conscious of their\nmoral weakness, as men do even in Christian times. They learned that,\nneither by intellectual abstraction, nor by ecstasy of feeling, could\nthey lift themselves to a living, conscious fellowship with God. The\nsense of guilt was unrelieved by expiations, penances, and prayers. And\nwhilst some cultivated a proud indifference, a Stoical apathy, and\nothers sank down to Epicurean ease and pleasure, there was a noble few\nwho longed and hoped with increasing ardor for a living Redeemer, a\npersonal Mediator, who should \"stand between God and man and lay his\nhand on both.\" Christ became in some dim consciousness \"the Desire of\nNations,\" and the Moral Law became even to the Greek as well as the Jew\n\"a school-master to lead them to Him.\"\n\n[Footnote 859: Neander's \"Church History,\" vol. i. p. 4.]\n\nThe arrival of Paul at Athens, in the close of this brilliant period of\nGreek philosophy, now assumes an aspect of deeper interest and\nprofounder significance. It was a grand climacteric in the life of\nhumanity--an epoch in the moral and religious history of the world. It\nmarked the consummation of a periodic dispensation, and it opened a new\nera in that wonderful progression through which an overruling Providence\nis carrying the human race. As the coming of the Son of God to Judea in\nthe ripeness of events--\"the fullness of time\"--was the consummation of\nthe Jewish dispensation, and the event for which the Jewish age had been\na preparatory discipline, so the coming of a Christian teacher to\nAthens, in the person of \"the Apostle of the Gentiles,\" was the\n_terminus ad quem_ towards which all the phases in the past history of\nphilosophic thought had looked, and for which they had prepared.\nChristianity was brought to Athens--brought into contact with Grecian\nphilosophy at the moment of its exhaustion--at the moment when, after\nages of unwearied effort, it had become conscious of its weakness, and\nits comparative failure, and had abandoned many questions in despair.\nGreek philosophy had therefore its place in the plan of Divine\nProvidence. It had a mission to the world; that mission was now\nfulfilled. If it had laid any foundation in the Athenian mind on which\nthe Christian system could plant its higher truths--if it had raised up\ninto the clearer light of consciousness any of those _ideas_ imbedded in\nthe human reason which are germane to Christian truth--if it had\nrevealed more fully the wants and instincts of the human heart, or if it\nhad attained the least knowledge of eternal truth and immutable right,\nupon this Christianity placed its _imprimatur_. And at those points\nwhere human reason had been made conscious of its own inefficiency, and\ncompelled to own its weakness and its failure, Christianity shed an\neffulgent and convincing light.\n\nTherefore the preparatory office of Greek religion and Greek philosophy\nis fully recognized by Paul in his address to the Athenians. He begins\nby saying that the observations he had made enabled him to bear witness\nthat the Athenians were indeed, in every respect, \"a God-fearing\npeople;\"--that the God whom they knew so imperfectly as to designate Him\n\"the Unknown,\" but whom \"they worshipped,\" was the God he worshipped,\nand would now more fully declare to them. He assures them that their\npast history, and their present geographical position, had been the\nobject of Divine foreknowledge and determination. \"He hath determined\nbeforehand the times of each nation's existence, and fixed the\ngeographical boundaries of their habitation,\" all with this specific\ndesign, that they might \"seek after,\" \"feel after,\" and \"find the Lord,\"\nwho had never been far from any one of them. He admits that their\npoet-philosophers had risen to a lofty apprehension of \"the Fatherhood\nof God,\" for they had taught that \"we are all his offspring;\" and he\nseems to have felt that in asserting the common brotherhood of our race,\nhe would strike a chord of sympathy in the loftiest school of Gentile\nphilosophy. He thus \"recognized the Spirit of God brooding over the face\nof heathenism, and fructifying the spiritual element in the heart even\nof the natural man. He feels that in these human principles there were\nsome faint adumbrations of the divine, and he looked for their firmer\ndelineation to the figure of that gracious Master, higher and holier\nthan man, whom he contemplated in his own imagination, and whom he was\nabout to present to them.\"[860]\n\n[Footnote 860: Merivale's \"Conversion of the Roman Empire,\" p. 78.]\n\nThis function of ancient philosophy is distinctly recognized by many of\nthe greatest of the Fathers, as Justin, Clement, Origen, Augustine, and\nTheodoret. Justin Martyr believed that a ray of the Divine Logos shone\non the mind of the heathen, and that the human soul instinctively turned\ntowards God as the plant turns towards the sun. \"Every race of men\nparticipated in the Word. And they who lived with the Word were\nChristians, even if they were held to be godless; as, for example, among\nthe Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and those like them.\"[861] Clement\ntaught that \"philosophy, before the coming of the Lord, was necessary to\nthe Greeks for righteousness; and now it proved useful for godliness,\nbeing a sort of preliminary discipline for those who reap the fruits of\nfaith through demonstration.... Perhaps we may say that it was given to\nthe Greeks with this special object, for it brought the Greek nation to\nChrist as the Law brought the Hebrews.\"[862] \"Philosophy was given as a\npeculiar testament to the Greeks, as forming the basis of the Christian\nphilosophy.\"[863] Referring to the words of Paul, Origen says, the\ntruths which philosophers taught were from God, for \"God manifested\nthese to them, and all things that have been nobly said.\"[864] And\nAugustine, whilst deprecating the extravagant claims made for the great\nGentile teachers, allows \"that some of them made great discoveries, so\nfar as they received help from heaven; whilst they erred as far as they\nwere hindered by human frailty.\"[865] They had, as he elsewhere\nobserves, \"a distant vision of the truth, and learnt, from the teaching\nof nature, what prophets learnt from the spirit.\"[866] In addressing the\nGreeks, Theodoret says, \"Obey your own philosophers; let them be your\ninitiators; for they announced beforehand our doctrines.\" He held that\n\"in the depths of human nature there are characters inscribed by the\nhand of God.\" And that \"if the race of Abraham received the divine law,\nand the gift of prophecy, the God of the universe led other nations to\npiety by natural revelation, and the spectacle of nature.\"[867]\n\n[Footnote 861: \"First Apology,\" ch. xlvi.]\n\n[Footnote 862: \"Stromata,\" bk. i. ch. v.]\n\n[Footnote 863: \"Stromata,\" bk. vi. ch. viii.]\n\n[Footnote 864: \"Contra Celsum,\" bk. vi. ch. iii.]\n\n[Footnote 865: \"De Civitate Dei,\" bk. ii. ch. vii.]\n\n[Footnote 866: Sermon lxviii. 3.]\n\n[Footnote 867: See Smith's \"Bible Dictionary,\" article \"Philosophy;\"\nPressense, \"Religions before Christ,\" p. II; Butler's \"Lectures on\nAncient Philosophy,\" vol. ii. pp. 28-40.]\n\nIn attempting to account for this partial harmony between Philosophy and\nRevelation, we find the Patristic writers adopting different theories.\nThey are generally agreed in maintaining some original connection, but\nthey differ as to its immediate source. Some of them maintained that the\nancient philosophers derived their purest light from the fountain of\nDivine Revelation. The doctrines of the Old Testament Scriptures were\ntraditionally diffused throughout the West before the rise of\nphilosophic speculation. If the theistic conceptions of Plato are\nsuperior to those of Homer it is accounted for by his (hypothetical)\ntour of inquiry among the Hebrew nation, as well as his Egyptian\ninvestigations. Others maintained that the similarity of views on the\ncharacter of the Supreme Being and the ultimate destination of humanity\nwhich is found in the writings of Plato and the teachings of the Bible\nis the consequence of _immediate_ inspiration. Origen, Jerome, Eusebius,\nClement, do not hesitate to affirm that Christ himself revealed his own\nhigh prerogatives to the gifted Grecian. From this hypothesis, however,\nthe facts of the case compel them to make some abatements. In the\nmid-current of this divine revelation are found many acknowledged\nerrors, which it is impossible to ascribe to the celestial illuminator.\nPlato, then, was _partially_ inspired, and clouded the heavenly beam\nwith the remaining grossnesses of the natural sense.[868] Whilst a\nthird, and more reasonable, hypothesis was maintained by others. They\nregarded man as \"the offspring and image of the Deity,\" and maintained\nthere must be a correlation of the human and divine reason, and,\nconsequently, of all discovered truth to God. Therefore they expected to\nfind some traces of connection and correspondence between Divine and\nhuman thought, and some kindred ideas in Philosophy and Revelation.\n\"Ideas,\" says St. Augustine, \"are the primordial forms, as it were, the\nimmutable reason of things; they are not created, they are eternal, and\nalways the same: they are contained in the Divine intelligence and\nwithout being subject to birth and death, they are _types_ according to\nwhich is formed every thing that is born and dies.\" The copies of these\narchetypes are seen in nature, and are participated in by the reason of\nman; and there may therefore be some community of idea between man and\nGod, and some relation between Philosophy and Christianity.\n\n[Footnote 868: Butler's \"Lectures on Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. ii. p.\n41.]\n\nThe various attempts which have been made to trace the elevated theism\nand morality of Socrates and Plato to Jewish sources have signally\nfailed. Justin Martyr and Tertullian claim that the ancient philosophers\n\"borrowed from the Jewish prophets.\" Pythagoras and Plato are supposed\nto have travelled in the East in quest of knowledge.[869] The latter is\nimagined to have had access to an existing Greek version of the Old\nTestament in Egypt, and a strange oversight in chronology brings him\ninto personal intercourse with the prophet Jeremiah. A sober and\nenlightened criticism is compelled to pronounce all these statements as\nmere exaggerations of later times.[870] They are obviously mere\nsuppositions by which over-zealous Christians sought to maintain the\nsupremacy and authority of Scripture. The travels of Pythagoras are\naltogether mythical, the mere invention of Alexandrian writers, who\nbelieved that all wisdom flowed from the East.[871] That Plato visited\nEgypt at all, rests on the single authority of Strabo, who lived at\nleast four centuries after Plato; there is no trace in his own works of\nEgyptian research. His pretended travels in Phoenicia, where he gained\nfrom the Jews a knowledge of the true God, are more unreliable still.\nPlato lived in the fourth century before Christ (born B.C. 430), and\nthere is no good evidence of the existence of a Greek version of the Old\nTestament before that of \"the Seventy\" (Septuagint), made by order of\nPtolemy Philadelphus, B.C. 270. Jeremiah, the prophet of Israel, lived\ntwo centuries before Plato; consequently any personal intercourse\nbetween the two was simply impossible. Greek philosophy was\nunquestionably a development of Reason alone.[872]\n\n[Footnote 869: Mr. Watson adopts this hypothesis to account for the\ntheistic opinions of the ancient philosophers of Greece. See \"Institutes\nof Theology,\" vol. i. pp. 26-34.]\n\n[Footnote 870: Ritter's \"History of Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. ii. p.\n147.]\n\n[Footnote 871: Max Muller, \"Science of Language,\" p. 94.]\n\n[Footnote 872: See on this subject, Ritter's \"History of Ancient\nPhilosophy,\" vol. i. pp. 147, 148; Encyclopaedia Britannica, article\n\"Plato,\" vol. xvii. p. 787; Smith's \"Bible Dictionary,\" article\n\"Philosophy;\" and Thompson's \"Laws of Thought,\" p. 326.]\n\nSome of the ablest Christian scholars and divines of modern times, as\nCudworth, Neander, Trench, Pressense, Merivale, Schaff, after the most\ncareful and conscientious investigation, have come to this conclusion,\nthat Greek philosophy fulfilled a preparatory mission for Christianity.\nThe general conclusions they reached are forcibly presented in the words\nof Pressense:\n\nIt would be difficult to overstate the importance of Greek philosophy\nwhen viewed as a preparation to Christianity. Disinterested pursuit of\ntruth is always a great and noble task. The imperishable want of the\nhuman mind to go back to first principles, suffices to prove that this\nprinciple is divine. We may abuse speculation; we may turn it into one\nof the most powerful dissolvents of moral truths; and the defenders of\npositive creeds, alarmed by the attitude too often assumed by\nspeculation in the presence of religion, have condemned it as\nmischievous in itself, confounding in their unjust prejudice its use and\nits abuse. But, for all serious thinkers, philosophy is one of the\nhighest titles of nobility that humanity possesses: and when we consider\nits mission previous to Christianity, we feel convinced that it had its\nplace in the Divine plan. It was not religion in itself that philosophy,\nthrough its noblest representatives, combated, but polytheism. It\ndethroned the false gods. Adopting what was best in paganism, philosophy\nemployed it as an instrument to destroy paganism, and thus clear the way\nfor definite religion. Above all, it effectually contributed to purify\nthe idea of Divinity, though this purification was but an approximation.\nIf at times it caught glimpses of the highest spiritualism, yet it was\nunable to protect itself against the return and reaction of Oriental\ndualism. In spite of this imperfection, which in its way served the\ncause of Christianity by demonstrating the necessity of revelation, men\nlike Socrates and Plato fulfilled amongst their people a really sublime\nmission.\n\nThey were to the heathen world the great prophets of the human\nconscience, which woke up at their call. And the awakening of the moral\nsense was at once the glory and ruin of philosophy; for conscience, once\naroused, could only be satisfied by One greater than they, and must\nnecessarily reject all systems which proved themselves insufficient to\nrealize the moral idea they had evoked.\n\n\"But to perish thus, and for such a cause, is a high honor to a\nphilosophy. It was this made the philosophy of Greece, like the Hebrew\nlaws, though in an inferior sense, a schoolmaster that led to Jesus\nChrist, according to the expression of Clement of Alexandria. Viewed in\nthis light, it was a true gift of God, and had, too, the shadow of good\nthings to come, awakening the presentiment and desire of them, though it\ncould not communicate them. Nor can we conceive a better way to prepare\nfor the advent of Him who was to be 'the Desire of Nations' before\nbecoming their Saviour.\"[873]\n\n[Footnote 873: \"Religions before Christ,\" pp. 101, 102.]\n\nIn previous chapters we have endeavored to sketch the history of the\ndevelopment of metaphysical thought, of moral feeling and idea, and of\nreligious sentiment and want, which characterized Grecian civilization.\nIn now offering a brief _resume_ of the history of that development,\nwith the design of more fully exhibiting the preparatory office it\nfulfilled for Christianity, we shall assume that the mind of the reader\nhas already been furnished and disciplined by preparatory principles. He\ncan scarce have failed to recognize that this development obeyed a\n_general law_, however modified by exterior and geographical conditions;\nthe same law, in fact, which governs the development of all individual\nfinite minds, and which law may be formulated thus:--_All finite mind\ndevelops itself, first, in instinctive determinations and spontaneous\nfaiths; then in rising doubt, and earnest questioning, and ill-directed\ninquiry; and, finally, in systematic philosophic thought, and rational\nbelief_. These different stages succeed each other in the individual\nmind. There is, first, the simplicity and trust of childhood; secondly,\nthe undirected and unsettled force of youth; and, thirdly, the wisdom of\nmature age. And these different stages have also succeeded each other in\nthe universal mind of humanity. There has been, 1st. _The era of\nspontaneous beliefs_--of popular and semi-conscious theism, morality,\nand religion, 2d. _The transitional age_--the age of doubt, of inquiry,\nand of ill-directed mental effort, ending in fruitless sophism, or in\nskepticism. 3d. _The philosophic or conscious age_--the age of\nreflective consciousness, in which, by the analysis of thought, the\nfirst principles of knowledge are attained, the necessary laws of\nthought are discovered, and man arrives at positive convictions, and\nrational beliefs. In the history of Grecian civilization, the first is\nthe Homeric age; the second is the pre-Socratic age, ending with the\nSophists; and the third is the grand Socratic period. History is thus\nthe development of the fundamental elements of humanity, according to an\nestablished law, and under conditions which are ordained and supervised\nby the providence of God. \"The unity of civilization is in the unity of\nhuman nature; its varieties, in the variety of the elements of\nhumanity,\" which elements have been successively developed in the course\nof history. All that is fundamental in human nature passes into the\nmovement of civilization. \"I say all that is fundamental; for it is the\nexcellency of history to take out, and throw away all that is not\nnecessary and essential. That which is individual shines for a day, and\nis extinguished forever, or stops at biography.\" Nothing endures, except\nthat which is fundamental and true--that which is vital, and organizes\nitself, develops itself, and arrives at an historical existence.\n\"Therefore as human nature is the matter and basis of history, history\nis, so to speak, the judge of human nature, and historical analysis is\nthe counter-proof of psychological analysis.\"[874]\n\n[Footnote 874: Cousin's \"Lectures on the History of Philosophy,\" vol. i.\np. 31.] Nature, individual mind, and collective humanity, all obey the\nlaw of progressive development; otherwise there could be no history, for\nhistory is only of that which has movement and progress. Now, all\nprogress is from the indefinite to the definite, from the inorganic to\nthe organic and vital, from the instinctive to the rational, from a dim,\nnebulous self-feeling to a high reflective consciousness, from sensuous\nimages to abstract conceptions and spiritual ideas. This progressive\ndevelopment of nature and humanity has not been a series of creations\n_de novo_, without any relation, in matter or form, to that which\npreceded. All of the present was contained in embryonic infoldment in\nthe past, and the past has contributed its results to the present.[875]\nThe present, both in nature, and history, and civilization, is, so to\nspeak, the aggregate and sum-total of the past. As the natural history\nof the earth may now be read in the successive strata and deposits which\nform its crust, so the history of humanity may be read in the successive\ndeposits of thought and language, of philosophy and art, which register\nits gradual progression. As the paleontological remains imbedded in the\nrocks present a succession of organic types which gradually improve in\nform and function, from the first sea-weed to the palm-tree, and from\nthe protozoa to the highest vertebrate, so the history of ancient\nphilosophy presents a gradual progress in metaphysical, ethical, and\ntheistic conceptions, from the unreflective consciousness of the Homeric\nage, to the high reflective consciousness of the Platonic period. And as\nall the successive forms of life in pre-Adamic ages were a preparation\nfor and a prophecy of the coming of man, so the advancing forms of\nphilosophic thought, during the grand ages of Grecian civilization, were\na preparation and a prophecy of the coming of the Son of God.\n\n[Footnote 875: The writer would not be understood as favoring the idea\nthat this development is simply the result of \"natural law.\" The\nconnection between the past and the present is not a material, but a\n_mental_ connection. It is the bond of Creative Thought and Will giving\nto organic forces a foreseen direction towards the working out of a\ngrand plan. See Agassiz, \"Contributions to Natural History,\" vol. i. pp.\n9, 10; Duke of Argyll, \"Reign of Law,\" ch. v.]\n\nWe shall now endeavor to trace this process of gradual preparation for\nChristianity in the Greek mind--\n\n(i.) _In the field of_ THEISTIC _conceptions_.\n\n(ii.) _In the department of_ ETHICAL _ideas and principles_.\n\n(iii.) _In the region of_ RELIGIOUS _sentiment_.\n\nIn the field of theistic conception the propaedeutic office of Grecian\nphilosophy is seen--\n\nI. _In the release of the popular mind from Polytheistic notion, and the\npurifying and spiritualizing of the Theistic idea_.\n\nThe idea of a Supreme Power, a living Personality, energizing in nature,\nand presiding over the affairs of men, is not the product of philosophy.\nIt is the immanent, spontaneous thought of humanity. It has, therefore,\nexisted in all ages, and revealed itself in all minds, even when it has\nnot been presented to the understanding as a definite conception, and\nexpressed by human language in a logical form. It is the thought which\ninstinctively arises in the opening reason of childhood, as the dim and\nshadowy consciousness of a living mind behind all the movement and\nchange of the universe. Then comes the period of doubt, of anxious\nquestioning, and independent inquiry. The youth seeks to account to\nhimself for this peculiar sentiment. He turns his earnest gaze towards\nnature, and through this living vesture of the infinite he seeks to\ncatch some glimpses of the living Soul. In some fact appreciable to\nsense, in some phenomenon he can see, or hear, or touch, he would fain\ngrasp the cause and reason of all that is. But in this field of inquiry\nand by this method he finds only a \"receding God,\" who falls back as he\napproaches, and is ever still beyond; and he sinks down in exhaustion\nand feebleness, the victim of doubt, perhaps despair. Still the\nsentiment of the Divine remains, a living force, in the centre of his\nmoral being. He turns his scrutinizing gaze within, and by\nself-reflection seeks for some rational ground for his instinctive\nfaith. There he finds some convictions he can not doubt, some ideas he\ncan not call in question, some thoughts he is compelled to think, some\nnecessary and universal principles which in their natural and logical\ndevelopment ally him to an unseen world, and correlate and bind him fast\nto an invisible, but real God. The more his mind is disciplined by\nabstract thought, the clearer do these necessary and universal\nprinciples become, and the purer and more spiritual his ideas of God.\nGod is now for him the First Principle of all principles, the First\nTruth of all truths; the Eternal Reason, the Immutable Righteousness,\nthe Supreme Good. The normal and healthy development of reason, the\nmaturity of thought, conduct to the recognition of the true God.\n\nAnd so it has been in the universal consciousness of our race as\nrevealed in history. There was first a period of spontaneous and\nunreflective Theism, in which man felt the consciousness of God, but\ncould not or did not attempt a rational explanation of his instinctive\nfaith. He saw God in clouds and heard Him in the wind. His smile\nnourished the corn, and cheered the vine. The lightnings were the\nflashes of his vengeful ire, and the thunder was his angry voice. But\nthe unity of God was feebly grasped, the rays of the Divinity seemed\ndivided and scattered amidst the separate manifestations of power, and\nwisdom, and goodness, and retribution, which nature presented. Then\nplastic art, to aid and impress the imagination, created its symbols of\nthese separate powers and principles, chiefly in human form, and gods\nwere multiplied. But all this polytheism still rested on a dim\nmonotheistic background, and all the gods were subordinated to\nZeus--\"the Father of gods and men.\" Humanity had still the sense of the\ndependence of all finite being on one great fountain-head of\nIntelligence and Power, and all the \"generated gods\" were the subjects\nand ministers of that One Supreme. This was the childhood of humanity so\nvividly represented in Homeric poetry.\n\nThen came a period of incipient reflection, and speculative thought, in\nwhich the attention of man is drawn outward to the study of nature, of\nwhich he can yet only recognize himself as an integral part. He searches\nfor some arche--some first principle, appreciable to sense, which in its\nevolution shall furnish an explanation of the problem of existence. He\ntries the hypothesis of \"_water_\" then of \"_air_\" then of \"_fire_\" as\nthe primal element, which either is itself, or in some way infolds\nwithin itself an informing Soul, and out of which, by vital\ntransformation, all things else are produced. But here he failed to find\nan adequate explanation; his reason was not satisfied. Then he sought\nhis first principle in \"_numbers_\" as symbols, and, in some sense, as\nthe embodiment of the rational conceptions of order, proportion, and\nharmony,--God is the original _monas_--unity--One;--or else he sought it\nin purely abstract \"_ideas_\" as unity, infinity, identity, and all\nthings are the evolution of an eternal thought, one and identical, which\nis God. And here again he fails. Then he supposes an unlimited\n_migma_--a chaotic mixture of elements existing from eternity, which was\nseparated, combined, and organized by the energy of a Supreme Mind, the\n_nous_ of Anaxagoras. But he holds not firmly to this great principle;\n\"he recurs again to air, and ether, and water, as _causes_ for the\nordering of all things.\"[876] And after repeated attempts and failures,\nhe is disappointed in his inquiry, and falls a prey to doubt and\nskepticism. This was the early youth of our humanity, the period that\nopens with Thales and ends with the Sophists.\n\n[Footnote 876: Thus Socrates complains of Anaxagoras. See \"Phaedo,\" Sec.\n108.]\n\nThe problem of existence still waits for and demands a solution. The\nheart of man, also, still cries out for the living God. The Socratic\nmaxim, \"know thyself,\" introverts the mental gaze, and self-reflection\nnow becomes the method of philosophy. The Platonic analysis of thought\nreveals elements of knowledge which are not derived from the outer\nworld. There are universal and necessary principles revealed in\nconsciousness which, in their natural and logical development, transcend\nconsciousness, and furnish the cognition of a world of Real Being,\nbeyond the world of sense. There are absolute truths which bridge the\nchasm between the seen and the unseen, the fleeting and the permanent,\nthe finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal. There are\nnecessary laws of thought which are also found to be laws of things, and\nwhich correlate man to a living, personal, righteous Lord and Lawgiver.\nFrom absolute ideas Plato ascends to an _absolute Being_, the author of\nall finite existence. From absolute truths to an _absolute Reason_, the\nfoundation and essence of all truth. From the principle of immutable\nright to an _absolutely righteous Being_. From the necessary idea of the\ngood to a being of _absolute Goodness_--that is, to _God_. This is the\nmaturity of humanity, the ripening manhood of our race which was\nattained in the Socratic age.\n\nThe inevitable tendency of this effort of speculative thought, spread\nover ages, and of the intellectual culture which necessarily resulted,\nwas to undermine the old polytheistic religion, and to purify and\nelevate the theistic conception. The school of Elea rejected the gross\nanthropomorphism of the Homeric theology. Xenophanes, the founder of the\nschool, was a believer in\n\n      \"_ One God_, of all beings divine and human the greatest,\n      Neither in body alike unto mortals, neither in ideas.\"\n\nAnd he repels with indignation the anthropomorphic representations of\nthe Deity.\n\n\"But men foolishly think that gods are born as men are,\nAnd have, too, a dress like their own, and their voice, and their figure:\nBut if oxen and lions had hands like ours, and fingers,\nThen would horses like unto horses, and oxen to oxen,\nPaint and fashion their god-forms, and give to them bodies\nOf like shape to their own, as they themselves too are fashioned.\"[877]\n\nEmpedocles also wages uncompromising war against all representations of\nthe Deity in human form--\n\n      \"For neither with head adjusted to limbs, like the human,\n      Nor yet with two branches down from the shoulders outstretching,\n      Neither with feet, nor swift-moving limbs,....\n      He is, wholly and perfectly, _mind_, ineffable, holy,\n      With rapid and swift-glancing thought pervading the world.\"[878]\n\n[Footnote 877: Ritter's \"History of Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. i. pp.\n431, 432.]\n\n[Footnote 878: Ibid., vol. i. pp. 495, 496.]\n\nWhen speaking of the mythology of the older Greeks, Socrates maintains a\nbecoming prudence; he is evidently desirous to avoid every thing which\nwould tend to loosen the popular reverence for divine things.[879] But\nhe was opposed to all anthropomorphic conceptions of the Deity. His\nfundamental position was that the Deity is the Supreme Reason, which is\nto be honored by men as the source of all existence and the end of all\nhuman endeavor. Notwithstanding his recognition of a number of\nsubordinate divinities, he held that the Divine is one, because Reason\nis one. He taught that the Supreme Being is the immaterial, infinite\nGovernor of all;[880] that the world bears the stamp of his\nintelligence, and attests it by irrefragable evidence;[881] and that he\nis the author and vindicator of all moral laws.[882] So that, in\nreality, he did more to overthrow polytheism than any of his\npredecessors, and on that account was doomed to death.\n\n[Footnote 879: Xenophon, \"Memorabilia,\" bk. i. ch. iii. Sec. 3.]\n\n[Footnote 880: Id., ib., bk. i. ch. iv. Secs. 17, 18.]\n\n[Footnote 881: Id., ib., bk. i. ch. i. Sec. 19.]\n\n[Footnote 882: Ritter's \"History of Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. ii. p. 63;\nButler's \"Lectures on Ancient Philosophy,\" vol. i. p. 359.]\n\nIt was, however, the matured dialectic of Plato which gave the\ndeath-blow to polytheism. \"Plato, the poet-philosopher, sacrificed Homer\nhimself to monotheism. We may measure the energy of his conviction by\nthe greatness of the sacrifice. He could not pardon the syren whose\nsongs had fascinated Greece, the fresh brilliant poetry that had\ninspired its religion. He crowned it with flowers, but banished it,\nbecause it had lowered the religious ideal of conscience.\" He was\nsensible of the beauty of the Homeric fables, but he was also keenly\nalive to their religious falsehood, and therefore he excluded the poets\nfrom his ideal republic. In the education of youth, he would forbid\nparents and teachers repeating \"the stories which Hesiod and Homer and\nthe other poets told us.\" And after instancing a number of these stories\n\"which deserve the gravest condemnation,\" he enjoins that God must be\nrepresented as he is in reality. \"God,\" says he, \"is, beyond all else,\ngood in reality, and therefore so to be represented;\" \"he can not do\nevil, or be the cause of evil;\" \"he is of simple essence, and can not\nchange, or be the subject of change;\" \"there is no imperfection in the\nbeauty or goodness of God;\" \"he is a God of truth, and can not lie;\" \"he\nis a being of perfect simplicity and truth in deed and word.\"[883] The\nreader can not fail to recognize the close resemblance between the\nlanguage of Plato and the language of inspiration.\n\nThe theistic conception, in Plato, reaches the highest purity and\nspirituality. God is \"_the Supreme Mind_,\" \"incorporeal,\"\n\"unchangeable,\" \"infinite,\" \"absolutely perfect,\" \"essentially good,\"\n\"unoriginated and eternal.\" He is \"the Father and Maker of the world,\"\n\"the efficient Cause of all things,\" \"the Monarch and Ruler of the\nworld,\" \"the Sovereign Mind that orders all things,\" and \"pervades all\nthings.\" He is \"the sole principle of all things,\" \"the beginning of all\ntruth,\" \"the fountain of all law and justice,\" \"the source of all order\nand beauty;\" in short, He is \"the beginning, middle, and end of all\nthings.\"[884]\n\n[Footnote 883: \"Republic,\" bk. ii. Secs. 18-21.]\n\n[Footnote 884: See _ante_, ch. xi. pp. 377, 378, where the references to\nPlato's writings are given.]\n\nAristotle continued the work of undermining polytheism. He defines God\nas \"the Eternal Reason\"--the Supreme Mind. \"He is the immovable cause of\nall movement in the universe, the all-perfect principle. This principle\nor essence pervades all things. It eternally possesses perfect\nhappiness, and its happiness consists in energy. This primeval mover is\nimmaterial, for its essence is energy--it is pure thought, thought\nthinking itself--the thought of thought.\"[885] Polytheism is thus swept\naway from the higher regions of the intelligence. \"For several to\ncommand,\" says he, \"is not good, there should be but one chief. A\ntradition, handed down from the remotest antiguity, and transmitted\nunder the veil of fable, says that all the stars are gods, and that the\nDivinity embraces the whole of nature. And round this idea other\nmythical statements have been agglomerated, with a view to influencing\nthe vulgar, and for political and moral expediency; as for instance,\nthey feigned that these gods have human shape, and are like certain of\nthe animals; and other stories of the kind are added on. Now, if any one\nwill separate from all this the first point alone, namely, that they\nthought the first and deepest grounds of existence to be Divine, he may\nconsider it a divine utterance.\"[886] The popular polytheism, then, was\nbut a perverted fragment of a deeper and purer \"Theology.\" This passage\nis a sort of obituary of polytheism. The ancient glory of paganism had\npassed away. Philosophy had exploded the old theology. Man had learned\nenough to make him renounce the ancient religion, but not enough to\nfound a new faith that could satisfy both the intellect and the heart.\n\"Wherefore we are not to be surprised that the grand philosophic period\nshould be followed by one of incredulity and moral collapse,\ninaugurating the long and universal _decadence_ which was, perhaps, as\nnecessary to the work of preparation, as was the period of religious and\nphilosophic development.\"\n\n[Footnote 885: \"Metaphysics,\" bk. xii.]\n\n[Footnote 886: \"Metaphysics,\" bk. xi. ch. viii. Sec. 19.]\n\nThe preparatory office of Greek philosophy in the region of speculative\nthought is seen--\n\n2. _In the development of the Theistic argument in a logical\nform._--Every form of the theistic proof which is now employed by\nwriters on natural theology to demonstrate the being of God was\napprehended, and logically presented, by one or other of the ancient\nphilosophers, excepting, perhaps, the \"moral argument\" drawn from the\nfacts of conscience.\n\n(I.) _The_ AETIOLOGICAL _proof_, or the argument based upon the principle\nof causality, which may be presented in the following form:\n\n      All genesis or becoming supposes a permanent and uncaused\n      Being, adequate to the production of all phenomena.\n\n      The sensible universe is a perpetual genesis, a succession\n      of appearances: it is \"always becoming, and never really\n      is.\"\n\n      Therefore, it must have its cause and origin in a permanent\n      and unoriginated Being, adequate to its production.\n\nThe major premise of this syllogism is a fundamental principle of\nreason--a self-evident truth, an axiom of common sense, and as such has\nbeen recognized from the very dawn of philosophy. [Greek: Adounaton\nginesthai ti ek medenos prouparxonios]--_Ex nihilo nihil_--_Nothing\nwhich once was not, could ever of itself come into being_. Nothing can\nbe made or produced without an efficient cause, is the oldest maxim of\nphilosophy. It is true that this maxim was abusively employed by\nDemocritus and Epicurus to disprove a Divine creation of any thing out\nof nothing, yet the great body of ancient philosophers, as Pythagoras,\nXenophanes, Parmenides, Zeno, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Plato, and\nAristotle, regarded it as the announcement of an universal conviction,\nthat nothing can be produced without an efficient cause;--order can not\nbe generated out of chaos, life out of dead matter, consciousness out of\nunconsciousness, reason out of unreason. A first principle of life, of\norder, of reason, must have existed anterior to all manifestions of\norder, of life, of intelligence, in the visible universe. It was clearly\nin this sense that Cicero understood this great maxim of the ancient\nphilosophers of Greece. With him \"_De nihilo nihil fit\"_ is equivalent\nto \"_Nihil sine causa_\"--nothing exists without a cause. This is\nunquestionably the form in which that fundamental law of thought is\nstated by Plato: \"Whatever is generated is necessarily generated from a\ncertain cause, for it is wholly impossible that any thing should be\ngenerated without a cause.\"[887] And the efficient cause is defined as\n\"a power whereby that which did not previously exist was afterwards made\nto be.\"[888] It is scarcely needful to remark that Aristotle, the\nscholar of Plato, frequently lays it down as a postulate of reason,\n\"that we admit nothing without a cause.\"[889] By an irresistible law of\nthought, \"_all phenomena present themselves to us as the expression of\npower_, and refer us to a causal ground whence they issue.\"\n\n[Footnote 887: \"Timaeus,\" ch. ix.; also \"Philebus,\" Sec. 45.]\n\n[Footnote 888: \"Sophist,\" Sec. 109.]\n\n[Footnote 889: \"Post. Analytic,\" bk. ii. ch. xvi.; \"Metaphysics,\" bk. i.\nch. i. Sec. 3.]\n\nThe major premise of this syllogism is a fact of observation.\n\nTo the eye of sense and sensible observation, to scientific induction\neven in its highest generalizations, the visible universe presents\nnothing but a history and aggregation of phenomena--a succession of\nappearances or effects having more or less resemblance. It is a\nceaseless flow and change, \"a generation and corruption,\" \"a becoming,\nbut never really _is_;\" it is never in two successive moments the\n_same_.[890] All our cognitions of sameness, uniformity, causal\nconnection, permanent Being, real Power, are purely rational conceptions\n_given in thought_, supplied by the spontaneous intuition of reason as\nthe correlative prefix to the phenomena observed.[891]\n\n[Footnote 890: \"Timaeus,\" ch. ix.]\n\n[Footnote 891: Ibid.]\n\nTherefore the ancient philosophers concluded justly, there must be\nsomething [Greek: agenneton]--something which was never generated,\nsomething [Greek: autophyes] and [Greek: authypostaton]--self-originated\nand self-existing, something [Greek: tauton] and [Greek:\naionion]--immutable and eternal, the object of rational\napperception--which is the real ground and efficient cause of all that\nappears.\n\n(2.) The COSMOLOGICAL proof, or the argument based upon the principle of\norder, and thus presented:\n\n      Order, proportion, harmony, are the product and expression\n      of Mind.\n\n      The created universe reveals order, proportion, and harmony.\n\n      Therefore, the created universe is the product of Mind.\n\nThe fundamental law of thought which underlies this mode of proof was\nclearly recognized by Pythagoras. All harmony and proportion and\nsymmetry is the result of _unity_ evolving itself in and pervading\n_multiplicity_. Mind or reason is unity and indivisibility; matter is\ndiverse and multiple. Mind is the determinating principle; matter is\nindeterminate and indefinite. Confused matter receives form, and\nproportion, and order, and symmetry, by the action and interpenetration\nof the spiritual and indivisible element. In presence of facts of order,\nthe human reason instinctively and necessarily affirms the presence and\naction of Mind.\n\n\"Pythagoras had long devoted his intellectual adoration to the lofty\nidea of Order. To his mind it seemed as the presiding genius of the\nserene and silent world. He had from his youth dwelt with delight upon\nthe eternal relations of space and number, in which the very idea of\nproportion seems to find its first and immediate development, until at\nlength it seemed as if the whole secret of the universe was hidden in\nthese mysterious correspondences. The world, in all its departments,\nmoral and material, is a living arithmetic in its development, a\nrealized geometry in its repose; it is a '_cosmos_' (for the word is\nPythagorean), the expression of harmony, the manifestation to sense of\neverlasting order; and the science of _numbers_ is the truest\nrepresentation of its eternal laws.\" Therefore, argued Pythagoras and\nthe Pythagoreans, as the reason of man can perceive the relations of an\neternal order in the proportions of extension and number, the laws of\nproportion, and symmetry, and harmony must inhere in a Divine reason, an\nintelligent soul, which moves and animates the universe. The harmonies\nof the world which address themselves to the human mind must be the\nproduct of a Divine mind. The world, in its real structure, must be the\nimage and copy of that divine proportion which the mind of man adores.\nIt is the sensible type of the Divinity, the outward and multiple\ndevelopment of the Eternal Unity, the Eternal One--that is, God.\n\nThe same argument is elaborated by Plato in his philosophy of beauty.\nGod is with him the last reason, the ultimate foundation, the perfect\nideal of all beauty--of all the order, proportion, harmony, sublimity,\nand excellence which reigns in the physical, the intellectual, and the\nmoral world. He is the \"Eternal Beauty, unbegotten and imperishable,\nexempt from all decay as well as increase--the perfect--the Divine\nBeauty\"[892] which is beheld by the pure mind in the celestial world.\n\n[Footnote 892: \"Banquet,\" Sec. 35.]\n\n(3.) The Teleological proof, or the argument based upon the principle of\nintentionality or Final Cause, and is presented in the following form:\n\n      The choice and adaptation of means to the accomplishment of\n      special ends supposes an intelligent purpose, a Designing\n      Mind.\n\n      In the universe we see such choice and adaptation of means\n      to ends.\n\n      Therefore, the universe is the product of an intelligent,\n      personal Cause.\n\nThis is peculiarly the Socratic proof. He recognized the necessity and\nthe irresistibility of the conviction that the choice and adaptation of\nmeans to ends is the effect of Purpose, the expression of Will.[893]\nThere is an obviousness and a directness in this mode of argument which\nis felt by every human mind. In the \"Memorabilia\" Xenophon has preserved\na conversation of Socrates with Aristodemus in which he develops this\nproof at great length. In reading the dialogue[894] in which Socrates\ninstances the adaptation of our organization to the external world, and\nthe examples of design in the human frame, we are forcibly reminded of\nthe chapters of Paley, Whewell, and M'Cosh. Well might Aristodemus\nexclaim: \"The more I consider it, the more it is evident to me that man\nmust be the masterpiece of some great Artificer, carrying along with it\ninfinite marks of the love and favor of Him who has thus formed it.\" The\nargument from Final Causes is pursued by Plato in the \"Timaeus;\" and in\nAristotle, God is the Final Cause of all things.[895]\n\n[Footnote 893: \"Canst thou doubt, Aristodemus, whether a disposition of\nparts like this (in the human body) should be the work of chance, or of\nwisdom and contrivance?\"--\"Memorabilia,\" bk. i. ch. iv.]\n\n[Footnote 894: \"Memorabilia,\" bk. i. ch. iv.]\n\n[Footnote 895: Aristotle clearly recognizes that an end or final cause\nimplies Intelligence. \"The appearance of ends and means is a proof of\nDesign.\"--\"Nat. Ausc.,\" bk. ii. ch. viii.]\n\n(4.) The Ontological or Ideological proof, or the argument grounded on\nnecessary and absolute ideas, which may be thrown into the following\nsyllogism:\n\n      Every attribute or quality implies a subject, and absolute\n      modes necessarily suppose an Absolute Being. Necessary and\n      absolute truths or ideas are revealed in human reason as\n      absolute modes.\n\n      Therefore universal, necessary, and absolute ideas are modes\n      of the absolute subject--that is, God, the foundation and\n      source of all truth.\n\nThis is the Platonic proof. Plato recognized the principle of substance\n([Greek: ousia ypokeimenon]), and therefore he proceeds in the \"Timaeus\"\nto inquire for the real ground of all existence; and in the \"Republic,\"\nfor the real ground of all truth and certitude.\n\nThe universe consists of two parts, permanent existences and transient\nphenomena--being and genesis; the one eternally constant, the other\nmutable and subject to change; the former apprehended by the reason, the\nlatter perceived by sense. For each of these there must be a principle,\nsubject, or substratum--a principle or subject-matter, which is the\nground or condition of the sensible world, and a principle or substance,\nwhich is the ground and reason of the intelligible world or world of\nideas. The subject-matter, or ground of the sensible world, is \"the\nreceptacle\" and \"nurse\" of forms, an \"invisible species and formless\nreceiver (which is not earth, or air, or fire, or water) which receives\nthe immanence of the intelligible.\"[896] The subject or ground of the\nintelligible world is that in which ideal forms, or eternal archetypes\ninhere, and which impresses form upon the transitional element, and\nfashions the world after its own eternal models. This eternal and\nimmutable substance is God, who created the universe as a copy of the\neternal archetypes--the everlasting thoughts which dwell in his infinite\nmind.\n\n[Footnote 896: \"Timaeus,\" ch. xxiv.]\n\nThese copies of the eternal archetypes or models are perceived by the\nreason of man in virtue of its participation in the Ultimate Reason. The\nreason of man is the organ of truth; by an innate and inalienable right,\nit grasps unseen and eternal realities. The essence of the soul is akin\nto that which is real, permanent, and eternal;--_It is the offspring and\nimage of God_; therefore it has a true communion with the realities of\nthings, by virtue of this kindred and homogeneous nature. It can,\ntherefore, ascend from the universal and necessary ideas, which are\napprehended by the reason, to the absolute and supreme Idea, which is\nthe attribute and perfection of God. When the human mind has\ncontemplated any object of beauty, any fact of order, proportion,\nharmony, and excellency, it may rise to the notion of a quality common\nto all objects of beauty--from a single beautiful body to two, from two\nto all others; from beautiful bodies to beautiful sentiments, from\nbeautiful sentiments to beautiful thoughts, until, from thought to\nthought, we arrive at the highest thought, which has no other object\nthan the perfect, absolute, _Divine Beauty_.[897] When a man has, from\nthe contemplation of instances of virtue, risen to the notion of a\nquality common to all these instances, this quality becomes the\nrepresentative of an ineffable something which, in the sphere of\nimmutable reality, answers to the conception in his soul. \"At the\nextreme limits of the intellectual world is the _Idea of the Good_,\nwhich is perceived with difficulty, but, in fine, can not be perceived\nwithout concluding that it is the source of all that is beautiful and\ngood; that in the visible world it produces light, and the star whence\nlight directly comes; that in the invisible world it directly produces\ntruth and intelligence.\"[898] This _absolute Good is God_.\n\n[Footnote 897: \"Banquet,\" Sec. 34.]\n\n[Footnote 898: \"Republic,\" bk. vii. ch. iii.]\n\nThe order in which these several methods of proof were developed, will\nat once present itself to the mind of the reader as the natural order of\nthought. The first and most obvious aspect which nature presents to the\nopening mind is that of movement and change--a succession of phenomena\nsuggesting the idea of _power_. Secondly, a closer attention reveals a\nresemblance of phenomena among themselves, a uniformity of nature--an\norder, proportion, and harmony pervading the _cosmos_, which suggest an\n_identity and unity of power and of reason_, pervading and controlling\nall things. Thirdly, a still closer inspection of nature reveals a\nwonderful adaptation of means to the fulfillment of special ends, of\norgans designed to fulfill specific functions, suggesting the idea of\n_purpose_, _contrivance_, and _choice_, and indicating that the power\nwhich moves and determines the universe is a _personal_, _thinking_, and\n_voluntary_ agent. And fourthly, a profounder study of the nature of\nthought, an analysis of personal consciousness, reveals that there are\nnecessary principles, ideas, and laws, which universally govern and\ndetermine thought to definite and immovable conceptions--as, for\nexample, the principles of causality, of substance, of identity or\nunity, of order, of intentionality; and that it is only under these laws\nthat we can conceive the universe. By the law of substance we are\ncompelled to regard these ideas, which are not only laws of thought but\nalso of things, as inherent in a subject, or Being, who made all things,\nand whose ideas are reflected in the reason of man. Thus from universal\nand necessary ideas we rise to the _absolute Idea_, from immutable\nprinciples to a _First Principle of all principles_, a _First Thought_\nof all thoughts--that is, to _God_. This is the history of the\ndevelopment of thought in the individual, and in the race--_cause_,\n_order_, _design_, _idea_, _being_, GOD.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XV.\n\nTHE PROPAEDEUTIC OFFICE OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY _(continued)_.\n\n\n      \"If we regard this sublime philosophy as a preparation for\n      Christianity instead of seeking in it a substitute for the\n      Gospel, we shall not need to overstate its grandeur in order\n      to estimate its real value.\"--Pressense.\n\n      \"Plato made me to know the true God. Jesus Christ showed me\n      the way to Him.\"--St. Augustine.\n\nThe preparatory office of Grecian philosophy is also seen in _the\ndepartment of morals_.\n\nI. _In the awakening and enthronement of Conscience as a law of duty,\nand the elevation and purification of the Moral Idea_.\n\nThe same law of evolution, which we have seen governing the history of\nspeculative thought, may also be traced as determining the progress of\nethical inquiry. In this department there are successive stages marked,\nboth in the individual and the national mind. There is, first, the\nsimplicity and trust of childhood, submitting with unquestioning faith\nto prescribed and arbitrary laws; then the unsettled and ill-directed\nforce of youth, questioning the authority of laws, and asking reasons\nwhy this or that is obligatory; then the philosophic wisdom of riper\nyears, recognizing an inherent law of duty, which has an absolute\nrightness and an imperative obligation. There is first a dim and shadowy\napprehension of some lines of moral distinction, and some consciousness\nof obligation, but these rest mainly upon an outward law--the observed\npractice of others, or the command of the parent as, in some sense, the\ncommand of God. Then, to attain to personal convictions, man passes\nthrough a stage of doubt; he asks for a ground of obligation, for an\nauthority that shall approve itself to his own judgment and reason. At\nlast he arrives at some ultimate principles of right, some immutable\nstandard of duty; he recognizes an inward law of conscience, and it\nbecomes to him as the voice of God. He extends his analysis to history,\nand he finds that the universal conscience of the race has, in all ages,\nuttered the same behest. Should he live in Christian times, he discovers\na wondrous harmony between the voice of God within the heart, and the\nvoice of God within the pages of inspiration. And now the convention of\npublic opinion, and the laws of the state, are revered and upheld by\nhim, just so far as they bear the imprimatur of reason and of\nconscience--that is, of God.\n\nThis history of the normal development of the individual mind has its\ncounterpart in the history of humanity. There is (1.) _The age of\npopular and unconscious morality_; (2.) _The transitional, skeptical, or\nsophistical age_; and (3.) _The philosophic or conscious age of\nmorality_.[899] In the \"Republic\" of Plato, we have these three eras\nrepresented by different persons, through the course of the dialogue.\nThe question is started--what is Justice? and an answer is given from\nthe stand-point of popular morality, by Polemarchus, who quotes the\nwords of the poet Simonides,\n\n      \"To give to each his due is just;\"[900]\n\nthat is, justice is paying your debts. This doctrine being proved\ninadequate, an answer is given from the Sophistical point of view by\nThrasymachus, who defines justice as \"the advantage of the\nstrongest\"--that is, might is right, and right is might.[901] This\nanswer being sharply refuted, the way is opened for a more philosophic\naccount, which is gradually evolved in book iv., Glaucon and Adimantus\npersonifying the practical understanding, which is gradually brought\ninto harmony with philosophy, and Socrates the higher reason, as the\npurely philosophic conception. Justice is found to be the right\nproportion and harmonious development of all the elements of the soul,\nand the equal balance of all the interests of society, so as to secure a\nwell-regulated and harmonious whole.\n\n[Footnote 899: Grant's \"Aristotle's Ethics,\" vol. i. p. 46.]\n\n[Footnote 900: \"Republic,\" bk. i. Sec. 6.]\n\n[Footnote 901: Ibid., bk. i. Sec. 12.]\n\nThe era of _popular and unconscious morality_ is represented by the\ntimes of Homer, Hesiod, the Gnomic poets, and \"the Seven Wise Men of\nGreece.\"\n\nThis was an age of instinctive action, rather than reflection--of poetry\nand feeling, rather than analytic thought. The rules of life were\npresented in maxims and proverbs, which do not rise above prudential\ncounsels or empirical deductions. Morality was immediately associated\nwith the religion of the state, and the will of the gods was the highest\nlaw for men. \"Homer and Hesiod, and the Gnomic poets, constituted the\neducational course,\" to which may be added the saws and aphorisms of the\nSeven Wise Men, and we have before us the main sources of Greek views of\nduty. When the question was asked--\"What is right?\" the answer was given\nby a quotation from Homer, Hesiod, Simonides, and the like. The morality\nof Homer \"is concrete, not abstract; it expresses the conception of a\nheroic life, rather than a philosophic theory. It is mixed up with a\nreligion which really consists in a celebration of the beauty of nature,\nand in a deification of the strong and brilliant qualities of human\nnature. It is a morality uninfluenced by a regard for a future life. It\nclings with intense enjoyment and love to the present world, and the\nstate after death looms up in the distance as a cold and repugnant\nshadow. And yet it would often hold death preferable to disgrace. The\ndistinction between a noble and ignoble life is strongly marked in\nHomer, and yet a sense of right and wrong about particular actions seems\nfluctuating\" and confused.[902] A sensuous conception of happiness is\nthe chief good, and mere temporal advantage the principal reward of\nvirtue. We hear nothing of the approving smile of conscience, of inward\nself-satisfaction, and peace, and harmony, resulting from the practice\nof virtue. Justice, energy, temperance, chastity, are enjoined, because\nthey secure temporal good. And yet, with all this imperfection, the\npoets present \"a remarkable picture of primitive simplicity, chastity,\njustice, and practical piety, under the three-fold influence of right\nmoral feeling, mutual and fear of the divine displeasure.\"[903]\n\n[Footnote 902: Grant's \"Aristotle's Ethics,\" vol. i. p. 51.]\n\n[Footnote 903: Tyler, \"Theology of the Greek Poets,\" p. 167.]\n\nThe _transitional, skeptical_, or _sophistical era_ begins with\nProtagoras. Poetry and proverbs had ceased to satisfy the reason of man.\nThe awakening intellect had begun to call in question the old maxims and\n\"wise saws,\" to dispute the arbitrary authority of the poets, and even\nto arraign the institutions of society. It had already begun to seek for\nsome reasonable foundation of authority for the opinions, customs, laws,\nand institutions which had descended to them from the past, and to ask\nwhy men were obliged to do this or that? The question whether there is\nat bottom any real difference between truth and error, right and wrong,\nwas now fairly before the human mind. The ultimate standard of all truth\nand all right, was now the grand object of pursuit. These inquiries were\nnot, however, conducted by the Sophists with the best motives. They were\nnot always prompted by an earnest desire to know the truth, and an\nearnest purpose to embrace and do the right. They talked and argued for\nmere effect--to display their dialectic subtilty, or their rhetorical\npower. They taught virtue for mere emolument and pay. They delighted, as\nCicero tells us, to plead the opposite sides of a cause with equal\neffect. And they found exquisite pleasure in raising difficulties,\nmaintaining paradoxes, and passing off mere tricks of oratory for solid\nproofs. This is the uniform representation of the sophistical spirit\nwhich is given by all the best writers who lived nearest to their times,\nand who are, therefore, to be presumed to have known them best.\nGrote[904] has made an elaborate defense of the Sophists; he charges\nPlato with gross misrepresentation. His portraits of them are denounced\nas mere caricatures, prompted by a spirit of antagonism; all antiquity\nis presumed to have been misled by him. No one, however, can read\nGrant's \"Essay on the History of Moral Philosophy in Greece\"[905]\nwithout feeling that his vindication of Plato is complete and\nunanswerable: \"Plato never represents the Sophists as teaching a lax\nmorality to their disciples. He does not make sophistry to consist in\nholding wicked opinions; he represents them as only too orthodox in\ngeneral,[906] but capable of giving utterance to immoral paradoxes for\nthe sake of vanity. Sophistry rather tampers and trifles with the moral\nconvictions than directly attacks them.\" The Sophists were wanting in\ndeep conviction, in moral earnestness, in sincere love of truth, in\nreverence for goodness and purity, and therefore their trifling,\ninsincere, and paradoxical teaching was unfavorable to goodness of life.\nThe tendency of their method is forcibly depicted in the words of Plato:\n\"There are certain dogmas relating to what is _just_ and _good_ in which\nwe have been brought up from childhood--obeying and reverencing them.\nOther opinions recommending pleasure and license we resist, out of\nrespect for the old hereditary maxims. Well, then, a question comes up\nconcerning what is right? He gives some answer such as he has been\ntaught, and straightway is refuted. He tries again, and is again\nrefuted. And, when this has happened pretty often, he is reduced to the\nopinion that _nothing is either right or wrong_; and in the same way it\nhappens about the just and the good, and all that before we have held in\nreverence. On this, he naturally abandons his allegiance to the old\nprinciples and takes up with those he before resisted, and so, from\nbeing a good citizen, he becomes lawless.\"[907] And, in point of fact,\nthis was the theoretical landing-place of the Sophists. We do not say\nthey became practically \"lawless\" and antinomian, but they did arrive at\nthe settled opinion that right and wrong, truth and error, are solely\nmatter of private opinion and conventional usage. Man's own fluctuating\nopinion is the measure and standard of all things.[908] They who \"make\nthe laws, make them for their own advantage.\"[909] There is no such\nthing as Eternal Right. \"That which _appears_ just and honorable to each\ncity is so for that city, as long as the opinion prevails.\"[910]\n\n[Footnote 904: \"History of Greece.\"]\n\n[Footnote 905: Aristotle's \"Ethics,\" vol. i. ch. ii.]\n\n[Footnote 906: \"His teachings will be good counsels about a man's own\naffairs, how best to govern his family; and also about the affairs of\nthe state, how most ably to administer and speak of state\naffairs.\"--\"Protag.,\" Sec. 26.]\n\n[Footnote 907: \"Republic,\" bk. vii. ch. xvii.]\n\n[Footnote 908: \"Theaetetus,\" Sec. 23.]\n\n[Footnote 909: \"Gorgias,\" Secs. 85-89.]\n\n[Footnote 910: \"Theaetetus,\" Secs. 65-75.]\n\nThe age of the Sophists was a transitional period--a necessary, though,\nin itself considered, an unhappy stage in the progress of the human\nmind; but it opened the way for, _The Socratic, philosophic_, or\n_conscious age of morals_. It has been said that \"before Socrates there\nwas no morality in Greece, but only propriety of conduct.\" If by this is\nmeant that prior to Socrates men simply followed the maxims of \"the\nTheologians,\"[911] and obeyed the laws of the state, without reflection\nand inquiry as to the intrinsic character of the acts, and without any\nanalysis and exact definition, so as to attain to principles of ultimate\nand absolute right, it must be accepted as true--there was no philosophy\nof morals. Socrates is therefore justly regarded as \"the father of moral\nphilosophy.\" Aristotle says that he confined himself chiefly to ethical\ninquiries. He sought a determinate conception and an exact definition of\nvirtue. As Xenophon has said of him, \"he never ceased asking, What is\npiety? what is impiety? what is noble? what is base? what is just? what\nis unjust? what is temperance? what is madness?\"[912] And these\nquestions were not asked in the Sophistic spirit, as a dialectic\nexercise, or from idle curiosity. He was a perfect contrast to the\nSophists. They had slighted Truth, he made her the mistress of his soul.\nThey had turned away from her, he longed for more perfect communion with\nher. They had deserted her for money and renown, he was faithful to her\nin poverty.[913] He wanted to know what piety was, that he might be\npious. He desired to know what justice, temperance, nobility, courage\nwere, that he might cultivate and practise them. He wrote no books,\ndelivered no lectures; he instituted no school; he simply conversed in\nthe shop, the market-place, the banquet-hall, and the prison. This\nphilosophy was not so much a _doctrine_ as a _life_. \"What is remarkable\nin him is not the _system_ but the _man_. The memory he left behind him\namongst his disciples, though idealized--the affection, blended with\nreverence, which they never ceased to feel for his person, bear\ntestimony to the elevation of his character and his moral purity. We\nrecognize in him a Greek of Athens--one who had imbibed many dangerous\nerrors, and on whom the yoke of pagan custom still weighed; but his life\nwas nevertheless a noble life; and it is to calumny we must have\nrecourse if we are to tarnish its beauty by odious insinuations, as\nLucian did, and as has been too frequently done, after him, by\nunskillful defenders of Christianity,[914] who imagine it is the gainer\nby all that degrades human nature. Born in a humble position, destitute\nof all the temporal advantages which the Greeks so passionately loved,\nSocrates exerted a kingship over minds. His dominion was the more real\nfor being less apparent.... His power consisted of three things: his\ndevoted affection for his disciples, his disinterested love of truth,\nand the perfect harmony of his life and doctrine.... If he recommended\ntemperance and sobriety, he also set the example; poorly clad, satisfied\nwith little, he disdained all the delicacies of life. He possessed every\nspecies of courage. On the field of battle he was intrepid, and still\nmore intrepid when he resisted the caprices of the multitude who\ndemanded of him, when he was a senator, to commit the injustice of\nsummoning ten generals before the tribunals. He also infringed the\niniquitous orders of the thirty tyrants of Athens. The satires of\nAristophanes neither moved nor irritated him. The same dauntless\nfirmness he displayed when brought before his judges, charged with\nimpiety. 'If it is your wish to absolve me on condition that I\nhenceforth be silent, I reply I love and honor you, but I ought rather\nto obey the gods than you. Neither in the presence of judges nor of the\nenemy is it permitted me, or any other man, to use every sort of means\nto escape death. It is not death but crime that it is difficult to\navoid; crime moves faster than death. So I, old and heavy as I am, have\nallowed myself to be overtaken by death, while my accusers, light and\nvigorous, have allowed themselves to be overtaken by the light-footed\ncrime. I go, then, to suffer death; they to suffer shame and iniquity. I\nabide by my punishment, as they by theirs. All is according to order.'\nIt was the same fidelity to duty that made Socrates refuse to escape\nfrom prison, in order not to violate the laws of his country, to which,\neven though irritated, more respect is due than to a father. 'Let us\nwalk in the path,' he says 'that God has traced for us.' These last\nwords show the profound religious sentiment which animated Socrates....\nIt is impossible not to feel that there was something divine in such a\nlife crowned with such a death.\"[914]\n\n[Footnote 911: Homer, Hesiod, etc.]\n\n[Footnote 912: \"Memorabilia,\" bk. i. ch. i. p. 16.]\n\n[Footnote 913: Lewes's \"Biographical History of Philosophy,\" p. 122.]\n\n[Footnote 914: Watson's \"Institutes of Theology,\" vol. i. p. 374.]\n\n[Footnote 915: Pressense, \"Religions before Christ,\" pp. 109-111.]\n\nSocrates laid the foundation for conscious morality by placing the\nground of right and wrong in an eternal and unchangeable reason which\nilluminates the reason and conscience of every man. He often asserted\nthat morality is a science which can not be taught. It depends mainly\nupon principles which are discovered by an inward light. Accordingly he\nregarded it as the main business of education to \"draw out\" into the\nlight of consciousness the principles of right and justice which are\ninfolded within the conscience of man--to deliver the mind of the secret\ntruth which was striving towards the light of day. Therefore he called\nhis method the \"maieutic\" or \"obstetric\" art. He felt there was\nsomething divine in all men (answering to his _to daimonion_ or\n_daimonion ti_--a divine and supernatural something--a warning\n\"voice\"--a gnomic \"sign\"--a \"law of God written on the heart\"), which by\na system of skillful interrogations he sought to elicit, so that each\nmight hear for himself the voice of God, and, hearing, might obey. Thus\nwas he the \"great prophet of the human conscience,\" and a messenger of\nGod to the heathen world, to prepare the way of the Lord.\n\nThe morality of conscience was carried to its highest point by Plato.\nFrom the moment he became the disciple of Socrates he sympathized deeply\nwith the spirit and the method of his master. He had the same deep\nseriousness of spirit, that same earnestness of purpose, that same\ninward reverence for justice, and purity, and goodness, which dwelt in\nthe heart of Socrates. A naturally noble nature, he loved truth with all\nthe glow and fervor of his young heart. He felt that if any thing gave\nmeaning and value to life, it must be the contemplation of absolute\ntruth, absolute beauty, and absolute Good. This absolute Good is God,\nwho is the first principle of all ideas, the fountain of all the order\nand proportion and beauty of the universe, the source of all the good\nwhich exists in nature and in man. To practise goodness--to conform the\ncharacter to the eternal models of order, proportion, and excellence, is\nto resemble God. To aspire after perfection of moral being, to secure\nassimilation to God ([Greek: omoiosis Theo]) is the noble aspiration of\nPlato's soul.\n\nWhen we read the \"Gorgias,\" the \"Philebus,\" and especially the\n\"Republic,\" with what noble joy are we filled on hearing the voice of\nconscience, like a harp swept by a seraph's hand, uttering such\ndeep-toned melodies! How does he drown the clamors of passion, the\ncalculations of mere expediency, the sophism of mere personal interest\nand utility. If he calls us to witness the triumph of the wicked in the\nfirst part of the \"Republic,\" it is in order that we may at the end of\nthe book see the deceitfulness of their triumph. \"As to the wicked,\" he\nsays, \"I maintain that even if they succeed at first in concealing what\nthey are, most of them betray themselves at the end of their career.\nThey are covered with opprobrium, and present evils are nothing compared\nwith those that _await them in the other life_. As to the just man,\nwhether in sickness or in poverty, these imaginary evils will turn to\nhis advantage in this life, _and after his death_; because the\nprovidence of the gods is necessarily attentive to the interests of him\nwho labors to become just, and to attain, by the practice of virtue, to\nthe most perfect resemblance to God which is possible to man.\"[916] He\nrises above all \"greatest happiness principles,\" and asserts distinctly\nin the \"Gorgias\" that it is better to suffer wrong than to do\nwrong.[917] \"I maintain,\" says he, \"that what is most shameful is not to\nbe struck unjustly on the cheek, or to be wounded in the body; but that\nto strike and wound me unjustly, to rob me, or reduce me to slavery--to\ncommit, in a word, any kind of injustice towards me, or what is mine--is\na thing far worse and more odious for him who commits the injustice,\nthan for me who suffer it.\"[918] It is a great combat, he says, greater\nthan we think, that wherein the issue is whether we shall be virtuous or\nwicked. Neither glory, nor riches, nor dignities, nor poetry, deserves\nthat we should neglect justice for them. The moral idea in Plato has\nsuch intense truth and force, that it has at times a striking analogy\nwith the language of the Holy Scriptures.[919]\n\n[Footnote 916: \"Republic,\" bk. x. ch. xii.]\n\n[Footnote 917: \"Gorgias,\" Secs. 59-80.]\n\n[Footnote 918: Ibid., Sec. 137.]\n\n[Footnote 919: Pressense, \"Religions before Christ,\" p. 129.]\n\nThe obligation of moral rectitude is, by Plato, derived from the\nauthoritative utterances of conscience as the voice of God. We must do\nright because reason and conscience say it is right. In the \"Euthyphron\"\nhe maintains that the moral quality of actions is not dependent on the\narbitrary will of a Supreme Governor;--\"an act is not holy because the\ngods love it, but the gods love it because it is holy.\" The eternal law\nof right dwells in the Eternal Reason of God, the idea of right in all\nhuman minds is a ray of that Eternal Reason; and the requirement of the\ndivine law that we shall do right is, and must be, in harmony with both.\n\nThe present life is regarded by Plato as a state of probation and\ndiscipline, the future life as one of reward and punishment.[920]\n\n[Footnote 920: \"Republic,\" bk. x. ch. xv., xvi.; \"Laws,\" bk. x. ch.\nxiii.]\n\nPlato was thus to the heathen world \"the great apostle of the moral\nidea;\" he followed up and completed the work of Socrates. \"The voice of\nGod, that still found a profound echo in man's heart, possessed in him\nan organ to which all Greece gave ear; and the austere revelation of\nconscience this time embodied in language too harmonious not to entice\nby the beauty of form, a nation of artists, they received it. The tables\nof the eternal law, carved in purest marble and marvellously sculptured,\nwere read by them.\"\n\nIn Plato both the theistic conception and the moral idea seem to have\ntouched the zenith. The philosophy of Aristotle, considered as a whole,\nappears on one side to have passed the line of the great Hellenic\nperiod. If it did not inaugurate, it at least prepared the way for the\ndecline. It perfected logic, as the instrument of ratiocination, and\ngave it exactness and precision, Yet taken all in all, it was greatly\ninferior to its predecessor. From the moral point of view it is a\ndecided retrogression. The god of Aristotle is indifferent to virtue. He\nis pure thought rather than moral perfection. He takes no cognizance of\nman. Morality has no eternal basis, no divine type, and no future\nreward. Therefore Aristotle's philosophy had little power over the\nconscience and heart.\n\nDuring the grand Platonic period human reason made its loftiest flight,\nit rose aloft and soared towards heaven, but alas! its wings, like those\nof Icarus, melted in the sun and it fell to earth again. Instead of wax\nit needed the strong \"eagle pinions of faith\" which revelation only can\nsupply. The decadence is strongly marked both in the Epicurean and Stoic\nschools. They both express the feeling of exhaustion, disappointment,\nand despair. The popular theology had lost its hold upon the public\nmind. The gods no longer visited the earth. \"The mysterious voice which,\naccording to the poetic legend related by Plutarch, was heard out at\nsea--'Great Pan is dead'--rose up from every heart; the voice of an\nincredulous age proclaimed the coming end of paganism. The oracles were\ndumb.\" There was no vision in the land. All faith in a beneficent\noverruling Providence was lost, and the hope of immortality was\nwell-nigh gone. The doctrines of a resurrection and a judgment to come,\nwere objects of derisive mockery.[921] Philosophy directed her attention\nsolely to the problem of individual well-being on earth; it became\nsimply a philosophy of life, and not, as with Plato, \"a preparation for\ndeath.\" The grosser minds sought refuge in the doctrines of Epicurus.\nThey said, \"Pleasure is the chief good, the end of life is to enjoy\nyourself;\" to this end \"dismiss the fear of gods, and, above all, the\nfear of death.\" The nobler souls found an asylum with the Stoics. They\nsaid, \"Fata nos ducunt--The Fates lead us! Live conformable to reason.\nEndure and abstain!\" Notwithstanding numerous and serious errors, the\nethical system of the Stoics was wonderfully pure. This must be\nconfessed by any one who reads the \"Enchiridion\" of Epictetus, and the\n\"Meditations\" of Aurelius. \"The highest end of life is to contemplate\ntruth and to obey the Eternal Reason. God is to be reverenced above all\nthings, and universally submitted to. The noblest office of reason is to\nsubjugate passion and conduct to virtue. Virtue is the supreme good,\nwhich is to be pursued for its own sake, and not from fear or hope. That\nis sufficient for happiness which is seated only in the mind, and\ntherefore independent of external things. The consciousness of\nwell-doing is reward enough without the applause of others. And no fear\nof loss, or pain, or even death, must be suffered to turn us aside from\ntruth and virtue.\"[922]\n\n[Footnote 921: Acts xvii. 32.]\n\n[Footnote 922: Marcus Aurelius.]\n\nThe preparatory office of Christianity in the field of ethics is further\nseen,\n\nII. _In the fact that, by an experiment conducted on the largest scale,\nit demonstrated the insufficiency of reason to elaborate a perfect ideal\nof moral excellence, and develop the moral forces necessary to secure\nits realization_.\n\nWe have seen that the moral idea in Socrates, Plato, Epictetus, Marcus\nAurelius, and Seneca rose to a sublime height, and that, under its\ninfluence, they developed a noble and heroic character. At the same time\nit must be conceded that their ethical system was marked by signal\nblemishes and radical defects. After all its excellence, it did not give\nroundness, completeness, and symmetry to moral life. The elements which\nreally purify and ennoble man, and lend grace and beauty to life, were\nutterly wanting. Their systems were rather a discipline of the reason\nthan a culture of the heart. The reason held in check the lower passions\nand propensities of the nature but it did not evoke the softer, gentler,\npurer emotions of the soul. The cardinal virtues of the ancient ethical\nsystems are Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Courage, all which are in\nthe last analysis reduced to Wisdom. Humility, Meekness, Forgiveness of\ninjuries, Love of even enemies, Universal Benevolence, Real\nPhilanthropy, the graces which give beauty to character and bless\nsociety, are scarcely known. It is true that in Epictetus and Seneca we\nhave some counsels to humility, to forbearance, and forgiveness; but it\nmust be borne in mind that Christianity was now in the air, exerting an\nindirect influence beyond the limits of the labors of the indefatigable\nmissionaries of the Cross.[923] By their predecessors, these qualities\nwere disparaged rather than upheld. Resentment of injuries was applauded\nas a virtue, and meekness was proclaimed a defect and a weakness. They\nknew nothing of a forgiving spirit, and were strangers to the charity\n\"which endureth all things, hopeth all things, and never fails.\" The\nenlarged philanthrophy which overleaps the bounds of kindred and\nnationality, and embraces a common humanity in its compassionate regards\nand benevolent efforts, was unknown. Socrates, the noblest of all the\nGrecians, was in no sense cosmopolitan in his feeling. His whole nature\nand character wore a Greek impress. He could scarce be tempted to go\nbeyond the gates of Athens, and his care was all for the Athenian\npeople. He could not conceive an universal philanthropy. Plato, in his\nsolicitude to reduce his ideal state to a harmonious whole, answering to\nhis idea of Justice, sacrificed the individual. He superseded private\nproperty, broke up the sacred relations of family and home, degraded\nwoman, and tolerated slavery. Selfishness was to be overcome, and\npolitical order maintained, by a rigid communism. To harmonize\nindividual rights and national interests, was the wisdom reserved for\nthe fishermen of Galilee. The whole method of Plato's \"Politeia,\"\nbreathes the spirit of legalism in all its severity, untempered by the\nspirit of Love. This was the living force which was wanting to give\nenergy to the ideals of the reason and conscience, to furnish high\nmotive to virtue, to prompt to deeds of heroic sacrifice and suffering\nfor the good of others; and this could not be inspired by philosophy,\nnor constrained by legislation. This love must descend from above. \"The\nPlatonic love\" was a mere intellectual appreciation of beauty, and\norder, and proportion, and excellence. It was not the love of man as the\noffspring and image of God, as the partaker of a common nature, and the\nheir of a common immortality. Such love was first revealed on earth by\nthe incarnate Son of God, and can only be attained by human hearts under\nthe inspiration of his teaching and life, and the renewing influence of\nthe Holy Spirit. \"Love is of God, and every one that loveth is born of\nGod and knoweth God.\" To \"love our neighbor as ourself\" is the golden\nprecept of the Son of God, who is incarnate Love. The equality of all\nmen as \"the offspring of God\" had been nominally recognized by the Stoic\nphilosophers; its realization had been rendered possible to the popular\nthought by Roman conquest, law, and jurisprudence; these had prepared\nthe way for its fullest announcement and practical recognition by the\nworld. At this providential juncture St. Paul appears on Mars' Hill, and\nin the presence of the assembled philosophers proclaims, \"_God hath made\nof one blood all nations of men_.\" A lofty ideal of moral excellence had\nbeen attained by Plato--the conception of a high and inflexible\nmorality, which contrasted most vividly with the depravity which\nprevailed in Athenian society. The education \"of the public assemblies,\nthe courts, the theatres, or wherever the multitude gathered\" was\nunfavorable to virtue. And the inadequacy of all mere human teaching to\nresist this current of evil, and save the young men of the age from\nruin, is touchingly and mournfully confessed by Plato. \"There is not,\nthere never was, there never will be a moral education possible that can\ncountervail the education of which these are the dispensers; that is,\n_human_ education: I except, with the proverb, that which is Divine.\nAnd, truly, any soul that in such governments escapes the common wreck,\ncan only escape _by the special favor of heaven.\"_[924] He affirms again\nand again that man can not by himself rise to purity and goodness.\n\"Virtue is not natural to man, neither is it to be learned, but it comes\nto us by a divine influence. Virtue is the gift of God in those who\npossess it.\"[925] That \"gift of God\" was about to be bestowed, in all\nits fullness of power and blessing, \"_through Jesus Christ our Lord_.\"\n\n[Footnote 923: Seneca lived in the second century; Epictetus, in the\nlatter part of the first century.]\n\n[Footnote 924: \"Republic,\" bk. vi. ch. vi., vii.]\n\n[Footnote 925: \"Meno;\" see conclusion.]\n\nIn the department of _religious feeling_ and _sentiment_, the\npropaedeutic office of Greek philosophy is seen, in general, in the\nrevealing of the immediate spiritual wants of the soul, and the distinct\npresentation of the problem which Christianity alone can solve.\n\nI. _It awakened in man the sense of distance and estrangement from God,\nand the need of a Mediator--\"a daysman betwixt us, that might lay his\nhand upon us both_\"[926]\n\n[Footnote 926: Job ix. 33.]\n\nDuring the period of unconscious and unreflective theism, the sentiment\nof the Divine was one of objective nearness and personal intimacy. The\ngods interposed directly in the affairs of men, and held frequent and\nfamiliar intercourse with our race. They descend to the battle-field of\nTroy, and mingle in the bloody strife. They grace the wedding-feast by\ntheir presence, and heighten the gladness with celestial music. They\nvisit the poor and the stranger, and sometimes clothe the old and\nshrivelled beggar with celestial beauty. They inspire their favorites\nwith strength and courage, and fill their mouths with wisdom and\neloquence. They manifest their presence by signs and wonders, by visions\nand dreams, by auguries and prophetic voices. But more frequently than\nall, they are seen in the ordinary phenomena of nature, the sunshine and\nstorm, the winds and tempests, the hail and rain. The natural is, in\nfact, the supernatural, and all the changes of nature are the movement\nand action of the Divine. The feeling of dependence is immediate and\nuniversal, and worship is the natural and spontaneous act of man.\n\nBut the period of reflection is inevitable. Man turns his inquiring gaze\ntowards nature and desires, by an imperfect effort of physical\ninduction, to reach \"the first principle and cause of things.\" Soon he\ndiscovers the prevalence of uniformity in nature, the actions of\nphysical properties and agencies, and he catches some glimpses of the\nreign of universal law. The natural tendency of this discovery is\nobvious in the weakening of his sense of dependence on the immediate\nagency of God. The Egyptians told Herodotus that, as their fields were\nregularly irrigated by the waters of the Nile, they were less dependent\non God than the Greeks, whose lands were watered by rains, and who must\nperish if Jupiter did not send them showers.[927] As man advances in the\nfield of mere physical inquiry, God recedes; from the region of\nexplained phenomena, he retires into the region of unexplained\nphenomena--the border-land of mystery. The gods are driven from the\nwoods and streams, the winds and waves. Neptune does not absolutely\ncontrol the seas, nor AEolus the winds. The Divine becomes, no more a\nphysical arche--a nature-power, but a Supreme Mind, an ineffable Spirit,\nan invisible God, the Supreme Essence of Essences, the Supreme Idea of\nIdeas (eidos auto kath auto) apprehended by human reason alone, but\nhaving an independent, eternal, substantial, personal being. Through the\ninstrumentality of Platonism, the idea of God becomes clearer and purer.\nMan had learned that communion with the Divinity was something more than\nan apotheosis of humanity, or a pantheistic absorption. He caught\nglimpses of a higher and holier union. He had surrendered the ideal of a\nnational communion with God, and of personal protection through a\nfederal religion, and now was thrown back upon himself to find some\nchannel of personal approach to God. But alas! he could not find it. A\nGod so vastly elevated beyond human comprehension, who could only be\napprehended by the most painful effort of abstract thought; a God so\ninfinitely removed from man by the purity and rectitude of his\ncharacter; a God who was all pure reason, seemed alien to all the\nyearnings and sympathies of the human heart; and such a God, dwelling in\npure light, seemed inapproachable and inacessible to man.[928] The\npurifying of the religious idea had evoked a new ideal, and this ideal\nwas painfully remote. By the energy of abstract thought man had striven\nto pierce the veil, and press into \"the Holy of Holies,\" to come into\nthe presence of God, and he had failed. And he had sought by moral\ndiscipline, by self-mortification, by inward purification, to raise\nhimself to that lofty plane of purity, where he might catch some\nglimpses of the vision of a holy God, and still he failed. Nay, more, he\nhad tried the power of prayer. Socrates, and Plato, and Cleanthes had\nbowed the knee and moved the lips in prayer. The emperor Aurelius, and\nthe slave Epictetus had prayed, and prayer, no doubt, intensified their\nlonging, and sharpened and agonized their desire, but it did not raise\nthem to a satisfying and holy _koinonia_ in the divine life. \"It seems\nto me\"--said Plato--as Homer says of Minerva, that she removed the mist\nfrom before the eyes of Diomede,\n\n      'That he might clearly see 'twixt Gods and men.'\n\nso must he, in the first place, remove from your soul the mist that now\ndwells there, and then apply those things through which you will be able\nto know[929] and rightly pray to God.\n\n[Footnote 927: Herodotus, vol. ii. bk. ii. ch. xiii. p. 14 (Rawlinson's\nedition).]\n\n[Footnote 928: \"To discover the Maker and Father of the universe is a\nhard task;.... to make him known to all is impossible.\"--\"Timaeus,\" ch.\nix.]\n\n[Footnote 929: \"Second Alcibiades,\" Sec. 23.]\n\nTo develop this innate desire and \"feeling after God\" was the grand\ndesign of providence in \"fixing the times\" of the Greek nation, and \"the\nboundaries of their habitation.\"[930] Man was brought, through a period\nof discipline, to feel his need of a personal relation to God. He was\nmade to long for a realizing sense of his presence--to desire above all\nthings a Father, a Counsellor, and a Friend--a living ear into which he\nmight groan his anguish, or hymn his joy; and a living heart that could\nbeat towards him in compassion, and prompt immediate succor and aid. The\nidea of a pure Spiritual Essence without form, and without emotion,\npervading all, and transcending all, is too vague and abstract to yield\nus comfort, and to exert over us any persuasive power. \"Our moral\nweakness shrinks from it in trembling awe. The heart can not feed on\nsublimities. We can not make a home of cold magnificence; we can not\ntake immensity by the hand.\"[931] Hence the need and the desire that God\nshall condescendingly approach to man, and by some manifestation of\nhimself in human form, and through the sensibilities of the human heart,\ncommend himself to the heart of man--in other words, the need of an\n_Incarnation_. Thus did the education of our race, by the dispensation\nof philosophy, prepare the way for him who was consciously or\nunconsciously \"_the Desire of Nations_,\" and the deepening earnestness\nand spiritual solicitude of the heathen world heralded the near approach\nof Him who was not only \"the Hope of Israel\" but \"the Saviour of the\nworld.\"\n\n[Footnote 930: Acts xvii. 26, 27.]\n\n[Footnote 931: Caird.]\n\nThe idea of an _Incarnation_ was not unfamiliar to human thought, it was\nno new or strange idea to the heathen mind. The numberless metamorphoses\nof Grecian mythology, the incarnations of Brahm, the avatars of Vishnu,\nand the human form of Krishna had naturalized the thought.[932] So that\nwhen the people of Lystra saw the apostles Paul and Barnabas exercising\nsupernatural powers of healing, they said, \"The gods have come down to\nus in the likeness of men!\" and they called Barnabas Jupiter, and Paul,\nMercurius. The idea in its more definite form may have been, and indeed\nwas, communicated to the world through the agency of the dispersed Jews.\nSo that Virgil, the Roman poet, who was contemporary with Christ, seems\nto re-echo the prophecy of Isaiah--\n\n     The last age decreed by the Fates is come,\n     And a new frame of all things does begin;\n     A holy progeny from heaven descends\n     Auspicious in his birth, which puts an end\n     To the iron age, and from which shall arise\n     A golden age, most glorious to behold.\n\n[Footnote 932: Young's \"Christ of History,\" p. 248.]\n\nII. _Finally, Greek philosophy prepared the way for Christianity by\nawakening and deepening the consciousness of guilt, and the desire for\nRedemption_.\n\nThe consciousness of sin, and the consequent need of expiation for sin,\nwere gradually unfolded in the Greek mind. The idea of sin was at first\nrevealed in a confused and indefinite feeling of some external,\nsupernatural, and bewildering influence which man can not successfully\nresist; but yet so in harmony with the sinner's inclination, that he can\nnot divest himself of all responsibility. \"Homer has no word answering\nin comprehensiveness or depth of meaning to the word _sin_, as it is\nused in the Bible..... The noun _amartia_ which is appropriated to\nexpress this idea in the Greek of the New Testament, does not occur in\nthe Homeric poems..... The word which is most frequently employed to\nexpress wrong-doing of every kind is _ate_, with its corresponding\nverb..... The radical signification of the word seems to be a\nbefooling--a depriving one of his senses and his reason, as by\nunseasonable sleep, and excess of wine, joined with the influence of\nevil companions, and the power of destiny, or the deity. Hence, the\nGreek imagination, which impersonated every great power, very naturally\nconceived of Ate as a person, a sort of omnipresent and universal cause\nof folly and sin, of mischief and misery, who, though the daughter of\nJupiter, yet once fooled or misled Jupiter himself, and thenceforth,\ncast down from heaven to earth, walks with light feet over the heads of\nmen, and makes all things go wrong. Hence, too, when men come to their\nsenses, and see what folly and wrong they have perpetrated, they cast\nthe blame on Ate, and so, ultimately, on Jupiter and the gods.\"[933]\n\n[Footnote 933: Tyler, \"Theology of the Greek Poets,\" pp. 174, 175.]\n\n     \"Oft hath this matter been by Greeks discussed,\n      And I their frequent censure have incurred:\n      Yet was not I the cause; but Jove, and Fate,\n      And gloomy Erinnys, who combined to throw\n      A strong delusion o'er my mind, that day\n      I robb'd Achilles of his lawful prize.\n      What could I do? a Goddess all o'erruled,\n      Daughter of Jove, dread Ate, baleful power\n      Misleading all; with light step she moves,\n      Not on the earth, but o'er the heads of men.\n      With blighting touch, and many hath caused to err.\"[934]\n\nAnd yet, though Agamemnon here attempts to shuffle off the guilt of his\ntransgression upon Ate, Jove, and Fate, yet at other times he confesses\nhis folly and wrong, and makes no attempt to cast the responsibility on\nthe gods.[935] Though misled by a \"baleful power,\" he was not compelled.\nThough tempted by an evil goddess, he yet followed his own sinful\npassions, and therefore he owns himself responsible.\n\nTo satisfy the demands of divine justice, to show its hatred of sin, and\nto deter others from transgression, sin is punished. Punishment is the\npenalty due to sin; in the language of Homer, it is the payment of a\ndebt incurred by sin. When the transgressor is punished he is said to\n\"pay off,\" or \"pay back\" his crimes; in other words, to expatiate or\natone for them.\n\n                             \"If not at once,\n     Yet soon or late will Jove assert their claim,\n     And heavy penalty the perjured pay\n     With their own blood, their children's, and their wives'.\"[936]\n\nAt the same time the belief is expressed that the gods may be, and often\nare, propitiated by prayers and sacrifices, and thus the penalty is\nremitted.\n\n     \"The Gods themselves, in virtue, honor, strength,\n      Excelling thee, may yet be mollified;\n      For they when mortals have transgressed, or fail'd\n      To do aright, by sacrifice and pray'r,\n      Libations and burnt-off'rings, may be sooth'd.\"[937]\n\n[Footnote 934: \"Iliad,\" bk. xix. l. 91-101 (Lord Derby's translation).]\n\n[Footnote 935: Ibid., bk. ix. l. 132-136.]\n\n[Footnote 936: Ibid., bk. iv. l. 185-188.]\n\n[Footnote 937: Ibid., bk. ix. l. 581-585.]\n\nPolytheism, then, as Dr. Schaff has remarked, had the voice of\nconscience, and a sense, however obscure, of sin. It felt the need of\nreconciliation with deity, and sought that reconciliation by prayer,\npenance, and sacrifice.[938]\n\nThe sense of the exceeding sinfulness of sin, and the absolute need of\nexpiation, is determined with increasing clearness and definiteness in\nthe tragic poets.\n\nThe first great law which the Tragedians recognize, as a law written on\nthe heart, is \"that the sinner must suffer for his sins.\" The connection\nbetween sin and suffering is constantly recognized as a natural and\nnecessary connection, like that between sowing and reaping.\n\n     A haughty spirit, blossoming, bears a crop\n     Of woe, and reaps a harvest of despair.[939]\n\n\"Lust and violence beget lust and violence, and vengeance too, at the\nappointed time.\"[940] \"Impiety multiplies and perpetuates itself.\"[941]\n\"The sinner pays the debt he contracted, ends the career that he\nbegins,\"[942] \"and drinks to the dregs the cup of cursing which he\nhimself had filled.\"[943] Conscience is the instrument in the hands of\nJustice and Vengeance by which the Most High inflicts punishment. The\nretributions of sin are \"wrought out by God.\"\n\nThe consequences of great crimes, especially in high places, extend to\nevery person and every thing connected with them. \"The country and the\ncountry's gods are polluted.\"[944] \"The army and the people share in the\ncurse.\"[945] \"The earth itself is polluted with the shedding of\nblood,\"[946] \"and even the innocent and the virtuous who share the\nenterprises of the wicked may be involved in their ruin, as the pious\nman must sink with the ungodly when he embarks in the same ship.\"[947]\n\n[Footnote 938: Tyler, \"Theology of the Greek Poets,\" p. 258.]\n\n[Footnote 938: AEschylus, \"Persae,\" l. 821.]\n\n[Footnote 940: \"Agamemnon,\" l. 763.]\n\n[Footnote 941: Ibid., l. 788.]\n\n[Footnote 942: Ibid., l. 1529.]\n\n[Footnote 943: Ibid., l. 1397.]\n\n[Footnote 944: Ibid., l. 1645.]\n\n[Footnote 945: \"Persae,\" _passim._]\n\n[Footnote 946: \"Sup.,\" 265.]\n\n[Footnote 947: \"Theb.,\" p. 602.]\n\nThe pollution and curse of sin, when once contracted by an individual,\nor entailed upon a family, will rest upon them and pursue them till the\npolluted individual or the hated and accursed race is extinct, unless in\nsome way the sin can be expiated, or some god interpose to arrest the\npenalty. The criminal must die by the hand of justice, and even in Hades\nvengeance will still pursue him.[948] Others may in time be washed away\nby ablutions, worn away by exile and pilgrimage, and expiated by\nofferings of blood.[949] But great crimes can not be washed away; \"For\nwhat expiation is there for blood when once it has fallen on the\nground.\"[950] Thus the law (_[Greek: nomos]_)--for so it is expressly\ncalled--as from an Attic Sinai, rolls its reverberating thunders, and\npronounces its curses upon sin, from act to act and from chorus to\nchorus of that grand trilogy--the \"Agamemnon,\" the \"Choephoroe,\" and the\n\"Eumenides.\"\n\n[Footnote 948: \"Sup.,\" l. 227.]\n\n[Footnote 949: \"Eum.,\" l. 445 seq.]\n\n[Footnote 950: \"Choeph.,\" l. 47.]\n\nBut after the law comes the gospel. First the controversy, then the\nreconciliation. A dim consciousness of sin and retribution as a fact,\nand of reconciliation as a _want_, seems to have revealed itself even in\nthe darkest periods of history. This consciousness underlies not a few\nof the Greek tragedies. \"The 'Prometheus Bound' was followed by the\n'Prometheus Unbound,' reconciled and restored through the intervention\nof Jove's son. The 'oedipus Tyrannus' of Sophocles was completed by the\n'oedipus Colonus,' where he dies in peace amid tokens of divine favor.\nAnd so the 'Agamemnon' and 'Choephoroe' reach their consummation only in\nthe 'Eumenides,' where the Erinyes themselves are appeased, and the\nFuries become the gracious ones. This is not, however, without a special\ndivine interposition, and then only after a severe struggle between the\npowers that cry for justice and those that plead for mercy.\"\n\nThe office and work which, in this trilogy, is assigned to Jove's son,\nApollo, must strike every reader as at least a remarkable resemblance,\nif not a foreshadowing of the Christian doctrine of _reconciliation_.\n\"This becomes yet more striking when we bring into view the relation in\nwhich this reconciling work stands to [Greek: Zeus Soter], Jupiter\nSaviour--[Greek: Zeus tritos], Jupiter the third, who, in connection\nwith Apollo and Athena, consummates the reconciliation. Not only is\nApollo a [Greek: Soter], a Saviour, who, having himself been exiled from\nheaven among men, will pity the poor and needy;[951] not only does\nAthena sympathize with the defendant at her tribunal, and, uniting the\noffice of advocate and judge, persuade the avenging deities to be\nappeased;[952] but Zeus is the beginning and end of the whole process.\nApollo appears as the advocate of Orestes only at her bidding;[953]\nAthena inclines to the side of the accused, as the offspring of the\nbrain of Zeus, and of like mind with him.\"[954] Orestes, after his\nacquittal, says that he obtained it\n\n     \"By means of Pallas and of Loxias\n      And the third Saviour who doth all things sway.\"[955]\n\nPlatonism reveals a still closer affinity with Christianity in its\ndoctrine of sin, and its sense of the need of salvation. Plato is\nsacredly jealous for the honor and purity of the divine character, and\nrejects with indignation every hypothesis which would make God the\nauthor of sin. \"God, inasmuch as he is good, can not be the cause of all\nthings, as the common doctrine represents him to be. On the contrary, he\nis the author of only a small part of human affairs; of the larger part\nhe is not the author; for our evil things far outnumber our good things.\nThe good things we must ascribe to God, whilst we must seek elsewhere,\nand not in him, the causes of evil.\"[956] The doctrine of the poets,\nwhich would in some way charge on the gods the errors of men, he sternly\nresists. We must express our disapprobation of Homer, or any other poet,\nif guilty of such foolish blunders about the gods as to tell us[957]\n\n     'Fast by the threshold of Jove's court are placed\n      Two casks, one stored with evil, one with good,'\n\nAnd that he for whom the Thunderer mingles both\n\n     'He leads a life checker'd with good and ill.'\n\n[Footnote 951: \"Sup.,\" l. 214.]\n\n[Footnote 952: \"Eum.,\" l. 970.]\n\n[Footnote 953: Ibid., l. 616.]\n\n[Footnote 954: Ibid., l. 664, 737.]\n\n[Footnote 955: Tyler's \"Theology of the Greek Poets,\" especially ch. v.,\nfrom which the above materials are drawn.]\n\n[Footnote 956: \"Republic,\" bk. ii. ch. xviii.]\n\n[Footnote 957: \"Iliad,\" xxiv., l. 660.]\n\nNor can we let our young people know that, in the words of AEschylus--\n\n     \"'When to destruction God will plague a house\n       He plants among the members guilt and sin.'\"[958]\n\nWhatever in the writings of Homer and the tragic poets give countenance\nto the notion that God is, in the remotest sense the author of sin, must\nbe expunged. Here is clearly a great advance in ethical conceptions.\n\nThe great defect in the ethical system of Plato was the identification\nof evil with the inferior or corporeal nature of man--\"the irascible and\nconcupiscible elements,\" fashioned by the junior divinities. The\nrational and immortal part of man's nature, which is derived immediately\nfrom God--the Supreme Good, naturally chooses the good as its supreme\nend and destination. Hence he adopted the Socratic maxim \"that no man is\nwillingly evil,\" that is, no man deliberately chooses evil as evil, but\nonly as a _seeming_ good--he does not choose evil as an end, though he\nmay choose it voluntarily as a means. Plato manifests great solicitude\nto guard this maxim from misconception and abuse. Man has, in his\njudgment, the power to act in harmony with his higher reason, or\ncontrary to reason; to obey the voice of conscience or the clamors of\npassion, and consequently he is the object of praise or blame, reward or\npunishment. \"When a man does not consider himself, but others, as the\ncause of his own sins,.... and even seeks to excuse himself from blame,\nhe dishonors and injures his own soul; so, also, when contrary to\nreason.... he indulges in pleasure, he dishonors it by filling it with\nvice and remorse.\"[959] The work and effort of life, the end of this\nprobationary economy, is to make reason triumphant over passion, and\ndiscipline ourselves to a purer and nobler life.\n\n[Footnote 958: \"Republic,\" bk. ii. ch, xviii., xix.]\n\n[Footnote 959: \"Laws,\" bk. v. ch. i.]\n\nThe obstacles to a virtuous life are, however, confessedly numberless,\nand, humanly speaking, insurmountable. To raise one's self above the\nclamor of passion, the power of evil, the bondage of the flesh, is\nacknowledged, in mournful language, to be a hopeless task. A cloud of\nsadness shades the brow of Plato as he contemplates the fallen state of\nman. In the \"Phaedrus\" he describes, in gorgeous imagery, the purity, and\nbeauty, and felicity of the soul in its anterior and primeval state,\nwhen, charioteering through the highest arch of heaven in company with\nthe Deity, it contemplated the divine justice and beauty; but \"this\nhappy life,\" says he, \"we forfeited by our transgression.\" Allured by\nstrange affections, our souls forgot the sacred things that we were made\nto contemplate and love--we _fell_. And now, in our fallen state, the\nsoul has lost its pristine beauty and excellence. It has become more\ndisfigured than was Glaucus, the seaman \"whose primitive form was not\nrecognizable, so disfigured had he become by his long dwelling in the\nsea.\"[960] To restore this lost image of the good,--to regain \"this\nprimitive form,\" is not the work of man, but God. Man can not save\nhimself. \"Virtue is not natural to man, neither is it to be learned, but\nit comes by a divine influence. _Virtue, is the gift of God_.\"[961] He\nneeds a discipline, \"an education which is divine.\" If he is saved from\nthe common wreck, it must be \"by the special favor of Heaven.\"[962] He\nmust be delivered from sin, if ever delivered, by the interposition of\nGod.\n\n[Footnote 960: \"Republic,\" bk. x. ch. xi.]\n\n[Footnote 961: \"Meno.\"]\n\n[Footnote 962: \"Republic,\" bk. vi. ch. vi., vii.]\n\nPlato was, in some way, able to discover the need of a Saviour, to\ndesire a Saviour, but he could not predict his appearing. Hints are\nobscurely given of a Conqueror of sin, an Assuager of pain, an Averter\nof evil in this life, and of the impending retributions of the future\nlife; but they are exceedingly indefinite and shadowy. In all instances\nthey are rather the language of _desire_, than of hope. Platonism\nawakened in the heart of humanity a consciousness of sin and a profound\nfeeling of want--the want of a Redeemer from sin, a spiritual, a divine\nRemedy for its moral malady--and it strove after some remedial power.\nBut it was equally conscious of failure and defeat. It could enlighten\nthe reason, but it could only act imperfectly on the will. Platonic was\na striking counterpart to Pauline experience prior to the apostle's\ndeliverance by the power and grace of Christ. It discovered that \"the\nLaw is holy, and the commandment is holy, and just, and good.\" It\nrecognized that \"it is spiritual, but man is carnal, the slave of sin.\"\nIt could say, \"What I do I approve not; for I do not what I would, but\nwhat I hate. But if my will [my better judgment] is against what I do, I\nconsent unto the Law that it is good. And now it is no more I that do\nit, but sin, that dwelleth in me. For I know that in me, that is, in my\nflesh, good abideth not, for to will is present with me, but the power\nto do the right is absent: the good that I would, I do not; but the evil\nthat I would not, that I do. I consent gladly to the law of God in my\ninner man ['the rational and immortal nature'[963]]; but I behold a law\nin my members ['the irascible and concupiscible nature'[964]] warring\nagainst the law of my mind (or reason), and bringing me into captivity\nto the law of sin which is in my members. _Oh wretched man that I am!\nwho shall deliver me from the body of this death_?\"[965] Paul was able\nto say, \"I thank God (that he hath now delivered me), through Jesus\nChrist our Lord!\" Platonism could only desire, and hope, and wait for\nthe coming of a Deliverer.\n\n[Footnote 963: Plato.]\n\n[Footnote 964: Ibid.]\n\n[Footnote 965: Romans, vii.]\n\nThis consciousness of the need of supernatural light and help, and this\naspiration after a light supernatural and divine, which Plato inherited\nfrom Socrates, constrained him to regard with toleration, and even\nreverence, every apparent approach, every pretension, even, to a divine\ninspiration and guidance in the age in which he lived. \"'The greatest\nblessings which men receive come through the operation of _phrensy_\n([Greek: mania]--inspired exaltation), when phrensy is the gift of God.\nThe prophetess of Delphi, and the priestess of Dodona, many are the\nbenefits which in their phrensies (moments of inspiration) they have\nbestowed upon Greece; but in their hours of self-possession, few or\nnone. And too long were it to speak of the Sibyl, and others, who,\ninspired and prophetic, have delivered utterances beneficial to the\nhearers. Indeed, this word phrenetic or maniac is no reproach; it is\nidentical with mantic--prophetic.[966] And often when diseases and\nplagues have fallen upon men for the sins of their forefathers, some\nphrensy too has broken forth, and in prophetic strain has pointed out a\nremedy, _showing how the sin might be expiated, and the gods appeased_\n(by prayers, and purifications, and atoning rites).... So many and yet\nmore great effects could I tell you of the phrensy which comes from the\ngods.\"[967] Some have discerned in all this merely the food for a feeble\nridicule. They regard these sentiments as simply an evidence of the\npower and prevalence of superstition clouding the loftiest intellects in\nancient times. By the more thoughtful and philosophic mind, however,\nthey will be accepted as an indication of the imperishable and universal\nfaith of humanity in a supernatural and supersensuous world, and in the\npossibility of some communication between heaven and earth.[968] And\nabove all, it is a conclusive proof that Plato believed that the\nknowledge of _salvation_--of a remedy for sin, a method of expiation for\nsin, a means of deliverance from the power and punishment of sin, must\nbe revealed from Heaven.\n\n[Footnote 966: [Greek: Mania], phrensy; _[Greek: pantis]_, a\nprophet--one who utters oracles in a state of divine phrensy; _[Greek:\npantike]_, the prophetic art.]\n\n[Footnote 967: \"Phaedrus,\" Sec. 47-50 (Whewell's translation).]\n\n[Footnote 968: \"_Vetus opinio est_, jam usque ab heroicis ducta\ntemporibus, eaque et populi Romani et _omnium gentium_ firmata consensu,\nversari quandem inter homines divinationem.\"--Cicero, \"De Divin.,\" i.\nI.]\n\nPaul, then, found, even in that focus of Paganism, the city of Athens,\nreligious aspirations tending towards Jesus Christ. A true philosophic\nmethod, notwithstanding its shortcomings and imperfections, concluded by\ndesiring and seeking \"the Unknown God,\" by demanding him from all forms\nof worship, from all schools of philosophy. The great work of\npreparation in the heathen world consisted in the developing of the\n_desire_ for salvation. It proved that God is the great want of every\nhuman soul; that there is a profound affinity between conscience and the\nliving God; and that Tertullian was right when he wrote the \"Testimonium\nAnimae naturaliter Christianae.\"[969] And when it was sufficiently\ndemonstrated that \"the world by philosophy knew not God (as a Redeeming\nGod and Saviour), then it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to\nsave them that believe.\" This was all a dispensation of divine\nprovidence, which was determined by, or \"in, the wisdom of God.\"[970]\n\nThe history of the religions and philosophies of human origin thus\nbecomes to us a striking confirmation of the truth of Christianity. It\nshows there is a wondrous harmony between the instinctive wants and\nyearnings of the human heart, as well as the necessary ideas and laws of\nthe reason, and the fundamental principles of revealed religion. There\nis \"a law written on the heart\"--written by the finger of God, which\ncorresponds to the laws written by the same finger on \"tables of stone.\"\nThere are certain necessary and immutable principles and ideas infolded\nin the reason of man, which harmonize with the revelations of the\nEternal Logos in the written word.[971] There are instinctive longings,\nmysterious yearnings of the human heart, to which that unveiling of the\nheart of God which is made in the teaching and life of the incarnate God\nmost satisfyingly answers. Within the depths of the human spirit there\nis an \"oracle\" which responds to the voice of \"the living oracles of\nGod.\"\n\n[Footnote 969: Pressense, \"Religions before Christ\" (Introduction);\nNeander, \"Church History,\" vol. i. (Introduction).]\n\n[Footnote 970: I Corinthians, i. 21.]\n\n[Footnote 971: \"The surmise of Plato, that the world of appearance\nsubsists in and by a higher world of Divine Thought, is confirmed by\nChristianity when it tells us of a Divine subsistence--that Eternal Word\nby whom and in whom all things consist.\"--Vaughan, \"Hours with the\nMystics,\" vol. i. p. 213.]\n\nHere, then, are two distinct and independent revelations--the unwritten\nrevelation which God has made to all men in the constitution of the\nhuman mind, and the external written revelation which he has made in the\nperson and teaching of his Son. And these two are perfectly harmonious.\nWe have here two great volumes--the volume of conscience, and the volume\nof the New Testament. We open them, and find they announce the _same_\ntruths--one in dim outline, the other in a full portraiture. There are\nthe same fundamental principles underlying both revelations. They both\nbear the impress of _divinity_. The history of philosophy may have been\nmarked by many errors of interpretation; so, also, has the history of\ndogmatic theology. Men may have often misunderstood and misinterpreted\nthe dictates of conscience; so have theologians misunderstood and\nmisinterpreted the dictates of revelation. The perversions of conscience\nand reason have been plead in defense of error and sin; and so, for\nages, have the perversions of Scripture been urged in defense of\nslavery, oppression, falsehood, and wrong. Sometimes the misunderstood\nutterances of conscience, of philosophy, and of science have been\narrayed against the incorrect interpretations of the Word of God. But\nwhen both are better understood, and more justly conceived, they are\nfound in wondrous harmony. When the New Testament speaks to man of God,\nof duty, of immortality, and of retribution, man feels that its\nteachings \"commend themselves to his conscience\" and reason. When it\nspeaks to him of redemption, of salvation, of eternal life and\nblessedness, he feels that it meets and answers all the wants and\nlongings of his heart. Thus does Christianity throw light upon the\noriginal revelations of God in the human conscience, and answers all the\nyearnings of the human soul. So it is found in individual experiences,\nso it has been found in the history of humanity. As Leverrier and Adams\nwere enabled to affirm, from purely mathematical reasoning, that another\nplanet must exist beyond _Uranus_ which had never yet been seen by human\neyes, and then, afterwards, that affirmation was gloriously verified in\nthe discovery of _Neptune_ by the telescope of Galle; so the reasonings\nof ancient philosophy, based on certain necessary laws of mind, enabled\nman to affirm the existence of a God, of the soul, of a future\nretribution, and an eternal life beyond the grave; and, then,\nsubsequently, these were brought fully into light, and verified by the\nGospel.\n\nWe conclude in the words of Pressense: \"To isolate it from the past,\nwould be to refuse to comprehend the nature of Christianity itself, and\nthe extent of its triumphs. Although the Gospel is not, as has been\naffirmed, the product of anterior civilizations--a mere compound of\nGreek and Oriental elements--it is not the less certain that it brings\nto the human mind the satisfaction vainly sought by it in the East as in\nthe West. _Omnia subito_ is not its device, but that of the Gnostic\nheresy. Better to say, with Clement of Alexandria and Origen, that the\nnight of paganism had its stars to light it, but that they called to the\nMorning-star which stood over Bethlehem.\"\n\n\"If we regard philosophy as a preparation for Christianity, instead of\nseeking in it a substitute for the Gospel, we shall not need to\noverstate its grandeur in order to estimate its real value.\"\n\n\n\n\nCONTENTS.\n\n\nA.\n\n     Abstraction, comparative and immediate, 187-189; 362-364.\n\n     AEschylus, his conception of the Supreme Divinity, 146;\n       his recognition of human guilt, and need of expiation, 515-517.\n\n     AEtiological proof of the existence of God, 487-489.\n\n     Anaxagoras, an Eclectic, 311;\n       in his physical theory an Atomist, 312;\n       taught that the Order of the universe can only be explained by\n       Intelligence, 312;\n       his psychology, 313;\n       the teacher of Socrates, 313.\n\n     Anaximander, his first principle _the infinite_, 290;\n       his infinite a chaos of primary elements, 290.\n\n     Anaximenes, a vitalist, 286;\n       his first principle _air_, 287.\n\n     Aristotle, his opinion of the popular polytheism of Greece, 157;\n       his classification of causes, 280, 404, 405;\n       his misrepresentations of Pythagoras, 299;\n       his classification of the sciences, 389;\n       his Organon, 389-394;\n       his Logic, 394-403;\n       his Theology, 404-417;\n       his Ethics, 417-421;\n       his Categories, 395;\n       his logical treatises, 396;\n       on induction and deduction, 396-398;\n       his psychology, 398, 401;\n       on how the knowledge of first principles is attained, 394, 402,\n          403;\n       on Matter and Form, 405-408;\n       on Potentiality and Actuality, 408-412;\n       his proof of the Divine existence, 412-415;\n       on the chief good of man, 419, 420;\n       his doctrine of the Mean, 420, 421;\n       defect of his ethical system, 505.\n\n     [Archai], or first principles, the grand object of\n        investigation in Greek Philosophy, 271, 274, 279, 280.\n\n     Athenians, criticism on Plutarch's sketch of their character, 45;\n       their vivacity, 45;\n       love of freedom, 46--and of country, 46;\n       private life of, 47;\n       intellectual character of, 48;\n       inquisitive and analytic, 48;\n       rare combinations of imagination and reasoning powers, 49;\n       religion of, 98;\n       the Athenians a religious people, 102;\n       their faith in the being and providence of God, 107;\n       their consciousness of dependence on God, 110, 116;\n       their religious emotions, 117;\n       their deep consciousness of sin and guilt, 122-124;\n       their sense of the need of expiation, 124, 125;\n       their religion exerted some wholesome moral influence, 162, 163.\n\n     Athens, topography of 27;\n       the Agora, 28;\n       its porticoes, 29;\n       the Acropolis, 30;\n       its temples, 31;\n       the Areopagus, 33;\n       sacred objects in, 98, 99;\n       images of the gods, 99;\n       localities of schools of philosophy in, 266-268.\n\n     Attica, geographical boundaries of, 26;\n       a classic land, 34;\n       its geographical and cosmical conditions providentially ordained\n       for great moral   ends, 34, 35; soil of, not favorable to\n       agriculture, 40--necessitated industry and frugality, 41; the\n       climate of, 41--its influence on the mental character of the\n       people, 42.\n\n\nB.\n\n     Bacon, his assertion that the search after final causes had misled\n       scientific inquirers, 222.\n\n\nC.\n\n     Categories of Aristotle, 395.\n\n     Causality, principle of, 189;\n       assailed by the Materialists, 194--especially by Comte, 203-209;\n       the intuition of _power_ a fact of immediate consciousness, 204;\n       consciousness of _effort_ the type of all force, 211;\n       Aristotle on Causality, 413;\n       aetiological proof of existence of God, 487-489.\n\n     Cause, origin of the idea of, 204, 205.\n\n     Causes, Aristotle's classification of, 280, 404, 405.\n\n     Chief good of man, Aristotle on, 419, 420.\n\n     Cleanthes, his hymn to Jupiter, 452, 453.\n\n     Comte, his theory of the origin of religion, 57-65;\n       his doctrine that all knowledge is confined to material\n       phenomena, 203; denies all causation, both efficient and final,\n       203-214.\n\n     Conditioned, law of the, 227, 228;\n       is contradictory, 250;\n       as a ground of faith, meaningless and void, 251.\n\n     Cosmological proof of the existence of God, 489, 490.\n\n     Cousin, his theory that religion had its outbirth in the\n       spontaneous apperceptions\n       of reason, 78-84;\n       criticism thereon, 84-86.\n\n     Criterion of truth, Plato's search after, 333, 334.\n\n     Cudworth, his interpretation of Grecian mythology, 139, 143.\n\n     Cuvier, on final causes, 216, 222.\n\nD.\n\n     Darwin, his inability to explain the facts of nature without\n       recognizing design, 221, 222.\n\n     Democritus, taught that atoms and the vacuum are the beginning of\n       all things, 292; an absolute materialist, 293.\n\n     Dependence, consciousness of, the foundation of primary religious\n       emotions, 110-113.\n\n     Development, law of mental, 478; three successive stages clearly\n       marked, in the individual, 478--in the universal mind of\n       humanity, 479, 480;\n           (1) in the field of Theistic conceptions, 481-494;\n           (2) in the department of morals, 495-509;\n           (3) in the department of religious sentiment, 509-522.\n\n     Dialectic of Plato, 353-369.\n\n     Dogmatic Theologians, assert that all our knowledge of God is\n       derived from the teaching of the Scriptures, 86,167; cast doubt\n       upon the principle of causality, 253-255--upon the principle of\n       the unconditioned, 255-257--upon the principle of unity,\n       258-261--and upon the immutable principles of morality, 261-263.\n\n     Dynamical or Vital school of ancient philosophers, 282-289.\n\nE.\n\n     Eclecticism of Anaxagoras, 311.\n\n     Emotions, the religious, 117-122;\n       sentiment of the Divine exists in all minds, 119-121;\n       also instinctive yearning after the Invisible, 121, 122.\n\n     Empedocles, a believer in one Supreme God, 153.\n\n     Epicurus, his theory of the origin of religion, 56, 57;\n       his Ethics, 427-432;\n       his Physics, 433-438;\n       taught that pleasure is the chief end of life, 428--that\n       ignorance of nature is the sole cause of unhappiness, 432--that\n       Physics and Psychology are the only studies conducive to\n       happiness, 432--that the universe is eternal and infinite,\n       433--that concrete bodies are combinations of atoms, 434--that\n       atoms have spontaneity, 436, and some degree of freedom, 436,\n       437; the parts of the world self-formed, 437, 438; plants,\n       animals, and man are spontaneously generated, 438; a state of\n       savagism the primitive condition of man, 439; his Atheism, 441;\n       his Psychology, 442-444; the soul material and mortal, 445, 446.\n\n     Eternity, Platonic notion of, 349 (_note_), 372, 373.\n\n     Eternity of Matter, how taught by Plato, 371-373;\n       distinctly affirmed by Epicurus, 433.\n\n     Eternity of the Soul, Plato's doctrine of, 373-375.\n\n     Ethical ideas and principles, gradual development of, 495, 496;\n       (1) the age of popular and unconscious morals, 497, 498;\n       (2) the transitional or sophistical age, 498-500;\n       (3) the philosophic or conscious age, 500-506.\n\n     Ethics of Plato, 383-387, 502-505;\n       of Aristotle, 417-42l;\n       of Epicurus, 427-432;\n       of the Stoics, 454, 456.\n\n     Expiation for sin, the need of, 124;\n       universally acknowledged, 124--especially in Grecian mythology,\n       125--and in the language of Greece and Rome, 125.\n\nF.\n\n     Facts of the universe, classification of, 175-177.\n\n     Fathers, the early, recognized the propaedeutic office of Greek\n       philosophy, 473-475.\n\n     Feeling, theories which ground all religion on, 70-74;\n       its inadequacy, 74-78.\n\n     Final Causes, impossibility of interpreting nature without\n       recognizing, 221, 222;\n       the assumption of final causes a means of discovery, 222, 223;\n       Cuvier on, 216, 222;\n       argument of Socrates from, 320-324;\n       Plato on, 380-382;\n       Aristotle on, 405, 413, 414;\n       teleological proof of the existence of God, 490, 491.\n\n     Force, the idea of, rejected by Comte, 207.\n\n     Forces, all of one type, and that type mind, 211.\n\n     Freedom, human, 19;\n       exists under limitations, 20;\n       both admitted and denied by Comte, 208, 209;\n       of Will, as taught by Plato, 386, 387;\n       admitted by Epicurus, 486.\n\nG.\n\n     Geoffrey St. Hilaire, his pretense of not ascribing any intentions\n       to nature, 216, 217.\n\n     Geography and History, relations between, 14;\n       opposite theories concerning, 15;\n       theory of Buckle, 16--of Ritter, Guyot, and Coubin, 16;\n       the relation one of adjustment and harmony, 16.\n\n     God, universality of idea of, 89;\n       Athenians believed in one God, 107, 147, 148;\n       idea of God a common phenomenon of human intelligence, 168, 169;\n       the development of this idea dependent on experience conditions,\n       169-172; the phenomena of the universe demand a God for their\n       explanation, 172-175: there are principles revealed in\n       consciousness which necessitate the idea of God, 184-189; proofs\n       of the existence of God employed by Aristotle, 412-416--by\n       Socrates, 320-324; views of God entertained by the Stoics, 452,\n       453; logical proofs of the existence of God developed by Greek\n       philosophy, 487-494; gradual development of Theistic conception,\n       481-487.\n\n     Gods of Grecian Mythology, how regarded by the philosophers,\n       151-157; views of Plato regarding them, 383.\n\n     Great men, represent the spirit of their age, 20;\n       the creation of a providence interposing in history, 21.\n\n     Greece, its geographical relations favorable to free intercourse\n       with the great historic nations, 35--to commerce, 36--to the\n       diffusion of knowledge, 36--and to a high degree of civilization,\n       36; peculiar configuration of Greece conducive to activity and\n       freedom, 36-38--and independence, 38; natural scenery, 43--its\n       influence on imagination and taste, 44.\n\n     Greek Civilization, a preparation for Christianity, 465-468.\n\n     Greek Language, a providentially prepared vehicle for the perfect\n       revelation of Christianity, 468-470.\n\n     Greek Philosophy, first a philosophy of Nature, 271, 281, 282;\n       next a philosophy of Mind, 271, 316-318;\n       lastly a philosophy of Life, 271, 422;\n       prepared the way for Christianity, 457-522.\n\n     Greeks, the masses of the people believed in one Supreme God, 147,\n       148.\n\n     Guilt, consciousness of, a universal fact, 122, 123;\n       recognized in Grecian mythology, 123, 124;\n       awakened and deepened by philosophy, 513-518.\n\nH.\n\n     Hamilton, Sir W., teaches that philosophic knowledge is the\n       knowledge of effects as dependent on causes, 224, 225;\n       and of qualities as inherent in substances, 225, 226;\n       and yet asserts all human knowledge is necessarily confined to\n       phenomena, 227;\n       his doctrine of the relativity of all knowledge, 227, 229-236;\n       his philosophy of the conditioned, 228;\n       conditional limitation the law of all thought, 236-242;\n       the Infinite a mere negation of thought, 242-246;\n       asserts we must believe in the infinity of God, 246;\n       takes refuge in faith, 247;\n       faith grounded on the law of the conditioned, 243, 249--that is,\n       on contradiction, 249, 250.\n\n     Hegel, his philosophy of religion, 65-70.\n\n     Heraclitus, his first principle _ether_, 288;\n       change, the universal law of all existence, 288;\n       a Materialistic Pantheist, 289.\n\n     Hesiod, on the generation of the gods, 142.\n\n     Homer, his conception of Zeus, 144, 145.\n\n     Homeric doctrine of sin, 513,514.\n\n     Homeric theology, 143-145, 509, 510.\n\n     Humanity, fundamental ideas and laws of, 18;\n       developed and modified by exterior conditions, 19;\n       the most favorable conditions existed in Athens.\n\nI.\n\n     Idealism, furnishes no adequate explanation of the common belief\n       in an external world, 193,199--and of a personal self, 200-202;\n       Cosmothetic Idealism, 305;\n       absolute Idealism, 305.\n\n     Ideas, Platonic doctrine of, 334-337;\n       Platonic scheme of, 364-367.\n\n     Images of the gods, how regarded by Cicero, 129--by Plutarch, 129;\n       the heathens apologized for the use of images, 159.\n\n     Immortality of the soul, taught by Socrates, 324--and by Plato,\n       375, 376; denied by Epicurus, 444-446.\n\n     Incarnation, the idea of, not unfamiliar to heathen thought, 512.\n\n     Induction, the psychological method of Plato, 356, 357.\n\n     Induction and Deduction, Aristotle on, 397, 398.\n\n     Infinite, the, not a mere negation of thought, 242-244;\n       known as the necessary correlative of the finite, 245;\n       as comprehensible in itself, as the finite is comprehensible in\n       itself, 246;\n       in what sense known, 252.\n\n     Infinite Series, the phrase, when literally construed, a\n       contradiction, 181,182.\n\n     Infinity, qualitative and quantitative, 239;\n       qualitative infinity possessed by God alone, 184, 239.\n\n     Intentionality, principle of, 190;\n       denied by Materialists, 194;\n       a first law of thought, 221-223; recognized by Socrates, 320-324.\n\n     Ionian School of Philosophy, a physical and sensational school,\n       281; subdivided into Mechanical and Dynamical, 282, 283.\n\n     Italian School of Philosophy, an Idealist school, 281;\n       subdivided into the Mathematical and Metaphysical, 282, 296.\n\nJ.\n\n     Jacobi, his faith-philosophy, 71.\n\nK.\n\n     Knowledge, Hamilton's doctrine of relativity of, 229-236;\n       opposite theories of knowledge among ancient philosophers, 330,\n       331; the tendency of these theories, 332;\n       Plato's theory of, 333, 334;\n       Plato's science of real knowledge, 337, 338.\n\n\n     L.\n\n     Language, inadequate to convey the idea of God, 92-94;\n       Greek language the best medium for the Christian revelation,\n       468-470.\n\n     Leucippus, his first principles _atoms_ and _space_, 291;\n       a pure Materialist, 292.\n\n     Logic of Aristotle, 394-403.\n\n     Logical Treatises of Aristotle, 395, 396.\n\n     Lucretius, the expounder of the doctrines of Epicurus, 426,427;\n       his account of the origin of worlds, 437, 438;\n       of plants, animals, and man, 438.\n\nM.\n\n     Mansel, bases religion on feeling of dependence, 72--and sense of\n       obligation, 73.\n\n     Materialists deny the principle of causality, 194, 203--and of\n       intentionality or final cause, 211-225;\n       Anaximander, Leucippus, and Democritus belong to the\n       materialistic school, 286-293:\n       Epicurus a materialist, 442-446.\n\n     Mathematical Infinite, not absolute, 179, 180;\n       capable of exact measurement, therefore limited, 180;\n       infinite sphere, radius, line, etc., self-contradictory, 180,\n       181.\n\n     Matter, did Plato teach the eternity of? 371-373;\n       the doctrine of the Stoics concerning matter, 449 (_note_).\n\n     Matter and Form, Aristotle on, 405-408.\n\n     Mean, Aristotle's doctrine of the, 420.\n\n     Mediator, consciousness of the need of a, awakened by Greek\n       philosophy, 509-513.\n\n     Metaphysical thought, law of its development, 478-480;\n       three different stages in the individual mind, 478, 479;\n       and in the universal consciousness of our race, 479.\n\n     Metempsychosis regarded by Plato as a mere hypothesis, 376\n       (_note_).\n\n     Mill, J. S., his doctrine that all knowledge is confined to mental\n       phenomena, 193;\n       his definition of matter, 196;\n       his views of personal identity, 196, 197;\n       his theological opinions, 197.\n\n     Miracles, not designed to prove the existence of God, 95.\n\n     Moral principles, universal and immutable, which lead to the\n       recognition of a God, 190;\n       the Dogmatic Theologians seek to invalidate the argument\n       therefrom, 261-263.\n\n     Mystics, base all religious knowledge on internal feeling, 70.\n\n     Mythology, philosophy of Greek, 134-139;\n       Cudworth's interpretation of, 139-143;\n       recognized the consciousness of guilt and need of expiation,\n       123-125.\n\n N.\n\n     National Character, a complex result, 17;\n       conjoint effect of moral and physical influences, 17;\n       human freedom not to be disregarded in the study of, 20;\n       influence of geographical surroundings, 23--of climate and\n       natural scenery, on the pursuits and mental character of nations,\n       23--on creative art, 24--and literature of nations, 25.\n\n     Nations, individuality of, 22;\n       determined mainly from without, 22.\n\n     Natural Realism, 305;\n       Anaxagoras a natural realist, 311-313.\n\n     Nature, interpreted by man according to fundamental laws of his\n      reason, 133.\n\nO.\n\n     Obligation, the sense of, lies at the foundation of religion, 115.\n\n     Ontological proof of the existence of God, 491-493.\n\n     Ontology, of Plato, 369-379;\n       the subject-matter of the world of sense, 370-373;\n       the permanent substratum of mental phenomena, 373-376;\n       the first Principle of all principles--God, 377-379, 491-493.\n\n     Optimism of Plato, 382.\n\n     Order of the Universe, had it a beginning, or is it eternal?\n       178-184.\n\n     Order, principle of, pervades the universe, 220, 221;\n       recognized by Pythagoras, 301;\n       Cosmological proof of the existence of God, 489, 490.\n\n P.\n\n     Parmenides, his theory of knowledge, 307-308;\n      a spiritualistic Pantheist, 308, 309.\n\n     Paul, St., at Athens, 14;\n       his emotion when he saw the city full of idols, 100;\n       the subject of his discourse, 101;\n       brought into contact with all the phases of philosophic thought,\n       268, 269;\n       his arrival at Athens an epoch in the moral history of the world,\n       472;\n       he recognized the preparatory office of Greek philosophy, 473.\n\n     Philosophers of Athens, 101;\n       believed in one supreme, uncreated, eternal God, 151-157;\n       their views of the mythological deities, 158, 159;\n       their apologies for images and image-worship, 159, 160.\n\n     Philosophic Schools, classification of, 271-273;\n       Pre-Socratic 280-314;\n       Socratic, 314-421;\n       Post-Socratic, 422-456.\n\n     Philosophy, the world-enduring monument of the glory of Athens,\n       265, 260;\n       defined, 270, 271;\n       an inquiry after first causes and principles, 271, 457;\n       not in any proper sense a theological inquiry, 273-277, 279;\n       the love of wisdom, 384, 385.\n\n     Philosophy in its relation to Christianity, 268-270;\n       sympathy of Platonism, 268;\n       antagonism of Epicureanism and Stoicism, 269;\n       the Propaedeutic office of philosophy, 457-524--recognized by St.\n       Paul, 473--and many of the early Fathers, 473-475;\n       philosophy undermined Polytheism, and purified the Theistic idea,\n       481-487;\n       developed the Theistic argument in a logical form, 487-494;\n       it awakened Conscience and purified the Ethical idea, 495-506;\n       demonstrated the insufficiency of reason to elaborate a perfect\n       ideal of moral excellence, 506-509;\n       awakened in man the sense of distance from God, and the need of\n       a Mediator, 509-513;\n       deepened the consciousness of sin, and the desire for a Redeemer,\n       513-522;\n       the history of philosophy a confirmation of the truth of\n       Christianity, 522-524.\n\n     Philosophy of Religion, 53;\n       based on the correlation between Divine and human reason,\n       458-462.\n\n     Plato, condemns the poets for their unworthy representations of\n       the gods, 130-132;\n       his views of the gods of Grecian mythology, 154-157:\n       the sympathy of his philosophy with Christianity, 268:\n       followed the philosophic method of Socrates, 328;\n       his moral qualifications for the study of philosophy, 328, 329;\n       his literary qualifications, 329, 330;\n       his search after a criterion of truth, 333, 334;\n       his doctrine of Ideas, 334-337;\n       his science of real knowledge, 337, 338;\n       his answer to the question, What is Science? 338, 339;\n       his Psychology 339-352;\n       his scheme of the intellectual powers, 345;\n       on the nature of the soul, 350;\n       his dialectic, 353-369;\n       his grand scheme of ideas, 364-367;\n       his Ontology, 369-379;\n       on the creation of time, 372;\n       did he teach that matter is eternal? 371, 372;\n       on the eternity of the rational element of the soul, 373-375;\n       on the immortality of the soul, 375, 376;\n       on God as the First Principle of all principles, 377-379;\n       his Physics, 380-383;\n       his Ethics, 383-387, 502-505;\n       defects of his\n       ethical system, 518;\n       his philosophy not derived from Jewish sources, 476;\n       felt the need of a superhuman deliverer from sin and guilt,\n       519-521.\n\n     Plutarch, his sketches of Athenian character, 44;\n       criticism on, 45;\n       on the universality of prayer and sacrifice, 115.\n\n     Poets, the Greek, believed in the existence of one uncreated Mind,\n       141;\n       their theogony was a cosmogony, 142;\n       the theologians of Greece, 274, 275.\n\n     Polytheism, Greek, a poetico-historical religion of myth and\n       symbol, 134;\n       its immoralities, 160, 161;\n       undermined by Philosophy, 484-487.\n\n     Post-Socratic Schools, classification of, 425;\n       a philosophy of life, 422-424.\n\n     Potentiality and Actuality, Aristotle on, 408-412.\n\n     Prayer, natural to man, 115.\n\n     Preparation for Christianity, not confined to Judaism alone,\n       464, 465;\n       Greek civilization also prepared the way for Christ, 465-468;\n       Greek language a providential development as the vehicle of a\n       more perfect revelation, 468-470;\n       Greek philosophy fulfilled a propaedeutic office, 470-472.\n\n     Pre-Socratic Schools, classification of, 280-282; 295, 296.\n\n     Principles, _universal and necessary_, how attained by the method\n       of Plato, 361-364, 390;\n       how, by the method of Aristotle, 390-394, 402, 403.\n\n     Psychological analysis, logical demonstration of the existence of\n       God begins with, 170;\n       reveals principles which in their logical development attain to\n       the knowledge of God, 184-189.\n\n     Psychology of Heraclitus, 289;\n       of Pythagoras, 304;\n       of Parmenides, 307, 308;\n       of Anaxagoras, 313;\n       of Protagoras, 315;\n       of Socrates, 317, 318;\n       of Plato, 339-352;\n       of Aristotle, 392, 398-401;\n       of Epicurus, 442-444;\n       of the Stoics, 453, 454.\n\n     Pythagoras, his doctrine that numbers are the first principles of\n       things, 297;\n       how to be interpreted, 297-304;\n       misrepresented by Aristotle, 298-300;\n       psychology of, 304.\n\nR.\n\n     Reason, insufficiency of, to elaborate a perfect ideal of moral\n       excellence, 505-509.\n\n     Redemption, desire of, awakened and defined by Greek philosophy,\n       513-521.\n\n     Relativity of all knowledge, Hamilton's doctrine of, 229-236.\n\n     Religion, the philosophy of, 53;\n       defined 53, 106;\n       universality of religious phenomena, 54;\n       hypothesis offered in explanation of, 55;\n       hypothesis of Epicurus and Comte, 56-65--of Hegel, 65-70--of\n       Jacobi and Schleiermacher, 70-78--of Cousin, 78-86--of Dogmatic\n       Theologians, 86-96--author's theory, 96, 97;\n       religion of the Athenians, 98--its mythological and symbolic\n       aspects, 128--exerted some wholesome influences, 161-163.\n\n     Reminiscence, Plato on, 354, 355.\n\n     Revelation, progressive, 462-464;\n       harmony of the two revelations in the volume of conscience and\n       the volume of the New Testament, 522-524.\n\nS.\n\n     Sacrifice, universal prevalence of, 115, 124;\n       prompted by the universal consciousness of guilt, 126:\n       expiatory sacrifices grounded on a primitive revelation, 127.\n\n     Schleiermacher, his theory that all religion is grounded on the\n       feeling of absolute dependence, 71, 72.\n\n     Science, Plato's answer to the question, What is Science? 338, 339.\n\n     Self-determination, limited by idea of duty, 113;\n       implies accountability, 114;\n       recognizes a Lawgiver and Judge, 115.\n\n     Socrates, his desire for truth, 316;\n       his daemon, 317 _(note_);\n       his philosophic method, 318, 319;\n       a believer in one Supreme God, 320;\n       his argument for the existence of God from final causes, 320-324;\n       his belief in immortality and a future retribution, 324, 325;\n       his Ethics, 325;\n       the great prophet of the human conscience, 500-502.\n\n     Socratic School, 314.\n\n     Sophists, 315, 316;\n       their skeptical tendency, 315;\n       their defective ethics, 498, 499.\n\n     Sophocles, believed in one Supreme God, 147.\n\n     Soul, Plato on the nature of the, 350, 373;\n       eternity of the rational element, 373-375.\n\n     Spencer, H., carries the law of the Conditioned forward to its\n       logical consequences, Atheism, 241, 242.\n\n     Stoical School, 446;\n       its philosophy a moral philosophy, 447.\n\n     Stoics, their Physiology, 448-453; their\n       Psychology, 453, 454;\n       their Ethics, 454-456;\n       their Theology, 452,453.\n\n     Substance, principle of, 189;\n       Idealism seeks to undermine it, 193;\n       Reason affirms a permanent substance as the ground of all mental\n       phenomena, 201--and of the phenomena of the sensible world,\n       202, 203.\n\n     Sufficient Reason, law of, recognized by Plato, 359.\n\n     Superstition, meaning of the term as used by Paul, 103.\n\n T.\n\n     Teleological proof of the existence of God, 490, 491.\n\n     Thales, a believer in one uncreated God, 152;\n       his first principles, 283;\n       he regards _water_ as the material cause, 284;\n       and God as the efficient cause, 285.\n\n     Theistic argument, in its logical form, 487-494.\n\n     Theistic conception, gradual development of, 481-484,\n\n     Theological opinions of the early periods of Greek civilization,\n       150, 151; 276-278.\n\n     Theology of Aristotle, 404-417;\n       identical with Metaphysics, 404, 416.\n\n     Theology of the Greek poets, 143-151;\n       proposed reform of Poetry by Plato, 131, 132.\n\n     Thinking, conditionality of, 228;\n       in what sense to be understood, 237;\n       thought imposes no limits upon the object of thought, 237, 238.\n\n     Thought, negative and positive, 242, 243;\n       negative thought an impossibility, 243;\n       all thought must be positive, 243.\n\n     Time, Platonic notion of, 371, 372.\n\n     Tragedians, the Greek, were the public religious teachers of the\n       Athenians, 145;\n       their theology, 146, 147;\n       influence of the religious dramas on the Athenian mind, 161-163;\n       guiltiness of man, and need of reconciliation confessed by,\n       515-517.\n\nU.\n\n     Unconditioned, principle of, 189;\n       assailed by Hamilton, 194.\n\n     Unity of God, 259;\n       an affirmation of reason, 259-261;\n       Xenophanes taught the unity of God, 307--also Parmenides,\n       309--and Plato, 377--and Aristotle, 415.\n\n     Unity, principle of, 189;\n       attempt of Dogmatic Theologians to prove its insufficiency, 194,\n       258-261;\n       recognized by Pythagoras, 296;\n       his effort to reduce all the phenomena of nature to a Unity, 303,\n       304.\n\n     Universal and necessary Principles, classification of, 189, 190;\n       these the foundation of our cognition of a God, 191;\n       how attained according to Plato, 360-364;\n       how by the method of Aristotle, 390-394, 402, 403.\n\n     Universe, the, is it finite or infinite? 178-184;\n       Epicurus teaches that it is infinite, 433.\n\n     Unknown God, the true God, 104;\n       God not absolutely unknown, 107-110;\n       classification of opponents to the doctrine that God can be\n       cognized by reason, 166-168;\n       Idealist School of Mill, 194-203;\n       Materialistic School of Comte, 203-223;\n       Hamiltonian School, 224-252;\n       School of Dogmatic Theologians, 252-263.\n\nW.\n\n     Watson, Richard, represents the views of Dogmatic Theologians 86;\n       asserts that all our religious knowledge is derived from oral\n       revelation, 86-88, 167;\n       incompleteness and inadequacy of this theory, 88-96;\n       in vindicating for the Scriptures the honor of revealing all our\n       knowledge of God, he casts doubt upon the principle of Causality,\n       253-255--on the principle of the Unconditioned, 255-257--on the\n       principle of Unity, 258-261--and on the immutable principles of\n       Morality, 261-263.\n\n     Wordsworth, on the Sentiment of the Divine, 118.\n\nX.\n\n     Xenophanes, his attack on Polytheism, 130;\n       his faith in one God, 153, 306, 307.\n\nZ.\n\n     Zeno of Citium, the founder of the Stoical School, 446;\n       a Spiritualistic Pantheist, 450, 451.\n\n     Zeno of Elea, maintained the doctrine of Absolute Identity, 309.\n\n     Zeus, originally the Supreme and only God of the Greeks, 143;\n       the Homeric Zeus, the Supreme God, 144, 145.\n\n\nTHE END.\n\n\n\nVALUABLE STANDARD WORKS\nFOR PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LIBRARIES,\nPublished by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York.\n\n\n_For a full List of Books suitable for Libraries, see _Harper &\nBrother's Trade-List _and_ Catalogue, _which may be had gratuitously on\napplication to the Publishers personally, or by letter enclosing Five\nCents_.\n\n\nHARPER & BROTHERS _will send any of the following works by mail, postage\nprepaid, to any part of the United States, on receipt of the price_.\n\nMOTLEY'S DUTCH REPUBLIC. 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The Massacre of St. Bartholomew:\nPreceded by a History of the Religious Wars in the Reign of Charles IX.\nBy Henry White, M.A. With Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth, $1 75.\n\nLOSSING'S FIELD-BOOK OF THE REVOLUTION. Pictorial Field-Book of the\nRevolution; or, Illustrations, by Pen and Pencil, of the History,\nBiography, Scenery, Relics, and Traditions of the War for Independence.\nBy Benson J. Lossing. 2 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $14 00; Sheep, $15 00; Half\nCalf, $18 00; Full Turkey Morocco, $22 00.\n\nLOSSING'S FIELD-BOOK OF THE WAR OF 1812. Pictorial Field-Book of the War\nof 1812; or, Illustrations, by Pen and Pencil, of the History,\nBiography, Scenery, Relics, and Traditions of the Last War for American\nIndependence. By Benson J. Lossing. With several hundred Engravings on\nWood, by Lossing and Barritt, chiefly from Original Sketches by the\nAuthor. 1088 pages, 8vo, Cloth, $7 00; Sheep, $8 50; Half Calf, $10 00.\n\nALFORD'S GREEK TESTAMENT. The Greek Testament: with a critically-revised\nText; a Digest of Various Readings; Marginal References to Verbal and\nIdiomatic Usage; Prolegomena; and a Critical and Exegetical Commentary.\nFor the Use of Theological Students and Ministers. By Henry Alford,\nD.D., Dean of Canterbury. Vol. I., containing the Four Gospels. 944\npages, 8vo, Cloth, $6 00; Sheep, $6 50.\n\nABBOTT'S HISTORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. The French Revolution of\n1789, as viewed in the Light of Republican Institutions. By John S.C.\nAbbott. With 100 Engravings. 8vo, Cloth, $5 00.\n\nABBOTT'S NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. The History of Napoleon Bonaparte. By John\nS.C. Abbott. With Maps, Woodcuts, and Portraits on Steel. 2 vols., 8vo,\nCloth, $10 00.\n\nABBOTT'S NAPOLEON AT ST. HELENA; or, Interesting Anecdotes and\nRemarkable Conversations of the Emperor during the Five and a Half Years\nof his Captivity. Collected from the Memorials of Las Casas, O'Meara,\nMontholon, Antommarchi, and others. By John S.C. Abbott. With\nIllustrations. 8vo, Cloth, $5 00.\n\nADDISON'S COMPLETE WORKS. The Works of Joseph Addison, embracing the\nwhole of the \"Spectator.\" Complete in 3 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $6 00.\n\nALCOCK'S JAPAN. The Capital of the Tycoon: a Narrative of a Three Years'\nResidence in Japan. By Sir Rutherford Alcock, K.C.B., Her Majesty's\nEnvoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary in Japan. With Maps and\nEngravings. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $3 50.\n\nALISON'S HISTORY OF EUROPE. First Series: From the Commencement of the\nFrench Revolution, in 1789, to the Restoration of the Bourbons, in 1815.\n[In addition to the Notes on Chapter LXXVI., which correct the errors of\nthe original work concerning the United States, a copious Analytical\nIndex has been appended to this American edition.] Second Series: From\nthe Fall of Napoleon, in 1815, to the Accession of Louis Napoleon, in\n1852. 8 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $16 00.\n\nBANCROFT'S MISCELLANIES. Literary and Historical Miscellanies. By George\nBancroft. 8vo, Cloth, $3 00.\n\nBALDWIN'S PRE-HISTORIC NATIONS. Pre-Historic Nations; or, Inquiries\nconcerning some of the Great Peoples and Civilizations of Antiquity, and\ntheir Probable Relation to a still Older Civilization of the Ethiopians\nor Cushites of Arabia. By John D. Baldwin, Member of the American\nOriental Society. 12mo, Cloth, $1 75.\n\nBARTH'S NORTH AND CENTRAL AFRICA. Travels and Discoveries in North and\nCentral Africa: being a Journal of an Expedition undertaken under the\nAuspices of H.B.M.'s Government, in the Years 1849-1855. By Henry Barth,\nPh.D., D.C.L. Illustrated. 3 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $12 00.\n\nHENRY WARD BEECHER'S SERMONS. Sermons by Henry Ward Beecher, Plymouth\nChurch, Brooklyn. Selected from Published and Unpublished Discourses,\nand Revised by their Author. With Steel Portrait. Complete in 2 vols.,\n8vo, Cloth, $5 00.\n\nLYMAN BEECHER'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY, &c. Autobiography, Correspondence, &c.,\nof Lyman Beecher, D.D. Edited by his Son, Charles Beecher. With Three\nSteel Portraits, and Engravings on Wood. In 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $5 00.\n\nBOSWELL'S JOHNSON. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Including a Journey\nto the Hebrides. By James Boswell, Esq. A New Edition, with numerous\nAdditions and Notes. By John Wilson Croker, LL.D., F.R.S. Portrait of\nBoswell. 2 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $4 00.\n\nDRAPER'S CIVIL WAR. History of the American Civil War. By John W.\nDraper, M.D., LL.D., Professor of Chemistry and Physiology in the\nUniversity of New York. In Three Vols. 8vo, Cloth, $3 50 per vol.\n\nDRAPER'S INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF EUROPE. A History of the\nIntellectual Development of Europe. By John W. Draper, M.D., LL.D.,\nProfessor of Chemistry and Physiology in the University of New York.\n8vo, Cloth, $5 00.\n\nDRAPER'S AMERICAN CIVIL POLICY. Thoughts on the Future Civil Policy of\nAmerica. By John W. Draper, M. D., LL. D, Professor of Chemistry and\nPhysiology in the University of New York. Crown 8vo, Cloth, $2 50.\n\nDU CHAILLU'S AFRICA. Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa:\nwith Accounts of the Manners and Customs of the People, and of the Chase\nof the Gorilla, the Crocodile, Leopard, Elephant, Hippopotamus and other\nAnimals. By Paul B. Du Chaillu. Numerous Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth, $5\n00.\n\nDU CHAILLU'S ASHANGO LAND. A Journey to Ashango Land: and Further\nPenetration into Equatorial Africa. By Paul B. Du Chaillu. New Edition.\nHandsomely Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $5 00.\n\nBURNS'S LIFE AND WORKS. The Life and Works of Robert Burns. Edited by\nRobert Chambers. 4 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $6 00.\n\nBELLOWS'S OLD WORLD. The Old World in its New Face: Impressions of\nEurope in 1867--1868. By Henry W. Bellows. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $3 50.\n\nBRODHEAD'S HISTORY OF NEW YORK. History of the State of New York. By\nJohn Romlyn Brodhead. First Period, 1609--1664. 8vo, Cloth, $3 00.\n\nBULWER'S PROSE WORKS. Miscellaneous Prose Works of Edward Bulwer, Lord\nLytton. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $3 50.\n\nCARLYLE'S FREDERICK THE GREAT. History of Friedrich II., called\nFrederick the Great By Thomas Carlyle. Portraits, Maps, Plans, &c. 6\nvols., 12mo, Cloth, $12 00.\n\nCARLYLE'S FRENCH REVOLUTION. History of the French Revolution. Newly\nRevised by the Author, with Index, &c. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $3 50.\n\nCARLYLE'S OLIVER CROMWELL. Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. With\nElucidations and Connecting Narrative. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $3 50.\n\nCHALMERS'S POSTHUMOUS WORKS. The Posthumous Works of Dr. Chalmers.\nEdited by his Son-in-Law, Rev. William Hanna, LL.D. Complete in 9 vols.,\n12mo, Cloth, $13 50.\n\nCOLERIDGE'S COMPLETE WORKS. The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor\nColeridge. With an Introductory Essay upon his Philosophical and\nTheological Opinions. Edited by Professor Shedd. Complete in Seven Vols.\nWith a fine Portrait. Small 8vo, Cloth, $10 50.\n\nCURTIS'S HISTORY OF THE CONSTITUTION. History of the Origin, Formation,\nand Adoption of the Constitution of the United States. By George Ticknor\nCurtis. 2 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $6 00.\n\nDOOLITTLE'S CHINA. Social Life of the Chinese: with some Account of\ntheir Religious, Governmental, Educational, and Business Customs and\nOpinions. With special but not exclusive Reference to Fuhchau. By Rev.\nJustis Doolittle, Fourteen Years Member of the Fuhchau Mission of the\nAmerican Board. Illustrated with more than 150 characteristic Engravings\non Wood. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $5 00.\n\nDAVIS'S CARTHAGE. Carthage and her Remains: being an Account of the\nExcavations and Researches on the Site of the Phoenician Metropolis in\nAfrica and other adjacent Places. Conducted under the Auspices of Her\nMajesty's Government. By Dr. Davis, F.R.G.S. Profusely Illustrated with\nMaps, Woodcuts, Chromo-Lithographs, &c. 8vo, Cloth, $4 00.\n\nEDGEWORTH'S (Miss) NOVELS. With Engravings. 10 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $15\n00.\n\nGIBBON'S ROME. History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. By\nEdward Gibbon. With Notes by Rev. H.H. Milman and M. Guizot. A new cheap\nEdition. To which is added a complete Index of the whole Work, and a\nPortrait of the Author. 6 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $9 00.\n\nHARPER'S PICTORIAL HISTORY OF THE REBELLION. Harper's Pictorial History\nof the Great Rebellion in the United States. With nearly 1000\nIllustrations. In Two Vols., 4to. Price $6 00 per vol.\n\nHARPER'S NEW CLASSICAL LIBRARY. Literal Translations.\n\nThe following Volumes are now ready. Portraits. 12mo, Cloth, $1 50 each.\nCaesar.--Virgil.--Sallust.--Horace.--Cicero's Orations.--Cicero's\nOffices, &c.--Cicero on Oratory and Orators.--Tacitus (2\nvols.).--Terence.--Sophocles.--Juvenal.--Xenophon.--Homer's\nIliad.--Homer's\nOdyssey.--Herodotus.--Demosthenes.--Thucydides.--AEschylus.--Euripides (2\nvols.).\n\nHELPS'S SPANISH CONQUEST. The Spanish Conquest in America, and its\nRelation to the History of Slavery and to the Government of Colonies. By\nArthur Helps. 4 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $6 00.\n\nHUME'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. History of England, from the Invasion of\nJulius Caesar to the Abdication of James II., 1688. By David Hume. A new\nEdition, with the Author's last Corrections and Improvements. To which\nis Prefixed a short Account of his Life, written by Himself. With a\nPortrait of the Author. 6 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $9 00.\n\nGROTE'S HISTORY OF GREECE. 12 vols., 12mo, Cloth. $18 00.\n\nHALE'S (Mrs.) WOMAN'S RECORD. Woman's Record; or, Biographical Sketches\nof all Distinguished Women, from the Creation to the Present Time.\nArranged In Four Eras, with Selections from Female Writers of each Era.\nBy Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale. Illustrated with more than 200 Portraits.\n8vo, Cloth, $5 00.\n\nHALL'S ARCTIC RESEARCHES. Arctic Researches and Life among the\nEsquimaux: being the Narrative of an Expedition in Search of Sir John\nFranklin, in the Years 1860, 1861, and 1862. By Charles Francis Hall.\nWith Maps and 100 Illustrations. The Illustrations are from Original\nDrawings by Charles Parsons, Henry L. Stephens, Solomon Eytinge, W.S.L.\nJewett, and Granville Perkins, after Sketches by Captain Hall. 8vo,\nCloth, $5 00.\n\nHALLAM'S CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY OF ENGLAND, from the Accession of Henry\nVII. to the Death of George II. 8vo, Cloth, $2 00.\n\nHALLAM'S LITERATURE. Introduction to the Literature of Europe during the\nFifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries. By Henry Hallam. 2\nvols. 8vo, Cloth, $4 00.\n\nHALLAM'S MIDDLE AGES. State of Europe during the Middle Ages. By Henry\nHallam. 8vo, Cloth, $2 00.\n\nHILDRETH'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. First Series: From the First\nSettlement of the Country to the Adoption of the Federal Constitution.\nSecond Series: From the Adoption of the Federal Constitution to the End\nof the Sixteenth Congress. 6 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $18 00.\n\nJAY'S WORKS. Complete Works of Rev. William Jay: comprising his Sermons,\nFamily Discourses, Morning and Evening Exercises for every Day in the\nYear, Family Prayers, &c. Author's enlarged Edition, revised. 3 vols.,\n8vo, Cloth, $6 00.\n\nJOHNSON'S COMPLETE WORKS. The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. With an\nEssay on his Life and Genius, by Arthur Murphy, Esq. Portrait of Johnson\n2 vols., 8vo, Cloth, $4 00.\n\nKINGLAKE'S CRIMEAN WAR. The Invasion of the Crimea, and an Account of\nits Progress down to the Death of Lord Raglan. By Alexander William\nKinglake. With Maps and Plans. Two Vols. ready. 12mo, Cloth, $2 00 per\nvol.\n\nKRUMMACHER'S DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL. David, the King of Israel: a\nPortrait drawn from Bible History and the Book of Psalms. By Frederick\nWilliam Krummacher, D.D., Author of \"Elijah the Tishbite,\" &c.\nTranslated under the express Sanction of the Author by the Rev. M.G.\nEaston, M.A. With a Letter from Dr. Krummacher to his American Readers,\nand a Portrait. 12mo, Cloth, $1 75.\n\nLAMB'S COMPLETE WORKS. The Works of Charles Lamb. Comprising his\nLetters, Poems, Essays of Elia. Essays upon Shakspeare, Hogarth, &c.,\nand a Sketch of his Life, with the Final Memorials, by T. Noon Talfourd.\nPortrait. 2 vols. 12mo, Cloth, $3 00.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEnd of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Christianity and Greek Philosophy, by\nBenjamin Franklin Cocker\n\n*** ","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \nEndorsements\n\n\"Need help with your marriage? In this insightful and solid book Rhonda Stoppe gives wives real help! She puts her finger on problems and attitudes that plague every married woman\u2014and then supplies answers, solutions, and counsel from God's Word.\"\n\nElizabeth George\n\nbestselling author, A Woman After God's Own Heart\u00ae\n\n\"A vast amount of the misery and brokenness people experience is the result of lies they believe. This is certainly true of marriage. Rhonda Stoppe debunks misleading myths with grace, humor, and candor and leaves you with hope that your marriage can become more than the stuff of your dreams: it can be the handiwork of God.\"\n\nRichard Blackaby, PhD\n\nauthor, Customized Parenting in a Trending World\n\n\"If you've ever been through a difficult season in marriage, you may have secretly wondered whether you'd be happier with someone else...In this terrific book, Rhonda walks through several critical areas of discontentment, busts the myths that are so easy to believe, and shows just how important it is to rely on God\u2014and how to do that\u2014in order to move from heartache to joy in your marriage. This is the book for every woman who wants to be content and happy in her marriage but may not know how.\"\n\nShaunti Feldhahn\n\nsocial researcher and bestselling author of For Women Only\n\n\"I just loved reading If My Husband Would Change, I'd Be Happy! Are you searching for the secret to a happy marriage? Stoppe not only delivers practical steps to finding your happily-ever-after, she shares a life-changing message of how to use a Christ-centered marriage for the glory of God.\"\n\nErica Galindo\n\nfounder, CEO, and editorial director SonomaChristianHome.com\n\n\"If My Husband Would Change, I'd Be Happy packs practical wisdom and many \"Aha!\" moments to shed light on the myths that sabotage relationships. Through storytelling, humor, and biblical insights, Rhonda Stoppe reveals where true joy originates and the secret of becoming your husband's best friend. BRAVO! Rhonda on such a well-written and much-needed message.\"\n\nJulie Gorman\n\nauthor of What I Wish My Mother Had Told Me About Men\n\n\"I loved this book. Read it only if you dare to be inspired to better your marriage. If My Husband Would Change I'd Be Happy is a must-read for anyone. Rhonda's love for others shines through in every page.\"\n\nCarmen Whittaker\n\nwife of Fermin Whittaker, executive director California Southern Baptist Convention\n\n\"If you're finding your \"happily ever after\" not turning out as expected and being shattered by your not-so-perfect Prince Charming, then Rhonda Stoppe is the fairy godmother who will point you in the right direction for a Happy Ending made in the kingdom of heaven!\"\n\nAngela Rose\n\nfounder, TheLaundryMoms.com\n\n\"Rhonda and Steve Stoppe have been long-distance pastors and mentors to my wife and I over the past 15 years. They are the most grounded-in-the-Bible people we have ever met. Because of that they have been an amazing example of how God intended a married couple to live as husband and wife, and mother and father.\"\n\nJosh Berry\n\npresident, LabeLive\n\n\"Rhonda Stoppe makes me want to be a better wife, a better mother, and a better grandmother. But most of all, Rhonda inspires me to be a better Christian through her own very real and passionate relationship with Jesus.\"\n\nJoy Lucius\n\njournalist, American Family Journal  \nauthor, The Dandelion Trial\n\n\"When my husband had an affair, I thought my marriage was over. But Rhonda and Steve Stoppe helped us begin the healing process in our marriage by covering my husband and me with the love of our Savior. Their personal mentorship has been instrumental in making our heavy circumstances less burdensome, and they provide godly marriage counsel that imparts hope for the future.\"\n\nAngie\n\nhumbled and blessed wife and student of the Word\n\nHARVEST HOUSE PUBLISHERS\n\nEUGENE, OREGON\nUnless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from the New King James Version\u00ae. Copyright \u00a9 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.\n\nVerses marked ESV are from The ESV\u00ae Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version\u00ae), copyright \u00a9 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.\n\nVerses marked NASB are taken from the New American Standard Bible\u00ae, \u00a9 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. (www.Lockman.org)\n\nCover by Dugan Design Group, Bloomington, Minnesota\n\nCover illustration \u00a9 Big_Ryan \/ iStock\n\nBack cover photo \u00a9 Jackie Plaza Photography\n\nIF MY HUSBAND WOULD CHANGE, I'D BE HAPPY\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2015 Rhonda Stoppe\n\nPublished by Harvest House Publishers\n\nEugene, Oregon 97402\n\nwww.harvesthousepublishers.com\n\nISBN 978-0-7369-6286-5 (pbk.)\n\nISBN 978-0-7369-6287-2 (eBook)\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this electronic publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means\u2014electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopy, recording, or any other\u2014without the prior written permission of the publisher. The authorized purchaser has been granted a nontransferable, nonexclusive, and noncommercial right to access and view this electronic publication, and purchaser agrees to do so only in accordance with the terms of use under which it was purchased or transmitted. Participation in or encouragement of piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of author's and publisher's rights is strictly prohibited.\nDedication\n\nTo my husband, Steve Stoppe, the love of my life for more than 30 years. By your example, you have taught me how to love selflessly and fervently. You are my Stoppe-Ever-After. I pray God gives us many more years to serve Him together in this mission:\n\nTo know Christ and make Him known.\n\nAnd I cannot wait to one day stand before Christ's Throne with you to celebrate with all those who have come to salvation through our ministry together!\n\nTo my children and their spouses:\n\nTony and Kylene\n\nJake and Meredith\n\nBrandon and Jessy\n\nEstevan and Kayla\n\nI am in awe of how your marriages reflect the love of Christ to a world in desperate need of a Savior.\n\nSoli Deo gloria\nAcknowledgments\n\nThank you Gayle, Molly, Joan, Elaine, Pam, Penny, and Marge for becoming the Titus 2 women in my life when I was a young bride. The way you love your husbands drew me to you, and the way you love Christ caused me to want to love Him as well. \"I thank my God upon every remembrance of you\" (Philippians 1:3).\n\nSpecial thanks to...\n\nMy husband\u2013\u2013Steve Stoppe, for agreeing to write \"From a Husband's Perspective\" in this book. As a pastor, counselor, and husband, your words are insightful and inspiring to me\u2013\u2013and any woman who takes them to heart.\n\nMy editor\u2013\u2013Steve Miller, whose insights and wise counsel have helped Steve and me author this marriage resource for a generation who is desperate to believe a happy marriage can last for a lifetime.\nContents\n\nEndorsements\n\nDedication\n\nAcknowledgments\n\n1. If He Would Change, I'd Be Happy\n\nHe Was Never Meant to Be Your Happily-Ever-After\n\n2. I Will Respect Him When He Earns My Respect\n\nThe Concept of Unconditional Respect\n\n3. I'm Falling Out of Love with Him\n\nStaying in Love Is All in Your Mind\n\n4. Our Kids Would Obey if He Were a Better Father\n\nMarriage Survival Guide for Parents\n\n5. I Would Be Happier Married to Someone Else\n\nThe Grass Is Not Greener on the Other Side of the Fence\n\n6. He Would Love Me More if I Were Prettier\n\nThe Secret to Keeping His Attention\n\n7. All He Wants Is Sex\n\nWhen You Long for Romance\n\n8. More Money Equals Less Stress\n\nGrow Rich in Ways You Never Imagined\n\n9. Every Couple Fights\n\nEight Steps to Making Peace\n\n10. Our Marriage Would Be Better if Bad Things Would Stop Happening\n\nThe Joy of the Lord Is Your Strength\n\n11. If Momma Ain't Happy, Ain't Nobody Happy\n\nIt's Not Your Husband's Job to Make You Happy\n\n12. Happily-Ever-After Is a Fairy Tale\n\nTen Keys to a More Fulfilling Marriage\n\nAppendix: How to Have a Relationship with Jesus\n\nNotes\n\nAbout the Publisher\n\nIf He Would Change, I'd Be Happy\n\nHe Was Never Meant to Be Your Happily-Ever-After\n\n######\n\nI love being in love\u2014don't you? From the depths of my soul I have had an adoration for my husband that has only grown deeper over the past 30-plus years that we have been married. Is this adoration a result of being married to a perfect man? Of course not\u2014even though as a young bride I was convinced all of my happiness would be realized on the day I said, \"I do\" because my husband had promised to be my happily-ever-after.\n\nOn the day of our wedding, I walked down the aisle clutching my father's arm because I was trembling. I could hardly believe the day I had dreamt of was finally upon us! I had spent six months planning our wedding, and by the time we were to say our vows all I could think of was that I would soon be Mrs. Steven W. Stoppe. (I remember writing my new name over and over again just to establish how I would sign it\u2014did you do that?)\n\nI was so nervous as all eyes turned toward me, the bride, who was wearing the biggest hat-veil thing anyone had ever seen! And then, when my eyes met Steve's, nothing else mattered. It took my breath away to see him looking so incredibly handsome in his white tuxedo. (Big hats for veils and white long-tailed tuxedos were in fashion in the 1980s\u2014so don't judge me!)\n\nAs our eyes met, I remember thinking, I cannot believe I am actually marrying this amazing man. I am going to be the best wife he could ever ask for. Did you feel that way when you got married?\n\nSteve and I wrote our own wedding vows\u2014a real challenge for my not-so-romantically inclined guy. But he was a good sport, and he wrote wonderful words promising to love me \"as long as God shall give me life\"\u2014as Steve so sweetly whispered into my ear that day. As a reminder of our promises to one another, the vows we wrote have hung on a wall in our home ever since that day.\n\nTo my delight, for our honeymoon, Steve planned a monthlong trip that included driving to see a number of national parks across the United States. What a thrill it was to have an entire month to enjoy ourselves as husband and wife! (Although I have to admit, the nights that we camped out were a bit challenging when I learned how important it was to be near a restroom after lovemaking\u2014can I get a witness?)\n\nSteve's Aha Moment\n\nI'm sure that any illusions of grandeur Steve may have had about me when we got married were dashed during the second week of our honeymoon, while we were in Yellowstone National Park.\n\nAfter a couple of weeks of travel and a lot of fast food, I had gotten pretty constipated\u2014I'm just keepin' it real as I write this. You can imagine how uncomfortable I was whenever it was time to be romantic. So Steve decided to help out his poor bound-up wife by giving me a couple of laxatives\u2014something I had never taken before. He assured me if I took the pills before bedtime, I would have a most satisfying bowel movement in the morning, and all would be well.\n\nAt Steve's prompting, I took two pills. The next morning, nothing happened. So we decided to just enjoy our day at Yellowstone and try again that night by taking some more laxatives.\n\nWhen we drove into the park, we went straight to see the geyser called Old Faithful. Both Steve and I were excited to watch the hot water erupt out from the crater in the ground. We were impressed by how high the water shot up into the sky\u2014so much so that Steve decided it would look even more impressive to view the spectacle from a higher vantage point.\n\nSo up a nearby mountain we hiked. Old Faithful spouts at regular intervals throughout the day, and we calculated that we would be able to reach the top of the mountain just in time to see the geyser shoot forth before dark.\n\nWell, I probably don't even have to tell you what happened next. As we hiked and I was getting exercise, my innards began to make the most horrible gurgling sounds. As a blushing bride, I attempted to keep my husband from hearing the atrocious noise. However, the more we hiked, the clearer it became to me that the little pills, along with my morning coffee, were beginning to do a mighty work in my intestines.\n\nShamefully, I had to tell Steve what was happening, but I assured him I would be able to make it to the top of the mountain in time to see Old Faithful in action. But a short time later, I began to realize not only would I not be able to make it to the top, I was also in danger of not making it back down in time to find a bathroom before I experienced my own geyser spouting off!\n\nPoor Steve\u2014I know he was torn over what to do. He really wanted to continue the hike. I am sure he secretly evaluated the possibility of letting me make my way back down to the bathroom by myself, but then realized this was one of those \"for better or worse\" moments in which he had promised to love me just two weeks before.\n\nIn the end, we hiked slowly down the mountain. I had to stop several times to compose myself before I could go on. And all the while, Steve was laughing hysterically. I am happy to report I did make it to a restroom in time!\n\nBy the time I got out, the sun was setting and the park was about to close. So Steve never did have an opportunity to hike back up that mountain.\n\nWhen the Honeymoon Is Over\n\nDating, courtship, and planning the wedding are all glorious experiences for most women. But after the honeymoon, when the wedding gifts are in their proper place and life begins to happen, often the glorious experiences fade into the endless routines of to-do lists, juggling finances, and learning to serve one another. Did this happen to you?\n\nIt wasn't long before my weekends became consumed with doing laundry and housework. Gone were the Saturdays before marriage, during which Steve and I would spend an entire day at a park lazing by a river, enjoying one another's company. Even as a newlywed, those carefree days already seemed like a distant memory as I washed the dinner dishes and imagined the river running down my kitchen sink.\n\nI remember one Saturday in particular. I was in the house, defrosting our freezer. (They don't even make refrigerators that don't self-defrost anymore, do they?) As I painstakingly chipped away big chunks of ice, I could hear Steve and his brother, Dan, laughing in the garage. Dan had come over to help Steve work on a project. I should have been grateful for the help, but I found myself resenting that they were having a grand old time together while I was stuck in the house thawing out that miserable refrigerator and doing yet another load of his dirty laundry. Steve was a carpenter in those days, so his clothes got exceptionally dirty.\n\nIt didn't take long before I was annoyed by how much work was involved with being a wife. Soon resentment began building in my heart toward Steve. Even though I had already seen marriages in my family fall apart from resentment, I found myself falling for the mistake of harboring wrong attitudes.\n\nFamily of Origin\n\nHow would you describe your parents' marriage? Were they head-over-heels for each other? Did you have a terrific role model from their marriage or other marriages in your family that were characterized by joy, laughter, and delight? I hope this was true for you. In my own upbringing, it was not. So when I thought about what I wanted in my marriage, I had a long list of what I did not want.\n\nHowever, I soon learned that making a list of what you do not want your marriage to become is not an effective way to move toward having the marriage of your dreams.\n\nHow did you come up with the ideals for your \"dream marriage\"? After the wedding, were you surprised to discover that many of your expectations for your marriage didn't come true? Did you assume the fun and carefree experiences you enjoyed while you were dating would continue into married life? I did.\n\nWhile life cannot always be one fun experience after another, you can definitely have a truly satisfying marriage with a love that grows deeper as time goes on. Key to making this happen is breaking free of the common myths wives believe\u2014myths that make us look for marital happiness in all the wrong places. And in the chapters ahead, we'll talk about the secret to building a marriage that brings the kind of lifelong fulfillment you desire and that others will want to emulate.\n\nExpect to Feel Betrayed\n\nIn the early days of our marriage, I found myself becoming less and less enamored with my husband because he did not measure up to my expectations. For example, Steve loved to make peanut-butter toast. And not just in the morning for breakfast. Steve would make peanut-butter toast several times throughout the day. Why I had not noticed this man's obsession with peanut-butter toast while we were dating, I'll never know.\n\nIt wasn't the peanut-butter toast that bothered me, but the crumbs that were left behind every time Steve made this concoction. I have this unexplainable abhorrence to finding crumbs on my kitchen counter and floor. Mind you, I am not a spotless housekeeper, but there's just something about crumbs that gets to me!\n\nThinking he was saving me the trouble of washing a plate, Steve would invariably make his toast directly on the countertop\u2014the countertop! This would leave so many crumbs it was almost unbearable to me.\n\nFor the first few months of our marriage, I just quietly wiped up the crumbs while uttering little manipulative\u2014okay, maybe even passive-aggressive\u2014comments about how much I despised crumbs. Then one day I walked into the kitchen and found the countertop covered in crumbs. I must have gasped audibly, because Steve came running into the kitchen to see what was the matter.\n\nI burst into tears, and explained to Steve how his leaving crumbs behind made me feel like he didn't respect all the work I did to keep the house nice. The poor guy\u2014he just stood there stunned that I would rant so much over peanut-butter toast and crumbs. And he wondered why I would feel so betrayed by something as simple as the fact that he left a few crumbs on the kitchen counter once in a while.\n\nThis story sounds funny now, but when we were first married, the crumb dilemma truly devastated me. Because that's when it began to dawn on me that my husband was not the perfect person I had imagined him to be.\n\nThe Danger of Unrealistic Expectations\n\nOne of the biggest threats to a happy marriage is when one or both parties have unrealistic expectations of each other. When those expectations are not realized, you might feel betrayed. And this is when you may begin to believe myths that lead you to have unrealistic or incorrect expectations that do harm to your relationship. In this book, we will shed light on those myths.\n\nWhen my expectations of Steve were not being met, I remember feeling betrayed because he had promised to always make me happy. How self-absorbed I was back then. God used my disillusionment to show me my selfish heart. Have you ever had expectations come crashing down around you when reality sets in? How did that experience make you feel? Are you in a similar situation right now? Or maybe you have experienced years of disappointment in your marriage. Whatever the case, let's talk for a moment about how disappointment turns to disillusionment.\n\nYou might feel betrayed when you come to realize the man you married is not the man you had perceived him to be. If you have been married for any amount of time, I am sure that by now you have your own secret list of things you wish you could change about your husband.\n\nI find it interesting that frequently, the very qualities a woman was attracted to while dating her man often become the rub in their relationship after they are married. For example:\n\nI could go on, but you get the picture. Have you considered your husband may have his own secret list of disappointments about you as well? Rather than dwelling on what you wish your husband would change, what if you were to make a list of how you have changed after marriage? And instead, work to be the woman your husband had hoped you would be\u2014the wife you meant to be\u2014on the day you said, \"I do.\"\n\nSeriously, stop for a moment and evaluate the type of wife you had hoped to be...and the kind of wife you actually are. When your husband looked at your beautiful face as you cascaded down the aisle, what kind of wife did he expect you would be? Have you measured up to your own expectations\u2014let alone his?\n\nI have taught this message at women's events. When I ask each woman to measure herself against the kind of wife she meant to be\u2014and the kind her husband had hoped she would be\u2014tears begin to fall. If we are honest with ourselves, I think most of us wives wish we could go back and change the way we have treated our husbands at certain times. Am I right?\n\nIn more than 30 years of ministry, Steve and I have listened to countless couples reveal how disappointed they were in the person whom they married. Whenever a wife can convince her husband to come in for biblical marriage counseling, she often secretly says to herself, \"Oh good. Now my husband is going to find out all the ways he needs to change to be a better husband\u2014so that I can be happy.\"\n\nCan I let you in on a little secret? Looking to your husband to make you happy is an unfair expectation. And no matter how \"perfect\" he is, he will never bring you true joy. Because the purpose for which you exist is not to find happiness in your marriage relationship\u2014contrary to every fairy tale you ever heard as a little girl.\n\nYou were created to delight in your Creator. God made you to long for intimacy with Him\u2014to delight in Him. So any other relationship that you pursue to fill the void only God can fill will always come up short. In the same way, you can never be your husband's source of true joy.\n\nI Needed Help!\n\nDo you know a godly couple who have been married for a long time and are still deeply in love? Doesn't your heart long to have a marriage like theirs? What's their secret?\n\nAs you observe such a couple, you may be tempted to say, \"Oh that wife is so lucky to be married to such a wonderful man. I wish my husband were more like him.\"\n\nUpon closer observation, however, you might be surprised to learn that the secret to their happy marriage isn't related to how \"ideal\" they are as spouses. Rather, it's because their relationship is grounded in a love that is deeper than their own love for each other. A marriage flourishes when both husband and wife love Christ more than any other person in life\u2014including one's own spouse.\n\nIn Mark 12:30, Jesus declared that the priority of life is to love God with all of your being\u2014all of it. Do you love God like that? As a young Christian, I would have answered, \"Yes, of course I love God!\" and pointed to my busyness in serving God as evidence of that love. However, every once in a while I would meet someone who straight-up loved Jesus. A person whose life wasn't about doing things for God; rather, they lived to love God so much that they couldn't help but love others. Have you ever met anyone like that?\n\nYou know what kind of people I am talking about. You have to spend only a few minutes with them to realize they have an authentic love deep in their heart for their Savior.\n\nThis kind of wholehearted love is available to anyone who has a relationship with God through His Son, Jesus. When you learn to devote your heart to loving the Lord, there will be a natural outpouring of God's love spilling out of your heart and onto those around you\u2014especially to your husband. (To learn more about a relationship with God through Jesus, please turn to the article in the appendix of this book, \"How to Have a Relationship with Jesus.\")\n\nIt all comes down to this: The key to having an all-out love for your husband and experiencing fulfillment in your marriage does not lie in how well your husband measures up to your expectations, but in how well you love God.\n\nIt is humanly impossible to love selflessly because we are all born with a sin nature that seeks our own good above anyone else's. The only people who are able to love the way Jesus intended are those who have a personal relationship with God through Christ, are filled with the Holy Spirit, and are pursuing a deeper love for the Lord. Because God provides His supernatural love to those who love Him, He offers hope for true love to anyone who would follow Christ. Romans 5:5 says, \"God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us\" (ESV). We will talk more about hope for a happy marriage in chapter 11.\n\nLoving your husband amounts to so much more than your emotions and feelings for him at any given moment. Love is a choice. And God's love gives you the ability to love your husband even when he doesn't measure up to your expectations. Listen to what the Bible says:\n\nAbove all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony...Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins (Colossians 3:14; 1 Peter 4:8 ESV).\n\nDid you know God loves you in this way? Psalm 139:17-18 says, \"How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God! How great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they would be more in number than the sand.\"\n\nAre you really taking in what this scripture says? The perfect Creator of heaven and earth makes it a point to think precious thoughts toward you\u2014you!\n\nLet's be honest: You and I both know that if God wanted to, He could write a long list of all our flaws and the ways we fail Him every day. Yet because of His great love, God says, \"I, even I am He who blots out your transgressions for My own sake, and I will not remember your sins\" (Isaiah 43:25).\n\nWhat kind of love is that? A love that chooses to forget your sins and focus on precious thoughts toward you. I know I do not deserve this kind of love. Do you?\n\nDo you see where I am going with this? If God loves you so overwhelmingly even though you don't measure up to His expectations, and you are called to love others as He loves, then you are to have that same kind of love for your husband.\n\nYour Marriage Is a Light\n\nJesus said, \"By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another\" (John 13:35). Why do you think Satan works so hard to destroy Christian marriage relationships?\n\nYour genuine love for each other will be a light that tells your children\u2014and a watching world\u2014that knowing the Savior really does make a difference in your lives. Letting this light shine does not happen by accident. In fact, if you make marital love all about your feelings, you will certainly miss the opportunity to shine Christ's light.\n\nWhen life is hard, your hormones are acting up, the bills pile up, and the kids get sick\u2014this is when the light of God's kind of love has the potential to shine the brightest. Jesus said, \"Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven\" (Matthew 5:16).\n\nAs a young bride, I was drawn to some happily married couples in our church because their love shone as a bright light to me. As I began to look to more mature couples who seemed to delight in one another, do you know what I found? An untapped resource of wisdom that was exactly what I needed to teach me how to have a happy marriage!\n\nTitus 2:4 instructs older women to teach the younger how to love their husbands. The Greek word translated \"love\" in this verse is phileo, which refers to a friendship love. And that is just what these older women taught me\u2014how to enjoy my husband for who he is, not who I wished he would be. They taught me how to become his closest and dearest friend.\n\nIn writing this book, it is my sincere desire to be a Titus 2 woman in your life. Because when you learn the secret of becoming your husband's closest friend, you will become your husband's greatest treasure\u2014and he will become yours as well.\n\nWhether you are newly married or you have been married for a number of years, it is never too late to transform your marriage by applying God's principles to your marriage relationship.\n\nOne Woman's Story\n\nDo you find yourself hoping that it's not too late to make your marriage into the kind of relationship you and your husband will thoroughly enjoy for the rest of your lives?\n\nI know a woman\u2014we will call her Lydia\u2014who has been in a difficult marriage for many years. Not long after she and her husband were married, Lydia realized the man her husband pretended to be and the man he turned out to be were vastly different. After a season of fighting and arguing, Lydia could see how the unrest in her home was hurting her children, stealing her joy, and flat-out making her a miserable person.\n\nSo, taking the advice of a Titus 2 woman in her life, Lydia determined to stop waiting for her husband to change so she could be happy. She stopped lamenting over how disappointed she was in him. And instead, she devoted herself to knowing and loving Christ through prayer, Bible study, and fellowship with Christians.\n\nIn her pursuit, Lydia has discovered the secret to true joy. Although her husband has changed very little over the years, not long ago Lydia joyfully said to me, \"I just love my husband. I know it is Christ in me that is loving him through me\u2014because I just love him!\"\n\nWhat an incredible legacy this woman is leaving for her children. Because of her example, she is raising some of the most merciful people I know.\n\nSo Much More Than Happily-Ever-After\n\nThe world is longing to see married people who grow more in love over time. When Christian marriages do not exude true love, it hurts the name of Christ. Do you realize God wants the love between you and your husband to be a testimony of His love to a watching world? Happy marriages are one of the greatest tools God uses to draw unbelievers toward Him. And the effect of that testimony begins in your home, especially to your children.\n\nWhile writing this book I laughed and cried over the love stories I have included. And the truths that I discovered as I researched and studied God's Word have forever changed the way I relate to my husband. I cannot wait to share these stories and insights with you!\n\nIf you're like most women, you are so busy you rarely read through an entire book. I ask you to make a commitment now to keep working your way through this book until you reach the end. Every chapter includes subheads that help break the chapter into smaller parts so you don't have to feel overwhelmed by trying to read an entire chapter in one sitting. Keep the book on your nightstand, read one or two subsections at a time, and keep moving forward at a pace that works for you. I know you'll be glad if you do this.\n\nAt the close of each chapter, Steve has written a section called \"From a Husband's Perspective.\" As you read what he says, you will not only glean a man's perspective, but also insights from the many years of biblical counseling he has done with husbands and wives.\n\nAt the end of each chapter you will find two sections called \"Thinking It Through\" and \"Living It Out.\" These will allow you to study and apply the truths you've learned. (These questions also work well in a group setting should you decide to lead or participate in a small group study through this book.)\n\nFinally, at the end of each chapter you will find a link to my website, NoRegretsWoman.com, where you will be able to watch a short video of Steve and me discussing the topics of each chapter, and\/or an audio link to a particular message or a Christian love song. All of these are intended to help you process what you have learned in the chapter.\n\nSo if you are ready, let's take this journey together. I expect we will become great friends as we shine truth on some of the myths wives believe and learn how to love our husbands in a way that brings glory to Christ. In so doing, you will discover how to build a no-regrets marriage, and more importantly, one day you will stand before the Lord in heaven and hear Him say, \"Well done, good servant!\"\n\nVisit NoRegretsWoman.com to watch Steve and Rhonda's video link and\/or listen to their suggested audio link.\n\nPhoto credit: JPlazaPhotography\n\nI Will Respect Him When He Earns My Respect\n\nThe Concept of Unconditional Respect\n\n######\n\nMost likely you have heard the Bible story of the teenage boy who killed a giant with his slingshot. The Bible says David was young and attractive, so you can imagine how the ladies of Israel would have taken notice of this new hero on the scene.\n\nThe women were so taken by David that the song they sang about him quickly became the number-one hit song. As the girls were singing, \"Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands\" (1 Samuel 18:7), I can only imagine how they might have swooned at even a glimpse of this overnight sensation.\n\nOne woman in particular fell head over heels for David. Her name was Michal, the daughter of King Saul. When King Saul found out his daughter loved David, he sent word to him: \"You shall be my son-in-law today\" (verse 21).\n\nIn my opinion, what made David even more attractive was his response to King Saul: \"Does it seem to you a light thing to be a king's son-in-law, seeing I am a poor and lightly esteemed man?\" (verse 23). David's response reveals his humble heart. There is nothing more attractive than a handsome man filled with God-honoring humility\u2014don't you agree?\n\nWhat a lucky girl Michal was! Back then, the daughters of a king didn't have any say about who they would marry. In fact, Michal's sister Merab was supposed to marry David, but at the last minute, King Saul married her off to someone else instead.\n\nI wonder what the marriage of this young regal couple would have been like. I wish the Bible gave us some details about the wedding. Can't you just imagine how enthralled the women of the land would have been over the romantic event? Yet the Bible simply states, \"Then Saul gave [David] Michal his daughter as a wife\" (verse 27).\n\nWhat we do learn is that, after Michal and David were married, King Saul became increasingly jealous against David's popularity and sought to kill him. In 1 Samuel 19:11-14, we see Michal deceiving her own father to protect her husband's life.\n\nAs with any marriage, there are the challenges and stresses of life. So it was with David and Michal. Since King Saul was seeking to kill David, the latter had no choice but to go into hiding, leaving Michal to await his return.\n\nImagine how much heartbreak this brought to young David. His father-in-law, who was also the father of his best friend, Jonathan, hated him so much he wanted to see David dead. David wrote many psalms during this season of sorrow and struggle, revealing the depth of the heartache and loneliness he experienced.\n\nAfter many years of exile, the day finally came when David was anointed king of Israel. After his coronation, one of his actions was to have the Ark of the Covenant brought into the City of David. When the Ark finally arrived, we are told that, \"David danced before the LORD with all his might\" (2 Samuel 6:14).\n\nFinally the running was over, and the promise God had made so many years earlier had come to pass. David was the king of Israel. And in humble gratitude he danced, for all he was worth, upon the streets of the city! Wouldn't you love to have been there that day? Watching this godly young man worship the Lord in total abandon would have been glorious.\n\nAs David danced, the people celebrated and watched their new king in action. And David's wife Michal also watched\u2014from her window. Wouldn't you expect Michal to run into the streets and dance with her husband to celebrate all God had done to bring about this wonderful moment? I know that's where you would have found me\u2014how about you?\n\nBut not so with Michal. Second Samuel 6:16 says she \"despised [David] in her heart\" when she saw him dancing in front of the people. Why would she be so upset with her husband's display of joyful worship? One Bible teacher observes, \"Michal considered David's unbridled joyful dancing as conduct unbefitting for the dignity and gravity of a king.\"\n\nAfter the coronation parade, David went with the priest and the people to offer burnt and peace offerings to the Lord, so Michal had plenty of time to seethe over her perceived humiliation before David arrived home.\n\nIsn't it interesting that we don't find Michal at the tent when David and the priest were giving offerings to the Lord? And where was she when David distributed a celebration meal to the multitude? I'll tell you where she was\u2014at home preparing her argument for when David walked in the door. Have you ever done that? I have.\n\nYou know what I am talking about. Something gets you so upset that you are in no frame of mind to do anything else until you've poured out your anger on your husband. As a young bride, I can remember a time when I waited for Steve's arrival home so I could blast him as soon as he walked in the door. From the hurt look on his face I knew he felt wounded and confused by my betrayal. Even today I regret the words I said to him so many years ago.\n\nSecond Samuel 6:20 says after everyone went home, David \"returned to bless his household.\" The poor guy was completely unaware Michal was getting ready to pounce on him. In fact, she didn't even wait for David to come to her\u2014she went to meet him. Imagine the hug, kiss, and words of affirmation David expected to hear from Michal. Instead, what he heard was this: \"How glorious was the king of Israel today, uncovering himself today in the eyes of the maids of his servants, as one of the base fellows shamelessly uncovers himself!\" (2 Samuel 6:20).\n\nWhat a slap in the face for David. In one moment all the wonder and joy from his glorious day were dashed by his wife's disrespectful accusation. How did David respond?\n\nIt was before the LORD, who chose me instead of your father and all his house, to appoint me ruler over the people of the LORD, over Israel. Therefore I will play music before the LORD. And I will be even more undignified than this, and will be humble in my own sight. But as for the maidservants of whom you have spoken, by them I will be held in honor (2 Samuel 6:21-22).\n\nIt seems Michal was so concerned about how the women of the city would perceive her husband\u2014likely the very women who earlier had sung about David's accomplishments\u2014that she felt it was necessary to disrespect him in a demeaning, sarcastic manner.\n\nAs can be expected, Michal's hurtful words did not endear David to her. In fact, the Bible says after that encounter, \"Michal the daughter of Saul had no children to the day of her death\" (2 Samuel 6:23). Some Bible commentators say Michal may have had no children because God closed her womb, and others suggest the more popular belief that from that day forward, King David had no further relations with Michal. Either way, the most disgraceful experience for a woman in those days was to not bear children. So the result of Michal's disrespect was her own disgrace.\n\nA Man's Insight\n\nAfter writing this, I couldn't shake the feeling of sorrow I had for the way David and Michal's marriage was wounded by her hurtful words. What a sad ending to a story that started out like a fairy tale. I felt the need to seek insights from a man's perspective, so over our morning coffee I asked my husband, Steve, what a woman might learn from this biblical account.\n\nSteve had some great points that helped me to gain understanding from both David and Michal's perspectives, and I'd like to share them with you because there's a lot here that wives can apply to their marriages. Steve said, \"The issues between Michal and David are as follows:\n\n1. Michal failed to see the big picture.\n\n2. Michal loved herself and her reputation more than she loved her husband.\n\n3. Michal's response showed disrespect to her husband.\"\n\nLet's unpack these three points to see what we can learn from them.\n\nFailing to See the Big Picture\n\nThe first issue we want to look at is that Michal failed to see the big picture. She had fallen in love with the teenage warrior who had battled a giant. She would have heard the song of the Israelite women as they celebrated David's victory. To be married to such a courageous, attractive man would have been quite a conquest for any woman. Michal found herself to be that woman.\n\nBut when Saul began to pursue David, the latter had to flee for his life. Nowhere in Scripture do we find that Michal was on the run with her husband. So we can only wonder if she waited in her comfy palace for David's return, likely only hearing about her husband's status through various messengers.\n\nWhen David was finally able to return, he determined to honor the Lord by bringing the Ark of the Covenant back to Israel. However, because the Ark was not moved according to God's instructions, one of David's men died while the Ark was in transit.\n\nImagine how David probably felt when the man died. In fact, he may have felt responsible for his death. After all, as king, David should have known God's requirements for moving the Ark so he could guide and protect his people.\n\nWhen the Ark finally arrived in the City of David, what a glorious occasion it was for the young king. No wonder he danced in the streets of the city!\n\nAnd where was Michal during all this activity? In her home, watching the festivities through a window. She likely saw only a brief snapshot of her husband's actions, which happened to include his dancing in the streets. And because Michal was self-centered rather than God-centered, all she could think about was the reputation she had worked so hard to maintain as royalty. As Saul's daughter and David's wife, she must have thought she was someone pretty special.\n\nCan you think of a time when you failed to see the big picture of your husband's circumstance? Maybe he spent the day battling giants at work while you were at home holding down the fort. Husbands often feel their wives do not understand the battles they have to face at work on a daily basis. Have you ever considered what your husband deals with? Here are a few possibilities to ponder:\n\n\u2022 Holding fast to his integrity in a work environment that says, \"The ends justify the means.\"\n\n\u2022 Keeping his eyes from longing at other women.\n\n\u2022 Putting up with office politics.\n\n\u2022 Worrying that someone younger or smarter is after his job.\n\n\u2022 Trying to make enough money to make ends meet.\n\n\u2022 Battling physical and emotional fatigue.\n\nMany men spend long hours at their job. For some their work is labor intensive, for others it is emotionally exhausting. When Steve worked in construction, he would come home physically spent. I remember watching him jump into our swimming pool after a hot day of working in the sun. Steam would rise from the surface of the water when he got into the pool.\n\nAnd these days, as a pastor, my husband comes home emotionally tired. He has listened and talked to people all day long. So that I could encourage my husband, I had to learn from him what his day was really like and not what I perceived it to be. Then I could discern when to talk to him about important matters or encourage him upon his return home.\n\nHow often husbands are greeted by their wives with a list of complaints! For example, let's say your husband had an amazing week at work. Maybe he is in sales, and after many business meetings and hours of presentations he lands the biggest account ever. On Friday, the boss calls all the staff together to honor your husband's efforts and thank him for a job well done.\n\nAll during the drive home, your husband is singing his heart out worshipping the Lord for His favor. He stops to buy a bucket of chicken for dinner, and some flowers to give you when he arrives.\n\nAll the while, you are at home watching the clock. Where could he be? you think to yourself. He's an hour late.\n\nWhen your husband finally pulls into the driveway, you meet him at the door. In a condescending tone, you say, \"Where have you been? You are late.\"\n\nHe starts to explain, and when you see the bucket of chicken, you exclaim, \"Chicken, seriously? You bought chicken? You could have called, you know. I already made spaghetti. We are having spaghetti tonight. You can take that chicken to work with you for lunch...if you're not already scheduled to have some wonderful 'business lunches' next week, while I eat peanut butter and jelly with the kids, again.\"\n\nAs you walk back into the house, you growl over your shoulder, \"By the way, you forgot to put the garbage cans away last night. They're still out on the street. Can you go get them now, please? It so embarrasses me when you leave the cans out there. Our neighbors must think you are lazy.\"\n\nAfter bringing in the garbage cans, your husband places the bouquet of flowers on the kitchen table. To which you respond, \"Flowers? It's not my birthday. That was last month, when you forgot the day\u2014remember?\"\n\nI know you would never be the woman in this scenario, but maybe you can relate to a similar rendition of the story. Is it any wonder husbands arrive home from work, grab the remote, and sit in front of the television until it is time to go to sleep?\n\nWhen it comes to your husband, are you failing to see the big picture and note all he does to provide for your family? Are you preoccupied with his shortcomings, or do you honor his efforts and celebrate his successes and offer him unconditional respect at home in spite of his failures?\n\nWhen Your Reputation Becomes More Important\n\nThe next point we can glean from Michal and David's story is Michal loved herself and her reputation more than she loved her husband. Like the woman who was more concerned about what the neighbors thought when the garbage cans were left out too long, do you have times when you throw your husband under the bus in an attempt to save your own reputation?\n\nMy husband was a youth pastor for 18 years, and we both dearly loved all that came with that job. After that, Steve accepted a position as senior pastor of a church. Shepherding adults is certainly different from pastoring teens. I soon discovered women in the church would come to me, rather than my husband, when they had a complaint. Or they would say things to me like, \"Can you have your husband call my husband? He is really under a lot of stress at work and needs some encouragement.\"\n\nIt didn't take long for me to develop a habit of telling my husband, \"You need to call so-and-so because his wife said he is struggling.\"\n\nWhat I soon discovered was that Steve would become very quiet and withdrawn when I made these types of comments. One day, as I was asking him if he had yet made the encouraging phone call, I had an \"aha moment.\"\n\nWhen Steve offered no reason why he had not followed up with the man, I pressed him to do so, adding, \"I don't want Mrs. Smith to think I forgot to tell you about her husband.\"\n\nAs I was speaking, the Lord opened my understanding. By agreeing to deliver Mrs. Smith's message to my husband, I was now part of the equation. I didn't want to look bad and have her think I had forgotten to pass along her request. And I didn't want her to think\u2014or tell others\u2014that my husband was uncaring about their situation. I was concerned about my reputation\u2014and ours.\n\nI then asked Steve, \"Honey, when I say you need to call this person, are you interpreting that as me telling you how to do your job?\"\n\nI could see the relief come across Steve's face. The poor guy had been trying to endure my \"helpfulness\" with a good attitude. Yet each time I would press him to make a contact, all he could hear was, \"Hey buddy, I know you're the pastor, but I am here to help you do your job right. If you drop the ball not only do you look bad as a pastor, but I look bad to these women who are asking me to get you to call their husbands.\"\n\nIn a moment everything changed! I came to realize how much my husband valued my respect. And in this new, uncharted territory of Minister's Wife, I was coming across more concerned about my own reputation and how Steve would be perceived by the women of the church than I was about trusting in Steve's leadership as a pastor. (Kind of like Michal's response to David, huh?)\n\nI quickly asked Steve to forgive me for being disrespectful. I assured him that I trusted his leadership and knew he was seeking the Lord daily for direction. I promised Steve from that day forward, \"When women come to me with a request or question, I will tell them they need to talk directly to you\u2014the pastor.\"\n\nThat was 15 years ago. And I am so thankful the realization came early on so I did not develop a habit of disrespecting my husband under the impression I was helping him do his job better. Along with this adjustment, I also determined not to correct him in public, talk over him in a meeting, or undermine his authority behind his back. The women of our church have a great respect for my husband because he is a godly leader\u2014and I believe, in part, it is also because they have seen my example of respecting him as the spiritual leader of our body. (If you are married to a pastor and would like more insights on how to minister to your husband, you may want to visit NoRegretsWoman.com to download my ebook I Sleep with the Pastor.)\n\nThe Cost of Showing Disrespect\n\nThe third issue we see in Michal and David's story is Michal's response showed disrespect to her husband. When David heard his wife's harsh words, he was quick to remind her that his actions were not about her, but were between him and God. David said he had danced \"before the LORD.\" He then reminded Michal of all God had done up to that point to make him king. Then finally David said, \"And I will be even more undignified than this, and will be humble in my own sight\" (verse 22).\n\nDavid made sure to explain his motives to his wife. He said, \"Look at what God has done. My dancing was in worship to Him. I know my heart was in the right place, and I don't care what you or anyone else thinks.\"\n\nFrom that day on David and Michal's relationship was forever changed as he withdrew from her. If the Bible commentaries are correct in suggesting the reason Michal had no children was because David never again went to bed with her, then we can conclude that Michal's disrespect of her husband led to his loss of affection for her.\n\nLove and Respect\n\nWomen long to be loved by their husbands. In all the years my husband and I have done biblical marriage counseling, we have seen that wives are often plagued with the question, \"Does he love me as much as I love him?\"\n\nFor the most part, women ache to know their husbands love them unconditionally. God created women to have this longing, which is why He instructed men, \"Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her\" (Ephesians 5:25).\n\nOver the years, I have learned to make myself vulnerable in asking Steve to help me feel loved by him. You may think this sounds needy\u2014okay, call me needy. But I know how much I value being loved by my man, and I am willing to ask him from time to time to show me his love.\n\nThe Bible calls husbands to \"live with your wives in an understanding way\" (1 Peter 3:7 NASB). But let's be honest, ladies\u2014we are a mystery. We aren't even sure what we want much of the time. Based on your hormones and many other variables, actions that say \"I love you\" today may not be what you need tomorrow. If your husband is going to live with you in an understanding way, it is your responsibility to gently coach him\u2014for the rest of your life\u2014how he can best show you his love.\n\nFor example, when I was younger I really appreciated my husband's compliments about my appearance. If he failed to notice when I made an extra effort to look good, rather than hinting or pouting until he noticed, I would say, \"Hey, did you notice my new dress\/hairstyle\/etc.?\" When he responded with a compliment, I did not allow myself to think, Oh yeah, now you say something, buddy. Maybe I'll stop making the effort, and then we'll see how long it takes you to notice. I'm sure you'll agree this sounds petty, but over the years that I have mentored women, I've seen this kind of attitude surface frequently.\n\nNow that I am older, I tell my husband how much more I need his kind affirmation. We joke about how merciful God is to cause our vision to diminish as we age because we see each other through lenses blurred that help to soften all our wrinkles.\n\nAnd Just as Much as You Need to Feel Loved...\n\nJust as deeply as wives long to be loved without condition, husbands desire to receive unconditional respect from their wives. Again, God knew women did not need to be instructed to love their man\u2014this comes naturally. But to respect him is another story. That's why the Bible instructs, \"Let the wife see that she respects her husband\" (Ephesians 5:33 ESV).\n\nWomen tend to nurture and mother the people they care about. But your husband does not need a mom. He wants a wife who believes in him, relies on him, and celebrates his accomplishments.\n\nAn interesting side note here if you happen to be a mother of sons: In my book Moms Raising Sons to Be Men, one insight I share about helping your sons grow into men is the need for you to discern when you should stop treating your sons as little boys and start showing them respect as men. If you have adolescent boys, you might want to visit my website at www.NoRegretsWoman.com\/media and listen to my radio message \"Hand Him His Manhood or He Will Fight You for It.\"\n\nWhen a man feels disrespected by his wife, he tends to pull away and not show her the love she craves. That's how David responded to Michal. And when a woman does not feel loved, she will respond by disrespecting her husband. In his book Love and Respect, Dr. Emerson Eggerichs calls this the \"Crazy Cycle.\" He says, \"The Love and Respect Connection is the key to any problem in a marriage...How the need for love and the need for respect play off of one another in a marriage has everything to do with the kind of marriage you will have.\"\n\nDr. Eggerichs encourages wives to write a letter to their husband about why they respect him. Here's how one woman responded\u2014and many others are learning the same:\n\nI am sad that I have been married twenty-two years and just now understand the respect message. I wrote my husband two letters about why I respected him. I am amazed at how it has softened him in his response to me. I have prayed for years that my husband would love me and speak my love language. But when I began to speak his language, then he responded with what I have wanted...This revelation...has changed everything in my marriage\u2014my approach, my response, my relationship to God and my husband. It was the missing piece.\n\nBut He Doesn't Deserve My Respect\n\nI completely understand a woman's resistance to showing respect to a man who has not earned it. But just as God instructs a husband to love his wife whether she earns his love or not, God commands a wife to show respect to her husband without condition. Let's consider Dr. Eggerichs's insight into this matter:\n\nA wife faces two choices. She can try to make personal adjustments and treat her husband respectfully according to what Scripture says, or she can continue with a sour look, and a negative, disrespectful attitude...To continue with disrespect only means shooting herself in both feet...\n\nLearning to show your husband respect is vital to a healthy marriage. My husband and I have watched failing marriages be turned around when a wife determines to obey God's mandate to show respect to her husband.\n\nAre you worried if you show respect your husband will \"get his way\" when conflict arises? Or are you afraid your respectful manner will lessen your chances of motivating your husband to change? Listen to one woman's response to this: \"If I step out in faith, claiming God's Word as the basis for my action, then I am trusting God to bring to pass what He said He would do. I can't go wrong with that! I've determined that is the path I am going to take no matter how unfamiliar it seems.\"\n\nAccording to God's Word, showing respect to your husband is not optional. As you spend time in the Bible, ask God to help you focus on and express to your husband what you respect about him. And when you do, don't be surprised if your husband responds in a more loving manner. Because your husband needs to be respected by you, when you bless him with honor, he will come to view you as a treasure. And you will become your husband's closest confidant, friend, and encourager. Your respect will motivate your husband to attempt feats he might otherwise only dream about\u2014because a man respected by his woman can accomplish great things!\n\nFROM A HUSBAND'S PERSPECTIVE\n\n######\n\nA Word from Steve\n\nTo be respected is probably one of the most important needs your husband has. In general, men crave respect. For example, with the promise of respect, gangs seduce young boys to do terrible acts. Countries go to war and bar fights break out all because some guy felt disrespected. Most men who have anger issues will admit their anger is triggered when they feel dishonored.\n\nYour husband longs to be respected by you. There is a good chance he married you because he found satisfaction in the way you showed him honor. So my question to you is this: How are you doing now?\n\nWhen we were newlyweds, Rhonda did not always recognize how important her respect was to me. When she talked to me as if she were my mother, I would inadvertently discount whatever she was saying. I didn't mean to disregard her; I think it was just a subconscious defense mechanism. Have you observed your husband shutting you down when you try to \"help\" him accomplish a task? He may be feeling disrespected.\n\nI remember when Rhonda had her \"aha moment\" and realized how her constant \"reminding\" me of my responsibilities was making me feel disrespected. Are your attempts to \"help\" your husband do better coming across as disrespectful? Sometimes letting your husband forget to follow through on a commitment is the wiser choice. Men learn from their mistakes, so letting your husband pay a late fee, run out of gas, or miss an appointment may do more to help him remember next time.\n\nWhen you ask your husband to take care of something for you, you would do well to realize men don't mean to put it out of their minds\u2014men compartmentalize. So when we direct our full attention to one task, we may forget or delay doing something else our wives have asked us to do.\n\nDon't interpret your husband's forgetfulness as him not caring enough about you to do what you have asked. Sometimes a husband will want to do a task his own way, but because he knows his wife will badger him until he does it her way, he will avoid the job altogether.\n\nAnd then sometimes we men just forget! Most men, when they realize they've let their wives down, become disappointed in themselves and even berate themselves in their thoughts. If you chastise your husband while he is processing his own disappointment in himself, don't be surprised if your husband responds with anger\u2014or as I did with Rhonda, shuts you down.\n\nAs Rhonda learned to let me off the hook when I didn't come through for her, I found myself trying harder. And because Rhonda worked to think honorable thoughts toward me\u2014even when I didn't do things the way she wanted me to\u2014she would respond to me in a respectful manner. This made me gravitate toward her even more. (In case you are wondering, your husband knows when you are disappointed in him, even if you don't say a word. You have to think honorably toward your husband in order to show him genuine respect.)\n\nWhen you learn to give your husband the respect he so desperately needs from you, you'll be blessing him with an incredible gift. Husbands hear their married friends complain all the time about how their wives dishonor them. What if your husband was one of the few who could say, \"Not my wife\u2014she is my greatest supporter\"? Can you imagine how the ability to say this would stir your husband's feelings of love toward you?\n\nAnd, when you honor your husband, you will also be walking in obedience to the Lord's command, \"Let the wife see that she respects her husband\" (Ephesians 5:33 ESV). Over many years of biblical counseling done with couples, I have seen marriages transformed when the wife learns to unconditionally respect her husband. God gave your husband a longing for respect, and it is the Lord who will bless you\u2014and your marriage\u2014when you learn to satisfy this desire. And don't be surprised if your respect kindles in your husband a deeper love for you and a bond of unity that will stand the tests of time.\n\n######\n\nTHINKING IT THROUGH\n\n######\n\n1. How did you feel after reading about the way Michal treated David?\n\n2. Has God convicted you of any areas in which you are withholding respect for your husband? Or possibly about ways you are blatantly disrespecting him? Take some time to ask the Lord to forgive you and help you turn from your sin.\n\n3. Prayerfully consider and then write the qualities you respect about your husband.\n\n######\n\nLIVING IT OUT\n\n######\n\n1. Spend some time writing a letter to your husband. Tell him why you appreciate him and the qualities you respect about him. (If you're not a letter writer, text your husband what it is you respect about him.)\n\n2. Determine to be a wife who shows unconditional respect to your husband. If you need more help in this area, look for a godly. older woman who respects her husband and ask her to mentor you.\n\n3. One of the best ways to learn what respecting your husband looks like in everyday life is to fellowship with couples who have learned the secret of unconditional love and respect. Look for married couples in your church whom you would like to emulate and spend time with them.\n\nVisit NoRegretsWoman.com to watch Steve and Rhonda's video link and\/or listen to their suggested audio link.\n\nI'm Falling Out of Love with Him\n\nStaying in Love Is All in Your Mind\n\n######\n\nIs this really my life?\" the young bride said through tears. Theresa couldn't believe she found herself \"falling out of love\" with the man she had vowed to love forever\u2014only 18 months previous.\n\nTheresa composed herself and told me the story of the whirlwind romance that led up to her marriage. As she shared with me how she and her husband met, I saw a sparkle in her eye and a gentle smile across her lips. When she talked about the long walks she and her fianc\u00e9 would take on the beach, holding hands and dreaming about how happy they would be as husband and wife, another tear trickled down her cheek.\n\nWhat had happened? Theresa couldn't point to any particular event that had caused her feelings for her husband to change. It had all happened gradually. \"Life just got in the way,\" was how she put it.\n\nWhat's the Key to Staying in Love?\n\nTheresa's story is not uncommon. Many couples find themselves in trouble when they wrongly make the tasks of everyday living their priority\u2014rather than nurturing their love for one another. So how can you cultivate a loving relationship with your husband that will stand the test of time?\n\nThe first insight into building a love that lasts is to take your focus off of how much you want to be loved by your husband. If you become obsessed with your longing to feel loved, you will become more preoccupied with self-satisfaction than with building a happy relationship. And this, in turn, will undermine the health of your marriage.\n\nYou may be surprised to learn the secret to loving your husband well lies in learning to love God deeply. Because when your love for the Lord is genuine, He gives you His supernatural ability to love others selflessly\u2014including your husband.\n\nThe marriages I most want to emulate are those of husbands and wives who have learned to love God so much that their passion for one another is almost supernatural. Don't you want a marriage like that?\n\nSo how can you learn to love God so deeply that it spills over into your marriage? Jesus said the greatest priority of life is to \"love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength\" (Mark 12:30).\n\nLet's take a closer look at Jesus' words, shall we? Notice how He said you are to love God: with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, all your strength. It's an all-out love. It holds nothing back. And it involves every part of your being\u2014your emotions, your inner self, and your thoughts. This kind of love seeks to grow closer to God and know Him intimately. That's how you fall more and more in love with someone\u2014by getting to know them.\n\nGrowing more deeply in love with the Lord means spending time with Him. But first, for this to happen, you must have a relationship with God through Christ. If you have received Christ as your Savior and Lord, then you are a child of God and you have a relationship with Him. And if you haven't taken this step or you aren't sure whether you have, then I would encourage you to read \"How to Have a Relationship with Jesus\" in the appendix of this book (see page 211).\n\nGetting back to loving God\u2014here are specific steps you can take to grow in that love:\n\n\u2022 Devote yourself to discovering God's character qualities through Bible study. Read His Word and get to know Him better. The more you read the Bible, the more you'll learn God's desires for your life. You'll come to see life\u2014and your marriage relationship\u2014from His perspective.\n\n\u2022 Pray to Him daily. Communicate with and talk to Him. Love grows through frequent interaction.\n\n\u2022 Fellowship with other believers who have a genuine love for God. Let their love for the Lord serve as a contagious influence for you.\n\nI can say with confidence that pursuing intimacy with God transformed my marriage, and it can transform yours as well. That's because when your love for God is right, He will help you love your husband the way your heart longs to love him.\n\nHas all this talk caused you to consider how loving God more can help your marriage? Francis Chan, author of Crazy Love, says:\n\nThe solution [to loving God more] isn't to try harder, fail, and then make bigger promises, only to fail again. It does no good to muster up more love for God, to will yourself to love Him more. When loving Him becomes an obligation...we end up focusing even more on ourselves...The answer lies in letting Him change you...The fact is, I need God to help me love God. And if I need His help to love Him, a perfect being, I definitely need His help to love other, fault-filled humans...As we begin to focus more on Christ, loving Him and others becomes more natural.\n\nDid you notice that last line? As you \"focus more on Christ, loving Him and others becomes more natural.\"\n\nLoving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength will enable you to love your husband with a selfless love that does not diminish when times are hard. As you love God and yield to the Holy Spirit's working in you, you'll be empowered to love your husband with God's perfect love. Can you imagine how many marriages would be saved if Christians committed to this one principle of loving God so deeply that His love spilled over into their relationship with their spouse?\n\nWhen Love Starts to Fade\n\nAlong with growing your love for the Lord, here are three practical steps you can take when you notice that your love for your husband is fading:\n\nRepent\n\nEven though Steve and I have biblically counseled married couples for many years, it still surprises me when spouses are convinced that the trouble in their marriage is no fault of their own. When a wife has this outlook, she has usually become so focused on how her husband has not measured up to her expectations that she is unable to see her own contribution to the discord.\n\nMight that describe you? Asking God to help search your heart and make you aware of your sin is the first step toward repentance. To repent requires you to agree with God that your thoughts and attitudes are sinful. It is easy to make excuses or justify sinful acts, so take some time to be alone with the Lord and pray, \"Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my anxieties; and see if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting\" (Psalm 139:23-24).\n\nIf the Holy Spirit reveals to you areas of dissatisfaction toward your husband, will you agree with God that your resentment is sin? And will you confess your sin?\n\nI know, I know\u2014I can hear you saying, \"But you don't know my husband. Why doesn't he have to repent?\" You're right\u2014I don't know your husband, but God does. And only God can do a work in your husband, not you.\n\nResentful thoughts and manipulative remarks will never accomplish good in your marriage. Instead, they will only drive a wedge between you and your love. Don't let that happen to the point that one day restoration may seem impossible.\n\nUnchecked resentment always leads to bitterness. Hebrews 12:15 warns that a root of bitterness will spring up trouble and defile many. During our nearly 20 years of work in youth ministry, my husband and I frequently saw the great damage bitterness can cause. We have watched children raised in Christian homes become rebellious and resentful toward the Lord because of the bitterness they witnessed in their parents' marriages. Don't believe your family will go unscathed if your disillusionment with your husband turns into resentment, and ultimately bitterness.\n\nThe apostle Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, warned, \"Do not be deceived; God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man sows, that he will also reap\" (Galatians 6:7). Consider the prophet Hosea's warning: \"They sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind\" (Hosea 8:7). Beware, because tiny seeds of resentment can sprout into a tornado of destruction that tears your family apart!\n\nIf God reveals to you areas of sin that you are harboring against your husband, ask Him to make you truly contrite over your sin. Then commit to daily asking God to make your heart tender toward your husband. To soften your heart is not beyond His power.\n\nThe next step to rekindling your love for your husband is...\n\nRemember\n\nTake a moment to think back to the way things were when you fell in love with your husband. You thought about him throughout the day. You looked him in the eye when he talked, and you listened intently to what he had to say. Remember how you would tell your girlfriends the qualities you loved about him?\n\nOne of my favorite dating memories took place when I was 15 years old. Steve and I were just starting to become interested in one another. One night I arrived at our school's gymnasium, where I would be cheerleading for our basketball team. When I walked into the gym, Steve had just dribbled a basketball down the court. As he came down from shooting a layup, we were face-to-face. It was a moment frozen in time. Our eyes met, he smiled, and then he ran back down the court to join his team. That magical moment is forever burned in my memory as the instant I fell in love with my husband.\n\nDo you remember a time when you couldn't wait for your husband's gaze to meet yours? A moment in particular that took your breath away? When you make a habit of remembering details of how you and your husband fell in love, you can rekindle feelings of adoration you may have forgotten. Looking at old pictures, reading old love notes, and just talking about past memories with your husband can have a wonderfully positive influence on your relationship.\n\nBelieve the Best About Your Husband\n\nRelationships in which people always believe the best about you are priceless, wouldn't you agree? Would your husband count you as one of those relationships? Does he have the confidence you will cover his mistakes with kindness? Or does he worry, \"I wonder how I will disappoint her today?\"\n\nWhen you think about your husband, do you tend to dwell on the things about him that disappoint you? Left unchecked, this practice can seriously undermine your love for your husband. The result will be dissatisfaction with your marriage. And over time, you may find yourself coming to believe the myth I am falling out of love with my husband.\n\nSo what can you do? How can you cultivate a new way of thinking about your husband?\n\nIt starts by making a deliberate decision to think on his good qualities and refuse to dwell on how he doesn't make you happy. In this way you can rekindle your affection for your husband and learn to delight in him. And what husband doesn't want to be enjoyed by his wife?\n\nWhat a gift you give your man when you determine to take pleasure in his good qualities and overlook his less-than-admirable ones. Wouldn't you want your husband to do this for you as well? Let this behavior begin with you.\n\nWhenever your husband does something that displeases you, determine that you will continue to think the best of him. Don't be quick to assign wrong motives to his actions. For example, when you go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and fall into the toilet because he left the seat up, don't angrily assume he doesn't care enough about you to put down the seat. No, simply realize that he forgot. And then choose to forgive him for his forgetfulness. Wouldn't you want your husband to forgive you when you inadvertently forget to do something he has asked you to do? Offer him the same grace you hope he will extend to you.\n\nThe Power of Right Thoughts\n\nA great way to develop a healthy thought life toward your husband is to follow the advice of the apostle Paul: \"Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things\" (Philippians 4:8 ESV).\n\nAt this point you may be thinking, What difference will it make if I try to think on what is best about my husband? He will never be anything but negative and unappreciative.\n\nI know a woman who would beg to differ. Her name is Anne.\n\nAnne had been married for more than a decade to a man she had learned to \"tolerate\" as she put it. But after her pastor gave a sermon on Philippians 4:8, she determined she would make every effort to have only good and honorable thoughts about her husband, Ted.\n\nAt first Anne could hardly find any good thoughts to replace the negative ones. But with God's help and a resolve to heal her marriage, Anne disciplined herself to put out of her mind any negative thoughts she had. Instead, she tried to dwell on positive thoughts about Ted.\n\nEventually, Anne found that as she obeyed God's instruction to think what was best about Ted, Christ's peace began to wash over her mind. No longer did Anne find herself anxious, unhappy, or restless.\n\nAs Anne's thought life was being transformed, her attitudes and actions were also changing. Soon Anne was not only thinking well of her husband; she also made it a point to verbally affirm him as well.\n\nAfter experiencing so many years of Anne's sharp tongue and condescending tone, Ted was wary of her new demeanor. He had learned a long time ago to keep his mouth shut, watch TV until bedtime, and not cross his wife if he wanted a relaxing evening.\n\nOver time, Ted grew to trust that Anne's new manner was not a passing phase. He found himself looking forward to arriving home after work. He even started to linger in the kitchen after dinner to talk with Anne as she cleaned up the dinner dishes.\n\nOne day Ted told Anne, \"I'll do the dishes tonight, honey. You do so much for me and the kids. It's the least I can do.\" Anne just about fell out of her chair.\n\nIt has been more than ten years since Anne determined to think what was best about Ted. She will tell you that decision saved her marriage. And because of Anne's example, Ted has learned to do the same and dwell on her good qualities as well. Today their marriage is one that others desire to emulate.\n\nBut My Husband Doesn't Deserve It\n\nYou may be tempted to say, \"You don't know how my husband has disappointed me. He doesn't deserve for me to focus on his good qualities because they could never outweigh his bad ones.\"\n\nGod could make the same statement about you\u2014and me. Our feeble human attempts to do good will never outweigh our bad. The prophet Isaiah said, \"All our righteousnesses are like filthy rags\" (Isaiah 64:6). The original Hebrew text in this passage reveals that by \"filthy rags,\" Isaiah meant menstrual rags. Yuck! I think the prophet wanted to impress on us how little God values our religious practices apart from loving Him. This gives a real picture of how impossible it is for our good deeds to ever make up for our bad.\n\nAre You Merciful?\n\nGod's love is merciful. His mercy not only forgives our sins but covers our weaknesses and provides relief from penalty.\n\nJesus encouraged us to show this same mercy toward each other when He said, \"Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.\" This means God will cover all your weaknesses with mercy when you are merciful to others.\n\nDoes the spiritual quality of mercy show in your attitude toward your spouse? \"Mercy does not hold a grudge, harbor resentment, capitalize on another's failure or weakness, or publicize another's sin.\" According to this list, would you be characterized by mercy? Or do you hold grudges and harbor resentment against your husband? If so, it's time to stop.\n\nDo you look for ways to come alongside your husband's weaknesses to be his helper, or do you watch for him to make mistakes so you can point them out, belittle him in front of the kids, or publicly ridicule him? Such actions are not merciful.\n\nIn case you may think showing mercy is merely optional, Jesus commanded His followers, \"Be merciful as your Father is merciful.\" Are you ready to ask God to help you be merciful toward your husband no matter what? In so doing, your attitude toward him is sure to reflect God's grace. And as you make it a habit to cover your husband's shortcomings with compassion, you might find him responding in kind.\n\nThe final step for relighting your love for your husband is...\n\nReturn\n\nBack when you and your husband were dating, what were some of the things you did to win his heart? How might you return to carrying out those actions?\n\nWhen Steve and I were dating, he drove a really cool car\u2014a Ford Mustang Mach 1. The car's muffler could be heard rumbling down the street from a block away. I remember choosing just the right outfit, putting on my makeup, and curling my hair in anticipation of our date. Inevitably, I would hear the deep rumbling of Steve's car as I was spraying the final mist of hairspray on my hair and checking my makeup one last time. My heart would skip a beat knowing that my love would soon arrive to pick me up for our date.\n\nWhen your husband is about to arrive home from work, do you anticipate his return? Do you put in the same effort to look nice as you did when you were dating? It's easy for wives to make sure they are looking their best whenever they go out in public, yet become lazy about their appearance at home.\n\nIn her book For Women Only, Shanti Feldhahn invited men to anonymously express some of their deepest desires for their marriage relationship. Listen to what one man said about what it means to him when his wife doesn't keep up her appearance: \"When you don't take care of yourself, I feel unvalued and unhappy.\"\n\nMen tell me there is a sort of secret affirmation they give one another when they see a man whose wife makes an effort to look pretty. I have heard men say, \"It's really not about if she is the perfect size.\" Rather they are affirmed when, through her appearance, the woman on their arm says to the world, \"I care about this man. I value him. I dress for him. I am his prize.\" Do you carry yourself as if you are your husband's prize?\n\nI remember the day I realized I had been letting myself go. Somewhere amidst my kids' toddler years, I looked in the mirror after my husband had arrived home from work and saw how bad I looked! I walked out of our bedroom and asked him, \"How long have I looked this bad?\" He just smiled and said, \"You're busy with the kids all day,\" then winked at me. The poor guy. Notice he did not say, \"Oh honey, you don't look bad.\" From that day onward I determined to prepare myself each day to look pretty for Steve's homecoming.\n\nWhat are some other ways you caught your husband's affections in the past that you could return to today? Here are some actions you might want to try:\n\n\u2022 When he talks to you, stop what you are doing and look at him.\n\n\u2022 Laugh out loud at his jokes\u2014even if you are so familiar with them the punch lines no longer take you by surprise.\n\n\u2022 Don't talk to him like you are his mother. (We will talk more about this later.)\n\n\u2022 Tell him what you admire about him\u2014often.\n\n\u2022 Thank him for working to help support the family. (And if he is out of work, find other accomplishments to praise\u2014even if it is something as simple as remembering to put down the toilet seat!)\n\n\u2022 Be his girlfriend. This means sit with him while he works on a project, go to the hardware store with him, go out with him to his favorite burger joint.\n\n\u2022 Find reasons to touch him. Scratch his back. Rub his neck. Hold his hand.\n\n\u2022 Have sex with him. (We will talk more about this in chapter 7.)\n\nThis list is certainly not exhaustive, but hopefully it will help get you started on thinking about the many ways you can fan the flames of love for your husband. And when you are trying to rekindle your love for him, remember you are not alone. God wants you to learn to love your husband with His merciful love. He will gladly help you. All you need to do is ask (see James 4:2).\n\nDid you know God is more interested in you having a loving marriage than you are? He is the One who can heal your marriage and make your love last a lifetime.\n\nBeginning with an authentic love for the Lord, God's love will spill out of your heart and into your marriage. When this happens, your marriage will become the most glorious of all your earthly relationships. And when you tap into this delightful resource, you will discover the secret to growing more in love with your husband with each passing year. In time, the love displayed in your marriage will be the kind others will want to emulate.\n\nFROM A HUSBAND'S PERSPECTIVE\n\n######\n\nA Word from Steve\n\nThis chapter talks about some expectations you may have for a loving marriage. You want your husband to be everything you imagined he would be, but let's face it\u2014we as men fall short. It hurts me to write this statement as much as it does for you to hear it.\n\nLike your husband, there are times when I am anything but attentive. However, Rhonda covers this with love\u2014Christ's love. Was this always the case? No. Over the years, she has learned to love Christ first, and her love for me spills out from her passion for Christ.\n\nAs a result, Rhonda has learned to think loving thoughts toward me, which is a great source of encouragement for me. Lest you think my wife is superhuman and you can never attain her level of spiritual maturity, let me say she isn't perfect in how she loves me. But Rhonda is always ready to confess and make right when she acts toward me in an unloving manner. This causes me to up my game and be the kind of husband God wants me to be. You may discover your husband will respond in the same way.\n\nI challenge you to apply the principles Rhonda laid out in this chapter and see if God can use your love and obedience for Him to influence a more loving response from your husband. If you don't see a positive result right away, don't give up. When you commit to living in obedience to God's plan for a loving marriage, He will bless you for your faithfulness.\n\nEven if your husband doesn't respond initially the way you would like, your commitment to loving God with your whole heart will be rewarded. The godly life you lead may eventually stir in your husband a desire to obey the Lord as well. And consider how your children will learn to love when they observe your unconditional love for their father\u2014no matter how he responds. By simply adjusting your mind to think well of your husband, you are laying up treasure in heaven. An eternal reward for temporal obedience sounds like a great layaway plan, don't you agree?\n\nIn the many years that I have biblically counseled married couples, I have seen marriages transformed when wives committed to thinking well of their husbands. If your husband is able to rest in knowing you think well of him, you will become his delight.\n\nWhen you become a joy to your husband, his love for you is sure to grow. And when you are thinking only what is good about your husband, your heart will be filled with love for him as well.\n\n######\n\nTHINKING IT THROUGH\n\n######\n\n1. What part of this chapter did you relate to most? Why?\n\n2. With Philippians 4:8 as a guide, name two positive thoughts about your husband you will commit to dwelling on this week.\n\n######\n\nLIVING IT OUT\n\n######\n\n1. You fell in love with your husband because your mind instructed your heart how to feel. List three qualities that made you fall in love with him. Then tell your husband at least one characteristic you love about him.\n\n2. Briefly write out a \"magical moment\" you remember from the days you were dating your husband. What can you do this week to create a magical moment in your marriage? (See \"Create Magical Moments\" on the next page for some ideas.)\n\nVisit NoRegretsWoman.com to watch Steve and Rhonda's video link and\/or listen to their suggested audio link.\n\nCreate Magical Moments\n\nA key part of becoming a couple who stays in love is committing yourselves to creating memorable encounters that celebrate your love. How can you create these magical moments? You don't have to plan an expensive date. On the contrary, frequently the most romantic interactions between couples are simple and occur in the course of everyday life.\n\nHere are four ways to put some magic back into your marriage:\n\n1. Make eye contact from across a crowded room, and give him a flirtatious smile or a wink.\n\n2. Come up behind him while he is talking to his friends and rub his back or his neck, or kiss his cheek. (Don't interrupt the conversation; just distract him a bit, and then be on your way.)\n\n3. Send him a loving or flirtatious text in the middle of the day. Tell him how much you cannot wait to see him when he gets home. Or tell him of the romantic evening you have planned for later. (Be careful of what you say in your text in case one day your 14-year-old picks up your phone and sees your flirtatious comments\u2014I speak from experience!)\n\n4. Be creative. Try to recall what you did to capture your husband's attention when you were dating. And then work to rekindle the magic like you did back then.\n\nOur Kids Would Obey if He Were a Better Father\n\nMarriage Survival Guide for Parents\n\n######\n\nAfter Steve and I had been married a couple of years, I began to get the baby bug. My girlfriend Beth had recently given birth to an adorable baby girl. Whenever Beth and her husband, Dave, would come over to our house, I would watch longingly as Beth nurtured her baby girl, Kristal.\n\nKristal was one of those babies who loved the baby swing. She would sit for hours in the swing with her pacifier in her mouth as Beth, Dave, Steve, and I would visit and play games late into the evenings. The joy I observed in our friends was so precious I was certain having a baby was \"just what our marriage needed.\"\n\nWhen I approached Steve about this, his practical response was, \"What\u2014now? We just bought this house. We are in the middle of a huge remodel and you want a baby?\"\n\nI knew Steve was right to question the rationale of wanting a baby at that time in our lives. We had agreed to move into the house we had purchased so we could use all our money to remodel it, rather than renting an apartment while the work was being done. And to top it off, my income was what we used to pay the house payment\u2014while Steve's income paid for all other bills and the materials needed for the remodel. Since Steve and I had already promised each other I would quit my job to be a stay-at-home mom once we had kids, I can see now how the thought of having children would have weighed heavily on Steve's already strained budget plans.\n\nHowever, at the time, all I could see was how badly I wanted to be a mother. And each time we enjoyed time with Beth and Dave, I was even more convinced our marital bliss would not be complete until we could procreate!\n\nAs the months passed and Steve watched Kristal become more than just a squirming little newborn, I saw a new interest spark in him. Steve loved playing with Kristal, and was overjoyed when he could get her to laugh out loud at his silliness.\n\nWhen Steve and I finally had a serious talk about having a baby, I assured him I most likely wouldn't get pregnant right away. Some of my girlfriends had taken up to a year to conceive. With a deep breath, and a prayer gently whispered, Steve agreed to \"try\" to have a baby.\n\nAbout a month later, Beth and Dave came to our house again for a visit. We ate our usual snacks\u2014including my husband's favorite potato chips and onion dip. (Oh how I miss those days when we were younger and could eat junk food and not feel crummy afterward.)\n\nThe next day while I was at work, I kept burping that nasty onion dip. And two days later, I was still burping. That's when I thought, I wonder if this is morning sickness?\n\nThirty years ago, when you wanted to find out if you were pregnant, you had to go to the doctor to take a pregnancy test. Today, you can simply run to the local pharmacy and buy an at-home pregnancy test.\n\nDuring my lunch hour I visited my doctor. After I returned to work, the doctor's office called with the message, \"Mrs. Stoppe, your test is positive.\" I wasn't sure exactly what that meant, so I asked, \"Positive what? Positive I'm pregnant, or positive I'm not?\" (At the time I was thinking, Steve will think it's a positive thing if my test turns out negative.)\n\nAs it turned out, I was pregnant. So on my way home from work I bought all the fixings for a nice dinner, including Cornish game hens and stuffing. I wanted to serve a special dinner when I announced to Steve he was going to be a daddy.\n\nWhen Steve got home, we sat down to a lovely candlelit table set with our wedding china. His eyes lit up when he saw the beautiful Cornish game hens come out of the oven. And then it happened\u2014as I carried the bowl with the stuffing in it to the table, Steve looked at the stuffing, turned up his nose, and said, \"Stuffing? I hate stuffing.\"\n\nWell, you can imagine the disappointment I felt in that moment! I burst into tears, and Steve was stunned.\n\nThen Steve pulled me onto his lap and said, \"It's all right; I'll eat it. I'm sure you did a good job of cooking it. I'm just not a fan of stuffing. Really, it's ok; look I'll eat some now,\" as he reached to take a huge bite.\n\nI stopped him before he could gag on the stuffing, which would have completely destroyed the evening. Then he wiped away my tears again and asked, \"Okay, now tell me what's really wrong.\"\n\nI apologized for overreacting to the situation, and explained how I had hoped to cook a special meal to celebrate a special occasion. A look of concern came across Steve's face\u2014at first he thought maybe he had forgotten our anniversary. I said, \"It's not our anniversary, or my birthday. But you are going to be a father.\"\n\nSteve's look of concern turned to fear. He said, \"Are you sure? You said it would take several months. How do you know?\"\n\nAfter I assured Steve the doctor had confirmed my suspicions, he held me tightly (looking back, I think he did that so I wouldn't see the terror on his face), but Steve's hug and gentle whisper, \"I'm gonna be a father...wow\" are sweet memories I will never forget\u2014in spite of the stuffing incident.\n\nOur first child, Meredith, was born on Christmas Eve (after 52 hours of labor\u2014can I hear you say, \"Wow!\"?). I was so happy to bring our little bundle of joy home and start living as a family that I left the hospital the very next day\u2014and besides, it was Christmas.\n\nAs time passed and we settled into our routines, Steve and I made an alarming discovery. Our baby, Meredith, was nothing like Kristal. Whereas Kristal would gladly accept a pacifier, Meredith would gag and spit it out. Whereas Kristal would sit in the baby swing for hours on end, Meredith would freak out and cry because the swing terrified her. And while Kristal would sleep soundly in her bed each evening, Meredith screamed wildly for hours on end. (Since I didn't know much about babies, it wasn't until Beth's mother came over for a visit that she informed me the reason Meredith pulled her knees up and screamed each night was because she had colic.)\n\nThis turned out to be the hardest year of our marriage. Up to this point, we had agreed on pretty much everything we did as a couple. But now disagreements were more frequent. For example, because of Meredith's constant crying I became frazzled, exhausted, and an emotional wreck. When I would ask Steve to take Meredith for a walk so she would feel better, he insisted she needed to \"cry it out\" in her crib. Since we didn't see eye-to-eye on how to deal with Meredith's crying, I worried, How many other things will we disagree on as we raise this child?\n\nThe irony of all this is I had originally anticipated only the bliss that having a baby would bring. I hadn't expected the difficulties and exhaustion as well.\n\nAfter three long months of constant crying, Meredith woke up one morning as a happy baby. No more tummy trouble, and from that day on, she has been an absolute delight. (Meredith\u2014if you're reading this, please know how very thankful we are for you, and in hindsight, we even thank the Lord for the work He did in us as you cried your little eyes out.)\n\nIron Sharpens Iron\n\nThey say hindsight is always 20\/20. When Steve and I were first married, I exhibited a bad attitude toward him when he messed up the house, forgot to do something, or said something that didn't sit well with me. Oh how I wish I could go back to those first months of marriage and relive them knowing what I know now. At any rate, the season I spent adjusting to married life was what God used to show me how selfish a person I was. Once I recognized that, the Lord was able to begin chiseling away at me and make me into a woman who reflected more accurately Christ's selfless love toward my husband. Then when I became a mother, once again the Lord showed me just how self-absorbed I was. Raising little ones is either gonna \"make yah or break yah\"\u2014isn't that true?\n\nProverbs 27:17 says, \"Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another\" (ESV). Have you ever noticed what happens when iron is rubbed against iron? Sparks fly! And while the end result is both knives become sharper and better instruments, the sharpening process requires friction\u2014which produces sparks. In the same way, God uses the relationships in our lives to sharpen us. As we rub up against each other, the friction can make us better instruments for His use.\n\nRaising children is sure to invite friction into a marriage. Not only are parents passionate about their kids, they are emotionally vested as well\u2014even to the point of being unreasonable sometimes. Let me explain: In nearly 20 years of youth ministry work, Steve and I encountered many parents who were blinded by their passion for their kids. For example, moms will go to great lengths to defend their child if they feel a teacher is treating him or her unjustly\u2014even when it's clear the child is the one at fault.\n\nMost parents have strong opinions about how their kids should be disciplined, what they should be allowed to do, and so on. But when mom and dad disagree on these important issues, sparks will fly. If you and your husband disagree about a specific parenting issue and the friction causes the two of you to evaluate your motives and surrender to Christ's leading, then you will become sharpened instruments for the Master's use.\n\nOn the contrary, when conflict over your kids leads you to sinful actions, you can know your motivations are not in line with God's will. In the middle of parenting disagreements when you react sinfully to your husband, do you stop to evaluate why you are willing to sin in the situation? If not, you are sadly missing an opportunity God is providing for you\u2014and your husband\u2014to ask the Holy Spirit for help. Once you are willing to admit your own sinful motivations and bring your thoughts and actions in line with what the Bible teaches regarding your situation, you will be able to have a rational, respectful discussion with your husband.\n\nBut Girls Just Wanna Have Fun!\n\nWhen Meredith was about 13, Steve was the youth pastor at a church in Austin, Texas. Steve's rule had always been that our kids were not allowed to ride in a car with a driver who was under the age of 18.\n\nAs the daughter of the youth pastor, Meredith was friends with a lot of kids under the age of 18 who had driver's licenses. Whenever she would ask if she could ride with one of her teenage friends, Steve promptly told her, \"Are they eighteen or older? If not, then the answer is no.\"\n\nPoor Meredith. I felt so sorry for her. She was trying so hard to fit in with the older kids\u2014good kids. But whenever Steve said no, she felt like a little kid and was \"mortified with embarrassment\" (I believe that's how she defined it).\n\nI loved the kids in our youth group. They had so much fun together going bowling, boating, and such. So whenever Steve told Meredith she wasn't allowed to go with them unless the driver was at least 18 years old, I truly felt sorry for her.\n\nSince I tried very hard to never disagree with Steve's mandate in front of Meredith, she would have thought I was in complete agreement with her father's rule. But behind closed doors Steve and I had many discussions about how unfair I thought he was being to Meredith. On one occasion, I even remember crying as I told Steve he was \"responding out of an irrational fear of what might happen to Meredith.\"\n\nYou know how you know when you've pushed your husband too far? Well, with that comment, I knew I'd done just that! Steve's nostrils flared (if you knew anything about Steve, you would know this means he is really mad), and he responded, \"Fine. You let her do whatever you think is best\u2014if you are willing to live with the consequence if something happens to her.\"\n\nSeriously\u2014how was I supposed to respond to that statement? Truth be told, over the years that Steve had been a youth pastor, we had seen our fair share of inexperienced teenage drivers get into car accidents\u2014some of them fatal. I was more than aware of the statistics regarding teenage-driver accidents. I just wanted to believe nothing would happen to our daughter because these were good kids.\n\nAfter I spent some time pondering the matter, the Holy Spirit convicted me over the fact I hadn't been honoring my husband's wishes. In the end, I stood by Steve's decision to not allow Meredith to ride with inexperienced drivers. Meredith continued to be upset, embarrassed, and distant with us whenever the issue came up.\n\nOne night after we had been out as a family, we arrived home to find a car parked in front of our house. A father of one of our youth group teens walked up to Steve's car window and tearfully explained how one of the teenage girls, who had been driving with another friend in her car, had just been killed in an accident. I'll spare you the details, but suffice it to say, these were two good girls. There was no drinking involved, and they were not doing anything illegal. The accident was simply a result of the girl's inexperience as a driver.\n\nMeredith was devastated to hear her friend had died\u2014as were we. After the funeral, Meredith came to us to apologize for being angry about our \"stupid rule\" because now she realized we were just trying to protect her.\n\nThat experience made me realize how very much I needed my husband's wisdom and input when it came to decisions regarding our kids' well-being. I usually leaned toward letting the kids do what I thought would be \"fun,\" while Steve was less concerned about their having a good time and more interested in keeping them safe and molding their character to be Christlike.\n\nWhat if I had fought with Steve in front of Meredith? What if I had pushed to get Steve to change his mind and Meredith had been allowed to ride with her friends? Maybe nothing bad would have happened to her. However, any bad that would have occurred would have been the consequence of my insistence, which, in turn, could have damaged our marriage\u2014and ultimately, our family.\n\nWhen you and your husband do not work to present a united front to your children, they will inevitably look for the point of your contention and get the two of you bickering over who is right so they can go on their merry way and do whatever they please.\n\nTake a moment and evaluate the way you and your husband parent. Do you teach your kids to respect their father by how you treat him in their presence? Do you talk about your kids' father behind his back, or complain to your children when your husband does not measure up to your expectations? If you do not instill a healthy respect in your kids for their father, you will suffer the consequences when you need your husband's reinforcement during their preteen and teenage years.\n\nBy the time your children have reached their middle-school years, if you and your husband have not learned how to work together in raising your children for God's glory, you will certainly be faced with conflict in your marriage. During their preteen years kids usually start asking to participate in social activities that are less supervised by adults. Couple that with adolescent hormones, and the emotions of both child and parent can escalate rather quickly.\n\nSadly, in the 20 years Steve and I worked with teens, we witnessed many marriages damaged\u2014even destroyed\u2014as parents battled with their spouse over each and every decision pertaining to their kids.\n\nBut What if My Husband Is a Bad Father?\n\nIs your husband aloof about parenting? Or possibly too controlling? I know people who fall into each of these categories. So what can you do when your husband does not measure up to your expectations as a father? For insight, let's learn from a mom whose husband was extremely controlling.\n\nTina's husband, Bob, had always been a control freak. When they were dating, Tina found security in Bob's take-charge manner as he planned every detail of their dates to a tee. After they were married, however, Bob's strong tendencies to control were often a point of contention. To avoid Bob's barrage of questioning when he arrived home, Tina had learned to keep certain details of how she spent her days from her husband. As time went on, Tina learned Bob's desire to control was deeply seated in fear\u2014a fear of not being able to protect his family.\n\nWhen Bob and Tina's teenage son began to resist his father's strong hand of control, intense arguments between father and son broke loose in their home. Tina felt sorry for her son, and would often get into the middle of the arguments. Until one day Tina's son pulled her aside and asked her to please stay out of the fight. He explained to his mother that her stepping in actually made Bob angrier and less reasonable to deal with.\n\nAs a favor to her son, Tina stepped back\u2014way back\u2014whenever the two would go toe-to-toe. That is when Tina learned to pray like she had never prayed before. While her husband and son were having heated arguments, Tina would go to her prayer chair and intercede for both of them. First, Tina would ask the Lord to reveal any sin in her heart so that she might confess it and be cleansed so her prayers would be effective (see James 5:16). Then she prayed specifically for her husband's controlling ways not to push her son into rebellion. And finally, Tina prayed for her husband to be convicted of how his fear was driving his incessant need to control everyone\u2014and every event\u2014in their family.\n\nAnd do you know what happened? God did a work in Tina's heart. As she made a habit of meeting with the Lord and confessing her own sin in each matter, her prayers became an effective resource in resolving the conflict between her husband and son. Years have passed since those difficult days, and Tina's commitment to pray for rather than defend her son made a lasting impression on him as a man who now serves Christ. And God changed her husband, ever so slowly. Anyone who was watching how the Lord worked to resolve Bob's control issues would say the events God used were nothing short of miraculous!\n\nPrayer Is the Key\n\nYou see, when Tina agreed to get out of the way, God was right there to do His work. Do you have a husband who is controlling? Can you apply what you have learned from Tina's story to your own marriage? Prayer is the key. The problem is, most of us don't want to wait for God to do the work in the person we are praying for. Often when wives do not see an instant transformation in their husband, they look for a way out. They convince themselves that they and the kids would be better off not living under the difficult situation. However, you must remember that God frequently does His best work refining us when we are in the midst of difficult circumstances. (Please understand I am not referring to situations involving spousal abuse.)\n\nFor example, the value of persistent, passionate prayer is one of the shining virtues in the life of Hannah, who was the mother of Samuel. In the years before Hannah was able to bear children, she endured a troubled home life. Her husband, Elkanah, was a bigamist. Because Hannah had been unable to conceive, it is likely that in order to have children, Elkanah took a second wife\u2014Peninnah.\n\nCan you imagine the hurt and rivalry that Elkanah invited into his home by marrying another woman? The Bible says that Elkanah preferred Hannah over Peninnah because he loved her deeply (see 1 Samuel 1:4-5). So here you have the makings for some intense rivalry all under one roof. What was Elkanah thinking?\n\nWhat a mess these three had on their hands, don't you think? In the book Twelve Extraordinary Women we glean this insight: \"Hannah was in constant anguish because of her own infertility. She was further tormented by Peninnah's taunts. The burden and stress made life almost unbearable.\"\n\nAlthough Hannah and Elkanah's marriage was marred by tension, the two did love one another deeply. As Twelve Extraordinary Women says,\n\nHannah's love for her husband is the first key to understanding her profound influence as a mother. Contrary to popular opinion, the most important characteristic of a godly mother is not her relationship with her children. It is her love for her husband. The love between husband and wife is the real key to a thriving family...Furthermore, all parents need to heed this lesson: what you communicate to your children through your marital relationship will stay with them for the rest of their lives. By watching how mother and father treat one another, they will learn the most fundamental lessons of life\u2014love, self-sacrifice, integrity, virtue, sin, sympathy, compassion, understanding and forgiveness. Whatever you teach about those things, right or wrong, is planted deep within their hearts.\n\nEach year, Hannah and Elkanah traveled together to the temple to worship God. One year in particular, Hannah was so sorrowful over her situation she could not even eat. (Lucky girl\u2014whenever I am distraught, all I want to do is eat. What about you?) Despite her difficult situation, she never became embittered. Rather, she became a woman characterized by a steadfast prayer life. First Samuel 1:12 says Hannah \"continued praying before the LORD.\"\n\nWith a broken heart, Hannah was driven to her knees. Her trials were the very tool God used to make her a woman of intense prayer. And on this particular visit to the temple, here's what Hannah said: \"O LORD of hosts, if You will indeed look on the affliction of Your maidservant and remember me, and not forget Your maidservant, but will give Your maidservant a male child, then I will give him to the LORD all the days of his life\" (1 Samuel 1:11).\n\nAnd when God answered Hannah's prayer and gave her a son, her immediate response was to pray. First Samuel 2:1-10 records her words, and the prayer is a beautiful masterpiece of thanksgiving.\n\nSo Hannah's troubles taught her to pray with intense passion, and when God answered her, she continued to remain steadfast in prayer.\n\nHannah's difficult marriage was also the catalyst God used to cause her to dedicate Samuel to the Lord. Do you realize Samuel is one of the few men in the Bible for whom we cannot find any record of rebellion against God? What a legacy Hannah left in her son Samuel\u2014all because she turned to God in her trial and did not become bitter or look for a way to escape her difficult marriage.\n\nIn the same way God used conflict in Hannah's home to make her a woman of prayer, the Lord wants to mold you into a woman who prays at all times, including in difficult circumstances. And if you follow Hannah's example of keeping your heart pure before the Lord, your prayers will not be hindered. Your fervent petitions for your children will do more to prepare them for God's plan for their lives than anything you can do on your own, including rescuing them from a difficult situation they may be facing.\n\nTo Know Christ and Make Him Known\n\nIf you have a personal relationship with Christ, then you have been invited to be on a mission with God. And what is that mission? To put it simply: to know Christ and to make Him known.\n\nIn your marriage relationship, do you tend to focus on how you can have a better marriage? In parenting, is your aim to become a better parent? While these are worthwhile goals, if you make them the focus of your life, you will have missed your mission. Sadly, the Christian church today leans much more toward helping people build happy lives rather than missional lives.\n\nFor example, when you got married, was your goal to live happily ever after with your husband? Have you made it your life's goal to work hard so you can have a nice home in which to raise a family? Again, these are not necessarily bad goals. The problem lies in making these \"good\" goals idols in your life\u2014idols that take priority over God's mission for you to know Christ more intimately day by day through prayer, Bible study, and fellowship with other Christians.\n\nReading book after book on how to be a better wife, mother, or Christian yet neglecting to spend dedicated amounts of time with God and His Word is settling for far less than what the Lord has for you. For it is through time with Him and the Bible that you will learn the character of Christ. Your love for Him will grow only as you sit in His presence and get to know Him more intimately through the pages of Scripture.\n\nIf your mission is to know Christ and make Him known, you must devote yourself to knowing Him so well that you recognize His providential hand in your own life\u2014and that of your family.\n\nIn his book You and Me Forever, Francis Chan states, \"[Our kids] must see the Gospel brought to life when they observe our parenting. We strive to demonstrate a beautiful picture of Christ in hopes that they will find Him attractive and give their lives to knowing Him.\"\n\nWhen your life's purpose is to know your Savior more and more with each passing day, the natural outcome will be for you to think with a biblical worldview. When this happens, you will learn to see life's ups and downs as opportunities to make Christ known to those around you\u2014especially to your children. And the more time you spend with Jesus, the more His character will spill out of your obedient life and thus create in others a desire to know Him too.\n\nD.L. Moody, a prominent evangelist and minister of the nineteenth century, said, \"If we attempt to feed others we must first be fed ourselves.\" This means, as a mother, you must take the time to daily study God's Word so you are ready to teach to others the truths you learn\u2014including your kids. I don't think the Lord could make your assignment, as a mom, any clearer than what He laid out in Deuteronomy 6:4-9:\n\nHear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.\n\nFor more insights into what this passage says about parenting, see pages 184-85 of my book Moms Raising Sons to Be Men. There, I share how you can help your kids develop a biblical worldview.\n\nYou Are an Ambassador for Christ\n\nThe apostle Paul often found himself in circumstances much worse than any you and I will likely ever face. And yet he never lost sight of his mission to proclaim Christ. Listen as Paul pleads with the believers in Ephesus\u2014he urged them to be\n\npraying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints, and also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak (Ephesians 6:18-20 ESV).\n\nIf you were in prison, would your prayer request be, \"Hey, guys, I'm in chains for telling people about Christ. Could you keep praying for me to have additional opportunities to speak the gospel more boldly?\"\n\nYou won't likely find yourself in chains anytime soon, but sometimes a difficult marriage can make you feel like you're in prison. What if God has you right where He wants you? What if, like in Paul's life, the Lord knew you would be most effective sharing with others\u2014including your children\u2014the hope of salvation because of your pain?\n\nLet me put it to you this way: If the only way God can bring your kids into the kingdom is by showing them how faith in Jesus is real through your struggle, is it worth it? My friend Tina thinks it is. She said, \"If my husband's controlling bent is what drove me to my knees and my son to Christ, it was all worth it!\" Wow. Isn't she right?\n\nFirst Peter 4:11 says, \"If anyone speaks, let him speak as the oracles of God. If anyone ministers, let him do it with the ability which God supplies, that in all things God may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to whom belong the glory and the dominion forever and ever. Amen.\"\n\nIn Christ, God has called you to be His mouthpiece to those whom He is drawing to Himself. As you grow to know God through Bible study, memorizing Scripture, and prayer, you will no doubt glorify Christ because the natural outpouring of one who knows Jesus intimately is a love for others. This love spills over first into your marriage, then to your children, and then into all the other relationships the Lord brings your way.\n\nSecond Corinthians 5:20 makes this profound statement: \"Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God.\" How does realizing you are Christ's ambassador to reconcile others to Him influence the way you relate to your husband and your children? Maybe you should take a moment to dwell on the fact the Lord has called you to be His ambassador. Then ask God to give you the courage to set aside all other pursuits\u2014even personal happiness\u2014to become the woman He has ordained you to be in this generation.\n\nThe apostle John said, \"I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth\" (3 John 4). Because when your children surrender to the truth of the gospel, the Spirit will do the work that no parental behavioral modification can ever accomplish. It is the Holy Spirit who changes everything!\n\nRemember, the circumstance in which you now find yourself is just a season. Your life will soon be past. Psalm 102:11-12 says, \"My days are like a shadow that lengthens, and I wither away like grass. But You, O LORD, shall endure forever, and the remembrance of Your name to all generations.\" When you live with an eternal perspective, you will find the courage to follow Jesus and live with the knowledge that your obedience to Christ will result in eternal rewards, as well as God's greatest good in this life.\n\nYour kids' security lies in the health of your marriage relationship. When you live with your eyes focused on the mission God has called you to\u2014to know Christ and make Him known\u2014you will have learned the key to building a no-regrets marriage. When you determine to live in a manner that reflects a genuine love for Christ\u2014no matter how smooth or difficult your marriage relationship may be\u2014you will do far more to draw your kids to salvation than any words you could ever say. And isn't that your ultimate goal?\n\nFROM A HUSBAND'S PERSPECTIVE\n\n######\n\nA Word from Steve\n\nI have a friend named Ken who devoted his life to working hard\u2014and playing hard. His free time was spent on all sorts of recreational activities from motorcycle riding and sailing to muscle cars. Although these hobbies were not bad in and of themselves, the time Ken spent enjoying them consumed his weekends, and on most Sundays, kept him away from church. All the while Ken's wife, Dorinda, continued to take their children to church every week. And she quietly prayed for the Lord to convict her husband regarding his misguided pursuits.\n\nKen's preoccupation with self had taken from Dorinda a husband who was once devoted to Christ. And it pulled Ken far away from any kind of ministry for the Lord. After a number of years, the Spirit began to show Ken that he was wasting his life. One day, Ken reluctantly agreed to attend a particular Bible study our church was offering to our men's group.\n\nAs Ken studied how men in the Bible experienced God when they walked in obedience to Him, he came to understand that he would need to reevaluate the way he was living. After a season of wrestling with God over his newfound convictions, Ken realized the priority of his life needed to be loving God with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength (see Mark 12:30).\n\nIt was then that Ken said, \"I need to adjust my life to what I have been learning.\"\n\nAt last, Dorinda's prayers were answered! Ken was ready to make knowing Christ and making Him known the supreme priorities of his life.\n\nAs a result, Ken got rid of many of his toys and set aside some of his hobbies to become a faithful follower of Christ. Talk about a transformation! Dorinda was overjoyed as she witnessed her husband's newfound passion to serve the Lord.\n\nAfter a time, Ken has come to enjoy some of his hobbies again, but now he and Dorinda do them together with the purpose of telling others about Christ. They also teach weekly Bible studies and mentor men and women in their church. And the two grandsons they are raising in their home get to watch their grandparents' marriage reflect their all-out commitment to knowing Christ and making Christ known.\n\nPerhaps your husband doesn't do what Ken did, or maybe you are secretly rejoicing at the prospect of your husband giving up some of the things that take up his free time. That's not my point here.\n\nMy point is this: Dorinda's deepest longing was to have her husband in church with her on Sundays. So what did she do? Did she nag, manipulate, cry, or pout until her husband gave in to her demands? No. Rather, Dorinda prayed.\n\nIf you long for your husband to be a better spiritual leader so that your children might be more obedient, don't nag him until he agrees to change. Nagging never works with husbands. In fact, if ever Rhonda nags me, I tend to want to do the opposite of what she asks.\n\nInstead, pray diligently each day for the Lord to transform your husband\u2013\u2013and your children\u2014with the truth.\n\nWhatever stresses you may experience in your marriage (and when you are raising children together, there will be seasons of stress), remember that the answer is not to stand against one another in conflict, but to stand united in prayer. Pray for your husband, and pray for your kids. Because the Bible promises, \"The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.\"\n\n######\n\nTHINKING IT THROUGH\n\n######\n\n1. From this chapter fill in the blanks: God's mission for your life is for you to _________________ Christ and to ____________________________ known.\n\n2. Write out 2 Corinthians 5:20. As an ambassador for Christ, what appeal does God desire to make through you to your children?\n\n3. What would your children say is the priority of your life? Read Job 6:24 and then ask God to help you understand whether you may have gone astray. Ask Him to teach you how to adjust your life to what you have learned in this chapter.\n\n######\n\nLIVING IT OUT\n\n######\n\n1. Look up 1 Peter 4:11 (ESV) and fill in the missing words:\n\nWhoever speaks, as one who speaks__________________; whoever serves, as one who serves ___________________ \u2014in order that __________________________ God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.\n\n2. Describe two steps you will take to demonstrate to your children that the most important pursuit in life is not personal happiness, but to build a life that stores up eternal rewards as you seek to know Christ and make Him known.\n\nVisit NoRegretsWoman.com to watch Steve and Rhonda's video link and\/or listen to their suggested audio link.\n\nI Would Be Happier Married to Someone Else\n\nThe Grass Is Not Greener on the Other Side of the Fence\n\n######\n\nMy dear friend Vi was married for 42 years to Curt, the love of her life. When I asked Vi to tell me about how she and Curt met, she said, \"We were in college, on a choir tour. I played the piano and he was going into music ministry, so we were a good fit.\" Vi jokingly added, \"Although, when you play the piano and you marry a minister, you're never quite sure if he married you for love or because he needed a pianist!\"\n\nThroughout their married life, Vi and Curt served the Lord in full-time ministry. Vi often referred to their marriage as a waltz through life divinely choreographed by the Lord. Their waltz came to an end when Curt was diagnosed with cancer at age 68. As his health failed, Vi never left his side.\n\nOn the last day of his life, Curt looked to his sweetheart and said, \"Vi, am I dying?\" To which Vi tearfully responded, \"Yes, dear\u2014you are dying.\"\n\nAnd then in the joyful spirit Curt so adored, Vi whispered, \"Curt, you are going home to see Jesus! What is the first thing you want to say to Him when you see His face?\"\n\nCurt closed his eyes and smiled as he considered the moment he would stand in the presence of the Lord. And then without hesitation, he looked into Vi's gentle eyes and said, \"I am going to thank Him for giving me you.\" (Read Vi's poem at the end of this chapter on pages 86-87.)\n\nI have told Vi and Curt's story a number of times, but I can never get through it without crying. Even now as I write this, tears are streaming down my face. We all long to have a marriage like Vi and Curt's, don't we? A love that lasts through the tests of time. A happily-ever-after story our grandkids will tell their children about long after we are gone.\n\nIn this day of quick divorces and remarriages, lifelong relationships like Vi and Curt's are all too few. Sadly, statistics generally show that around half of those who promise \"Till death do us part\" will never celebrate a fiftieth wedding anniversary, let alone a twenty-fifth.\n\nWhen Your Husband Lets You Down\n\nSo what's the problem? Why are people so quick to abandon their vows to seek happiness in the arms of another? When couples are blissfully engaged to be married, betrayal is the furthest thing from their minds. But after they tie the knot and the years go by, the grass starts to look greener elsewhere. How is it that so many marriages are ruined because the husband or wife falls in love with someone else? And what can you do to ensure this doesn't happen to your marriage?\n\nFirst, realize that women are not usually tempted to fantasize about leaving for another man unless they feel like their husband repeatedly does not measure up to their expectations. The danger lies in allowing your disappointment to cause you to think, I would be happier married to someone else.\n\nWhenever your husband lets you down, you most likely feel betrayed. When I use the word betrayed, I'm not talking about your husband having an affair with another woman, which is the ultimate betrayal. Rather, I am referring to the everyday disappointments that make you feel as though your husband is being disloyal to you. Some common examples of such betrayals are:\n\n\u2022 when your husband vents about you on the phone to his mother\n\n\u2022 when he spent an excessive amount of money on a frivolous item without telling you\n\n\u2022 when he looks too intently at another woman\n\n\u2022 when he looks at pornography\n\n\u2022 when he makes comments to embarrass or undermine you in front of others\n\nPreparing, in advance, to deal with these types of disloyalty will allow you to determine how you will handle feelings of betrayal before they happen. Now, I am not saying you should watch your husband in a way that suggests you don't trust him. Rather, settle in your mind how you plan to respond with forgiveness before an infraction occurs. And be ready to offer the same grace to your husband that you would want from him in the times that you disappoint him.\n\nIf you are not prepared with a response and forgiveness, then you are more likely to deal with your disappointment irrationally. And this is when many wives begin to believe the myth I would be happier married to someone else. Beware, for if you toy with this idea for too long, you will invite Satan to wreak havoc in your life. The devil knows that if he can get you to dream about a happier life with another man, he will have gained a foothold toward destroying your marriage. Don't give him that chance (see 2 Corinthians 2:11; Ephesians 4:27).\n\nIn the face of your husband's everyday betrayals, you have choices to make. You can either be ill-prepared for the letdown and withdraw emotionally, or you can choose to cover the betrayal with love\u2014God's love.\n\nHow you respond will either create an emotional distance in your relationship or deepen your love for one another. You will find strength and peace to cover your disappointment with grace when you fall to your knees and seek the One who will never betray you.\n\nThe Grass May Look Greener, but It's Full of Thorns\n\nI come from a long line of broken marriages. So as young bride, I wanted to learn the secret to a happy and lasting marriage. For help, I looked to a number of godly women in our church whose marriages I wanted to emulate. When you become friends with happily married couples, you can learn from their example how to have a joyful union. Can you think of at least one godly couple whom you would like to emulate? If not, pray for the Lord to lead you to some. (Joining a Bible study with some older women is a great place to start.)\n\nMost of the couples Steve and I spent time with were older than we were. And the wives in these marriages took seriously the instruction in Titus 2 for older women to teach younger women how to love their husbands. This made them great mentors for me. (And it's also the reason I am writing this book\u2014to pass on to you the godly principles they taught me so I can be a Titus 2 woman in your life. And then you, in turn, can teach these principles to the women God brings into your life. See how it works?)\n\nWhen I would ask these women, \"What is the key to a happy marriage?\" I was surprised at their answers. The overall message I gleaned from these Titus 2 women was this:\n\nThe real secret to a happy marriage is not in how much you love your husband, but how much you love Christ. God created us to worship Him. When you make it a priority to worship God through quiet time with the Lord in Bible study, prayer, repentance, and obedience to His will, you will find your joy, identity, and sense of well-being in your relationship with your Creator. When this happens, you will not feel the need to find your worth in your relationship with your spouse, and you will never be tempted to look to another man to fulfill you either.\n\nGod created you with a need to be loved and to feel significant. But He never intended for you to fulfill those desires through marriage\u2014or through any relationship with a person. Rather, God wants to fill the longings of your heart with Himself. The problem is that sin stole away mankind's desire for intimacy with the Creator. And now, because of sin in your heart\u2014and mine\u2014we focus on self and struggle with self-worship. In this state of self-love, you are susceptible to think I deserve to be happy and to believe Satan's lie I would be happier with someone else. In this vulnerable state, when one romantic relationship fails to make you feel complete, there is a temptation to replace it with another one.\n\nThe only way to guard against having a distorted sense of love and self-worth is to have a healthy personal relationship with Jesus. Again, that involves growing your love for Him through prayer, spending time in Bible study, and fellowshipping with other Christians. When you determine to find your joy in Christ, you will be set free from looking to others to fill the void only God can satisfy.\n\nSo once you decide to look to God as the sole source of true happiness, you are ready to apply the principles Steve and I learned from the happy couples who befriended us so many years ago.\n\nEight Insights We Learned from Happily Married Couples\n\nHere are eight practical ways you can cultivate a happy marriage:\n\n1. Have Realistic Expectations\n\nOne reason people become unhappy with their marriage is because the relationship doesn't turn out to be all they had expected. Did you think your husband would be the answer to all your hopes for happily-ever-after? If so, at some point after the honeymoon was over, you came to realize you had married a normal human being and not the Prince Charming you imagined him to be.\n\nMy \"aha moment\" came during our honeymoon when my brand-new husband proceeded to use the bathroom in front of me. I was shocked. I mean, I knew this big hunk of a man relieved himself, but it never occurred to me he would do it in my presence!\n\nThe sooner you realize you and your husband are both imperfect people, the better you will be prepared to cover with grace the times you let one another down.\n\n2. Your Husband Is Not Like You\n\nYou don't have to be married for too long to discover your husband is not like you. All too often, couples attempt to define unity in marriage as \"sameness.\" But unity isn't sameness.\n\nFor example, one way men and women differ from each other is the way they respond to discord. In conflict, a woman will generally pull away, secretly hoping her husband will come after her to show her how much he cares. But most men require time to process a heated conversation. They often need to distance themselves from the situation and think through what was said. This is why, after a disagreement, your husband may go out to the garage to work on a task. While he is contemplating his own feelings, trying to understand how you are feeling, and possibly looking for a way to resolve the conflict, it would be easy for you to interpret his pulling away as rejection or a lack of concern for you and your feelings.\n\nSo don't be quick to assume your husband's retreat means that he doesn't care. And learn how to give your husband the space he needs to come back and have a rational conversation\u2014when he is ready.\n\nRemember, unity in marriage does not mean you have to see eye-to-eye with your husband on every detail of life. In his book What Did You Expect? author Paul David Tripp says,\n\nUnity in marriage is not the result of sameness...God has designed that you will be married to someone different from you. Unity is, rather, the result of what husband and wife do in the face of inevitable differences...The more you look at your spouse and see the imprint of God's fingers...the more you will be able to resist the temptation to try to remake him in your own image...The more you see divine beauty...in the differences between you, the less you will be irritated by them.\n\nWhen you begin to celebrate God's imprint on your husband, you will be prepared to implement the next insight I learned from happy couples:\n\n3. Think the Best About Your Husband\n\nI know that in chapter 3 we already talked about dwelling on your husband's good qualities, but it bears repeating in this context. Remind yourself regularly of the qualities you love about your husband. And resist the temptation to compare him to the \"ideal husband\" you dream of having. Wouldn't you want your husband to do the same for you?\n\nEven wit deliberate effort toward resisting the temptation to compare, married couples will often lean toward viewing one another through a negative lens. If thinking the best about each other is not yet a habit within your marriage, someone has to take the first step. Let that someone be you.\n\nMany couples I have talked to will admit to having had a mediocre marriage\u2014or even a bad one\u2014until one of them determined to stop comparing their spouse to the person they wished he or she would be. In so doing, their newfound habit of thinking positive thoughts spilled over into affirming words and kind service to their spouse. More often than not, the actions of one spouse not only turned the marriage around, but in many instances even saved the marriage.\n\n4. Be Kind to One Another\n\nAre you kind? I don't mean are you nice to the mailman, or the bagger at the grocery store. It's easy to be kind to people you only see for a few minutes each day. But in general, do you have a kind disposition? Is kindness your default mode, or do you have to force yourself not to lash out when you are offended? Maybe a better question to ask would be this: Does your husband think you are kind?\n\nEphesians 4:32 says, \"Be kind one to another.\" This is a command, not a suggestion. And yet wouldn't you agree there are times that being kind is not the easiest response? And if you have little ones at home, lack of sleep alone can have a negative influence upon your attempts to remain kind. One marriage expert says women in their thirties (when most women have small children) go through what he refers to as \"the unfriendly years.\" Can I get a witness? As a stay-at-home mom, I recall being tired, overworked, and \"underpaid.\" Unfriendly would certainly define the way I sometimes treated my husband in those days. (I remember thinking, He gets to go to work every day in an air-conditioned office and have lunch with grown-ups, while I'm chasing after kids and up to my elbows in laundry.)\n\nHave you ever struggled with this type of thinking? Would you characterize yourself as unfriendly to your husband? If while reading this you find yourself resentful\u2014for whatever reason\u2014realize that you'll only end up hurting your marriage. Whatever the situation or your circumstances, if you make an extra effort to be kind to your husband now, you will enjoy the benefit of a happier marriage as time goes on.\n\nThe seeds of kindness Steve and I planted during the chaotic years of raising children have borne fruit, and today we find ourselves in the midst of a delightful empty-nest season. By contrast, I know many wives who were unkind to their husbands because they harbored an unforgiving attitude and resentment over their husband's lack of help when the kids were little, only to reap a broken marriage when the children grew up and left home.\n\n5. Refuse to Fantasize About Being Married to Someone Else\n\nA major threat to a happy marriage is the temptation to believe you married the wrong person.\n\nWatching soap operas or romantic movies can easily lead to a restless heart within women. After her own life fell apart, a friend of mine told me, \"Whenever you teach women, warn them not to watch soap operas. I used to watch them for hours and wish my life was as interesting as the lives of the people on the show. When the drama visited my own marriage, it nearly destroyed me. The lifestyle I thought would spark a new fire brought devastation and destruction.\"\n\nWhen times get hard\u2014and they will\u2014allowing yourself to daydream about what it would be like to escape the hardship will only invite trouble into your marriage. If you are looking up old boyfriends on the Internet, or dreaming about what life would be like if you were married to a different man, you are already in the process of undermining the foundation of your marriage. And when you let the ground under your marriage get shaky, it will one day crumble beneath your feet.\n\nIn the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told the story of the foolish man who built his house upon the sand (Matthew 7:26-27). Building your hopes for a happy marriage with someone other than your husband is certainly foolish. And when the storms of life come, your house will come crashing down around you.\n\n6. Your Husband Is Not Your Enemy\n\nIn times of strife, remind yourself that your husband is not your enemy. Your real adversary is the devil, who is a roaring lion seeking to devour you\u2014and your marriage. When you realize Satan comes to steal, kill, and destroy, you will know that it's the tempter who is your enemy, and not your husband.\n\n7. Love Christ More Than You Love Your Husband\n\nI know we discussed this several times in this book, but I cannot stress enough this key principle: When you determine to grow more deeply in love with Christ, you will find your worth in your relationship to Him. When this happens, you will not look to your husband to meet the needs only God can fill. When you live to love Jesus, His love for your husband will spill out of your heart. And your heart will become joyfully satisfied with your husband.\n\nOne marriage counselor offers this insight: \"Love is being unwilling to ask your spouse to be the source of your identity, meaning and purpose, or inner sense of well-being, while refusing to be the source of his.\"\n\n8. Determine That Divorce Will Never Be an Option\n\nIf ever you think leaving your marriage is the answer to your problems, remind yourself: Wherever you go, there you are. This means whatever struggles you may be having, realize you are half of the problem. If you choose to leave a difficult marriage, you can be certain you'll take all your unresolved issues into your next relationship as well. And while we are on this subject, let's talk a bit more about the consequences of divorce.\n\nThe Effects of Divorce\n\nWhenever couples have built a distance between themselves through hurtful words, unwillingness to forgive, or neglect, they may start to believe divorce is the only answer. Sadly, we live in a culture that thinks the goal of life is happiness at all costs, so divorce has become a very common choice, even among Christians. However, you can be sure the happiness you are seeking will elude you as you face the devastating fallout that comes with a divorce.\n\nOver the course of our years in youth work, my husband and I observed again and again the stress that raising a teen can have upon a marriage (which helped give us wisdom for when we raised our own teens). Some of the parents we knew chose to abandon their marriage vows when the times got rough\u2014only to find themselves facing a whole new set of problems that come with raising teenagers in a broken home.\n\nThe children's pastor of our church told me, \"In almost 20 years of working with kids, I have observed that the most harmful decision a parent can make for their child is to get a divorce.\" (Please understand that this statement does not hold true if there is abuse in the home.)\n\nI have heard women say, \"Our kids will be happier if they are not exposed to our constant fighting.\" Sadly, after the divorce, I have heard these same women regretfully admit how deeply their children were wounded by the breakup. Here are some heartbreaking realities that children of divorce will likely face:\n\n\u2022 Mom and Dad are less focused on their children as they work to establish their new single life. Whether the parents are focused on career, dating, or dealing with their own hurt after the divorce, kids inevitably suffer the consequences.\n\n\u2022 One or both of the parents remarry, which introduces stepchildren or siblings from the new marriage into the family. When this happens, your kids will struggle with feeling overlooked or less valued by their biological parents. Then there is the all-too-common threat of kids being sexually abused by a stepparent or step-sibling.\n\n\u2022 Children who grow up in broken homes deal with deep-seated insecurity issues that often lead to them repeating the cycle of divorce in their own marriages.\n\nOver the many years I have mentored women, I've learned that one major contributor to a woman's distrust of her husband's loyalty is her own parents' divorce. So don't deceive yourself into believing your broken marriage won't have any effect on your children's marriages.\n\nWhen my parents divorced after 30 years of marriage, I was well into my twenties\u2014and happily married with two children of my own. Even though I was an adult, their divorce shook my security in ways I would never have dreamed. Without a doubt, my parents' divorce is one of the most grievous experiences I have ever endured\n\nTill Death Do Us Part\n\nCan you think of an older couple you know who has stuck it out through the bad times? A couple you would like to emulate? My husband's parents, Bill and Eleanore, were just such a couple. My mother-in-law was deeply in love with \"Willie,\" as she called him. And I was captivated by their adoration for each other.\n\nAt first glance, you would think they never had any struggles in their marriage. But the reality was that Bill and Eleanore had weathered a number of difficult storms in life. For example, Bill was deployed to Korea not long after their marriage. While he was away, Eleanore suffered alone through a tragic miscarriage. In the first five years of their marriage, the couple silently grieved over their inability to conceive. So you can imagine their relief\u2014and elation\u2014when Steve was born. And then three years later, God blessed them with another son, Daniel.\n\nWhen Steve and I were dating, he used to tell me his parents never fought. I didn't believe him. I would say, \"Every married couple fights. Your parents are just hiding it from you and your brother.\"\n\nBut through the years I came to discover that Steve's perception of his parents' relationship was spot-on. The two genuinely adored one another. When life had been hard, rather than looking for a \"better life\" with someone else, they pressed into their relationship with Christ\u2014and ultimately into one another.\n\nBill and Eleanore's devotion for each other shone the brightest when Eleanore was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. First she forgot how to play the piano. Playing music for her church had been her great delight. You can imagine her sorrow when she couldn't remember how to play her favorite hymns. Bill grieved quietly for his bride.\n\nFor a decade, Bill devoted himself to Eleanore's care. Many nights I would hear him sobbing on the front porch as my husband held his dad in his arms. After a number of years the stress of taking care of Eleanore was taking a toll on Bill's health, so we suggested he put her in an assisted-care facility. To which Bill replied, \"She is my sweetheart. I would never dream of leaving her care to someone else.\"\n\nTalk about love. My kids and I were privy to watching true love lived out through Bill and Eleanore. Even when \"Ellie\" (as Bill called her) didn't remember who Bill was, he continued to take care of her. He even went so far as to sell their home, quit his job, and move into a house on our ranch so he could care for his love full-time.\n\nThe love demonstrated by my in-laws has left a lasting impression upon me, their children, and grandchildren. Jesus said, \"Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one's life for his friends\" (John 15:13). Steve's father certainly personified this kind of selfless love until the day his beloved Eleanore passed on into eternity.\n\nHave you ever considered the story you are writing with your life? This generation is desperate for love stories like those in this chapter. Won't you join the ranks of Vi and Curt, who waltzed in each other's arms until Curt's final breath, and Bill and Eleanore, whose undying love withstood a failing mind?\n\nWhen you learn that true joy and satisfaction is not found in a perfect marriage with a perfect person, but rather comes from your relationship with Christ, you will learn the secret to a happy marriage. I pray you will apply the biblical principles laid out in this book so you can build a no-regrets marriage. And through your example, may your children and grandchildren learn the secret to a happy marriage.\n\nFROM A HUSBAND'S PERSPECTIVE\n\n######\n\nA Word from Steve\n\nAfter reading about my parents, I had a hard time writing this conclusion to Rhonda's chapter. Remembering how much my mom and dad loved one another brings about emotions that are strangely sad, yet joyful. Growing up under my parents' example, I learned what God intended for unconditional love between a husband and wife to look like. Because my parents did not attempt to find their identity, acceptance, or value in each other, but rather in their relationship with Christ, they learned how to love one another selflessly. Even when my mom didn't remember who my dad was because of her Alzheimer's, my father continued to love and serve her\u2014all the while grieving the loss of who she had once been.\n\nFor you as a believer, finding your identity, acceptance, or value in your spouse\u2014or any other earthly relationship\u2014is always a dangerous path to trod. You will certainly be disappointed if you attempt to establish your worth based on your husband's view of you. Because at some point your husband will let you down, and your perceived security will be shattered. It is in this place of disappointment that a woman may be tempted to look outside of her marriage relationship to another man to find her worth.\n\nGalatians 2:20 says, \"I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.\" As much as Rhonda loves, accepts, and affirms me, she can never do for me all that Christ has done. And the same is true for you and your spouse.\n\nInstead of looking to your husband to make you feel treasured, make it your goal to die to yourself daily. And live by faith in the Son of God, who loved you so much He gave His life so that you could be made alive in Christ. Learn to remind yourself daily, through Scripture, just how precious you are to God. When you do, you will let your husband off the hook for being the source of your self-worth, and guard yourself from the temptation to look elsewhere for happiness.\n\nMake no mistake\u2014I am not saying you shouldn't want your husband to say and do things that make you feel loved. First Peter 3:7 tells us Christian men to live with our wives according to understanding. That means God expects husbands to try to meet their wives' emotional needs. But know that we men often need help with understanding what you need from us. If your husband is to try to learn what actions he can take to affirm his love for you, he will need you to coach him. Because, left to ourselves, more often than not we guys will get it wrong. And trying to figure out what our wives need at any given moment can be a rather intimidating task for all men. So if you find your husband not doing enough to make you happy, don't ever believe the lie that another man would understand your needs better\u2014because it's just not true.\n\nIn a marriage, both the husband and the wife bear the responsibility when they wrongly expect to find their worth in the way their spouse treats them. Accepting the fact that the ultimate goal of your life is to bring glory and honor to God is the first step you can take toward building a marriage that stands the tests of time.\n\n######\n\nTHINKING IT THROUGH\n\n######\n\n1. Which couple's story had the greatest impact on you, and why? What inspired or challenged you most? Then write down what type of story you would like your children and grandchildren to one day tell about your marriage. What is one major adjustment you can make in your marriage to help write that story?\n\n2. If your heart is broken over a difficult marriage, what encouragement can you draw from Psalm 34:18 and James 4:8?\n\n######\n\nLIVING IT OUT\n\n######\n\n1. If you have developed a habit of being unkind, realize that God can help you change. James 4:2 says, \"You do not have because you do not ask.\" So begin by seeking help from the Lord. Write out a prayer asking God to help you be kind to your husband.\n\n2. In a notebook, write out the eight principles we can learn from happily married couples found in this chapter. Next to each insight, make a note of how you will apply what you have learned to your own marriage. To help you build a no-regrets marriage, keep this list where you can refer to it often.\n\nVisit NoRegretsWoman.com to watch Steve and Rhonda's video link and\/or listen to their suggested audio link.\n\nThe Waltz\n\n\"Will you come and dance with me?\" he asked me oh so tenderly,\n\n\"And waltz with me around the floor like no two ever danced before?\"\n\nI smiled at him; my heart skipped a beat and before I realized it, I was on my feet.\n\nAccepting his invitation seemed so right\u2014I was willing to dance all night.\n\nHe looked to the Maestro and said, \"Conductor, if you please.\"\n\nAnd at his direction, the orchestra played with the greatest of ease\n\nThe most beautiful waltz I'd ever heard\n\nAnd we danced and danced without saying a word.\n\nWe both knew when the music began that we were a part of a much larger plan,\n\nAnd this waltz that we started just minutes ago was the first of a lifetime of dances\n\nTo show that we were becoming partners for life;\n\nNot just on the dance floor, but as husband and wife.\n\nI followed his lead as the music played on and we moved 'cross the floor in complete unison.\n\nWhat freedom I felt with his hand in mine, keeping in step, stepping in time.\n\nThe future was bright for two people that night who waltzed as though dancing on air.\n\nLife was just grand while holding his hand and gone were all worries and cares.\n\nAs the music played on and the clocked ticked away, nighttime approached at the close of the day\n\nAnd the music took on a different mood; and we found ourselves with a new attitude.\n\nWe were tired, without a doubt, and found that even good things wear you out!\n\nBut when one would faint, the other was strong and together we faced each new song.\n\nThere were times, I'll admit when I wanted to quit, but how could I leave him alone?\n\nWe'd partnered for life and I was his wife, \"flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone.\"\n\nHe was my \"head\" and I, his \"helpmate,\" we've waltzed now for so many years.\n\nI've laughed when he laughed and cried when he cried, shedding innumerable tears.\n\nNow we've become one and though the dancing is done, we still make quite a smart pair.\n\nI'll never regret that day when we met and he asked me to spin 'round the floor.\n\nSometimes it seemed slow, the music you know, and other times it was so very fast.\n\nBut together we stayed whatever was played and looking back, I thank God for the past.\n\nOne, two, three\u2014one, two, three\u2014it's the rhythm of the waltz you see;\n\nOne Conductor, plus two partners, make a unit of three.\n\nThe Conductor selected the tunes and tempo for each melody.\n\nAnd side by side, we simply complied with the music He played faithfully.\n\n\u2014Vi Estel 2014\n\nHe Would Love Me More if I Were Prettier\n\nThe Secret to Keeping His Attention\n\n######\n\nGeorge M\u00fcller is well remembered as a man who rescued thousands of helpless orphaned children from the cruel streets of England. In his famous orphan houses in Bristol, he helped provide for their basic needs and gave them an education as well.\n\nAs a young man, George met the beautiful Ermegarde at a Bible study. He loved the way her curls danced around her face when she giggled. When George was convinced God was calling him to be a missionary, he shared his dream with Ermegarde\u2014whom he intended to marry. Ermegarde turned up her nose and said, \" 'I could never be a missionary. Missionaries are poor...Be a lawyer, or a doctor, and leave being a missionary for other people who don't have anything better to do!' With that she stood up and stomped out of the room.\"\n\nAfter agonizing over this for several weeks, George knew he had to end his relationship with Ermegarde. Only then would he be free to follow the Lord's leading.\n\nLater, George met Mary Groves, who was not at all like Ermegarde\u2014either in external beauty or inner attitudes. As one biography tells it:\n\nThe relationship blossomed, and George found himself in love with Mary. Such a feeling surprised him for more than one reason. First, Mary was eight years older than he was. And second, he had not been looking for or even considering a wife. As far as he was concerned, a wife would slow him down. What if God called him to go someplace strange or remote? Could he expect a wife to follow him? And would he feel as though marriage made him a prisoner?\n\nAlthough George may not have expected just any wife to follow him, there was something about Mary.\n\nSoon the two were married. Mary set up housekeeping, and a week later, all her belongings were in George's tiny home. When George saw Mary's fancy silver and china, he talked with her and asked her to sell all her treasures for their ministry. Mary responded, \"Do what you think is best...and may God help us both.\"\n\nA while later, when George and Mary were out walking, George said,\n\n\"Mary, thank you for selling the things. Now there is another matter we need to talk about...It's the pew rent. I can't see how we can follow Jesus' command to treat all men equally if we give rich people the best pews.\"\n\nMary said, \"But George, that's our only income...\"\n\nGeorge said, \"I know it's hard, but I think it is the right thing to do.\"\n\nMary said, \"Do what you think is best, George. I can trust God, just like you do.\"\n\nGeorge stopped and hugged his wife. Tears spilled down his cheeks. Mary had been right\u2014marriage had not become a prison for him. Instead, it had given him a partner in the faith.\n\nTogether, George and Mary chose to trust God fully to meet their needs, and to give all else to ministry. It's reported that over the course of his life, nearly 1.5 million pounds passed through George's hands to provide food, shelter, and clothing for the multitudes of orphaned children in his care. He died with very little money to his name because he gave it all to ministry.\n\nWhat's more, George and Mary determined to never ask any person for money to support their orphanages. They simply prayed with faith, and watched God provide for their every need\u2014sometimes at the very last possible moment. It is for this reason that George Muller is considered to be a man of incredible faith.\n\nWhen Mary M\u00fcller died, George preached a short message at her funeral and quoted Psalm 119:68 (KJV): \"Thou art good, and doest good.\" The funeral service was one of the largest Bristol had ever seen. Thousands of letters poured in from orphans whom Mary had nurtured as children.\n\nGeorge was comforted by the letters, but he missed Mary greatly. Though she may not have been pretty by the world's standards, George knew his wife was one of the most beautiful women this world had ever known. In her, he had found a good thing.\n\nHe Who Finds a Wife Finds a Good Thing\n\nAre you a good thing? When your husband thinks about you, does a smile come across his lips? Not because of your outward appearance, but because of your inner beauty\u2014\"the hidden person of the heart, with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in the sight of God\" (1 Peter 3:4)?\n\nThe world says a man has done well if his wife is lovely to look at. But the Bible says, \"Charm is deceitful and beauty is passing, but a woman who fears the LORD, she shall be praised\" (Proverbs 31:30).\n\nProverbs 18:22 says, \"He who finds a wife finds a good thing, and obtains favor from the LORD.\" George M\u00fcller certainly found a good thing in his beloved Mary. Fortunately, when faced with the opportunity to marry a beautiful woman with little concern for God's plans, M\u00fcller decided to end the relationship. How differently George M\u00fcller's legacy might have been had he married Ermegarde. Maybe he would have been a successful doctor or lawyer, but he never would have known the life God had intended for him.\n\nMary M\u00fcller's outer appearance did not keep her husband from adoring her. Her glorious inner beauty shone on her face\u2014and in her life. This type of beauty shines more brightly over the passing years, and it is one that graciously spills over onto those around her.\n\nBeauty for God's Purpose\n\nIn the Bible, we read of women whom God worked through on account of their beauty. Queen Esther is a perfect example. The Bible says Esther was fair and beautiful (Esther 2:7). God had a purpose in her beauty, and it wasn't because He favored her. No, the Lord used Esther's looks to attract the attention of the king of Persia, who chose Esther to become his queen. This put her in the perfect position to be God's tool to help spare the people of Israel from annihilation.\n\nWhether you are pretty in the world's estimation or you would consider yourself average, don't believe the myth My husband would love me more if I were prettier. The truth is, a woman holds her husband's attention captive because of her inner loveliness.\n\nSo Is It Wrong to Want Your Husband to Think You Are Beautiful?\n\nAlmost every married woman wants her husband to tell her she's pretty. The trouble begins when you believe you will feel more valued if your husband makes you feel beautiful.\n\nBut when you start to think external beauty is what gives you value, you fail to understand your worth to your Creator. And when this happens, you become vulnerable to looking for affirmation on a human level.\n\nAnytime Christians seek from another person what only God can give, they make the person an idol. In a marriage relationship, if you look to your husband to satisfy your desire to be treasured, he will ultimately let you down. Because God never intended for your spouse to fill the void only He can fill.\n\nGod created you to find your worth and purpose in your relationship with Him alone. Listen to how much God treasures you: \"In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins\" (1 John 4:10). And, \"See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God; and such we are\" (1 John 3:1 NASB).\n\nA wise woman will learn to find her worth in her standing with Christ so she can delight in her husband's compliments from a pure heart. When the Lord is the delight of your heart, the kind words you receive from your husband will only add to your joy.\n\nSo is it wrong to want your husband to think you are beautiful? I don't think so. A biblical example of a husband captivated by his wife's beauty can be found in the Song of Solomon, where King Solomon refers to his beloved as \"fairest among women.\"\n\nWhile it is nice to receive such affirmation from your man, just make sure you are finding your worth in your vertical relationship with God, and not the horizontal relationship with your husband. And if it turns out you are married to a man who is not complimentary like King Solomon, by God's grace you can know your worth in Christ, and you can learn to cover your husband's shortcomings with God's love. First Peter 4:8 (NASB) says, \"Above all, keep fervent in your love for one another, because love covers a multitude of sins.\"\n\nWhat if He Never Tells Me I'm Pretty?\n\nWhat should you do if your husband constantly forgets to compliment you? I have heard women tell their husbands things like, \"Karen's husband is so sweet. He always tells her she's pretty.\" In saying this, wives expect their husbands to hear, \"I wish you would compliment me like Karen's husband compliments her.\"\n\nInstead, what their husbands hear is this: \"Wow, Karen's husband is a great guy. Why can't you be more like him?\"\n\nWhen your husband hears you comparing him to another man, he is not likely to try to become more like the man you have held up as an example. Rather, he is more likely to feel disrespected by you and shut down.\n\nIf you really want to help your husband understand how he can minister to you in this area, tell him. Prayerfully consider your words and your motivation before you have a heart-to-heart with him. Ask God for wisdom. James 1:5 says anyone who lacks wisdom can ask of God, who gives it liberally and generously. Have you ever asked God to give you His wisdom before you attempt to have sensitive or difficult conversations with your husband? Try it. Asking for God's wisdom will help you speak in a God-centered way rather than a self-centered one.\n\nAfter you talk to your husband, pray for God to help him understand your need. Let God do a work in his heart. Pray often, and don't expect your husband to change overnight. Be willing to remind him or even playfully nudge him to compliment you, if necessary.\n\nFirst Corinthians chapter 13 is called the \"Love Chapter\" of the Bible. The passage is filled with a wonderful list of the characteristics of genuine love. In verse 7 we read that love \"believes all things.\" That is, the most genuine kind of love believes the best about the other person.\n\nSo I ask you: Is your husband a good-willed man? Is it possible he is not intentionally overlooking opportunities to affirm your beauty? Are there things you forget to do for him? When that happens, do you hope he will believe the best about you? Can you apply this same kind of mercy to your husband if he neglects or forgets to compliment you?\n\nDon't Set Yourself Up for Disappointment\n\nIn her book What I Wish My Mother Had Told Me About Men, my friend Julie Gorman has this to say:\n\nDoesn't it feel good when a man affirms you? Of course! We all crave these things\u2014and that's what makes us vulnerable. As we search for significance and validation, God's word strongly commands, \"Do not put your trust in princes, in mortal men who cannot save\" (Psalm 146:3).\n\nEmbracing the fallacy that a man will validate our worth positions us for heartache and disappointment.\n\nWhy Do We Need to Hear We Are Beautiful?\n\nHave you ever considered what life must have been like for Adam and Eve before they fell into sin? Talk about a honeymoon! They would have found themselves in the most romantic resort, complete with an all-inclusive food menu. They had the whole garden to themselves, and Adam had eyes only for Eve.\n\nBefore the fall, Adam and Eve's unity with one another\u2014and their Creator\u2014would have been absolute paradise. Because they lived in joyful union with God, His character would have been reflected in all areas of their lives. Their love for one another would have been completely selfless and God-centered. They would have loved perfectly because they were a perfect reflection of the Creator's love.\n\nBut once sin entered into the world, not only was Adam and Eve's fellowship with God broken, but for the first time, their total unity with one another was violated as well. What a heartbreak this must have been!\n\nAfter they fell into sin, God questioned Adam about what he had done, and he blamed his wife. Oh wow! In that moment, Eve would have realized the honeymoon was definitely over. Can you imagine how hurt Eve must have been?\n\nFrom that day on, the heart of mankind became desperately sick and wicked. In her book Idols of the Heart, Elyse Fitzpatrick gives this insight:\n\nOur hearts, the fount from which all sin flows (Matthew 12:34), have ceased to be God-centered and have become self-centered. Rather than living to reflect God for His glory, man lives for his own glory, seeking happiness in his own reflection...Rather than desiring to enjoy the beauty and order of creation for God's glory, they deify outward appearances. They long for others to worship their beauty and creativity. They make a god of their home, clothing, car or anything that reflects their glory, beauty, or worth.\n\nElyse addresses a very real tendency we have to be self-focused rather than God-focused. When any desire becomes so important we would sin to get it, we can know that desire has become an idol.\n\nSo What Should I Do?\n\nBy now you may be asking, \"How can I balance being God-centered with wanting my husband to think I am pretty? And how can I discern if my desire is sinful?\"\n\nAsk yourself this question: If my husband does not make me feel beautiful, do I resent him? Resenting your husband is a sin. If his making you feel pretty is so important to you that you will sin to get it, then you can know you are idolizing your desire.\n\nThrough Bible study, the Holy Spirit can help you discern your motives. You will never see yourself more clearly than through the lens of Scripture. So you must be in the Word on a daily basis, asking God to help you become God-centered rather than self-centered. In this way you can discern your sin and confess it. As one Christian writer observed, \"It is hypocritical to pray for victory over our sins yet be careless in our intake of the Word of God.\"\n\nMaybe I Shouldn't Try So Hard\n\nNow, before you are tempted to think trying to be pretty for your husband is somehow \"unspiritual,\" I want to give you some insight into how a husband appreciates a wife who cares about how she looks.\n\nIn her book For Women Only, Shanti Feldhahn talks about an anonymous survey she conducted with more than one thousand men. Here's what men said about their wives making an effort to look pretty:\n\nIn a way this issue for men is like the romance issue for us. Maybe it shouldn't matter whether our husbands ever put one jot of effort into romancing us. But it does. We love him regardless, but it doesn't salve the empty wistfulness we feel or the pain we may suffer wondering why on earth our man doesn't see that this is so important to us.\n\nGuys feel the same way on the issue of our appearance\u2014or at least our effort. It is critical that we acknowledge that this male desire is both real and legitimate.\n\n[Another man said] \"I want to be proud of my wife. Every man has this innate competition with other men, and our wives are a part of that. Every man wants other men to think that he did well.\"\n\nNow hold on, before you translate the comments from those men to mean, \"We want you all to be skinny and look great in a bikini,\" listen to what a majority of men said:\n\n\"Sometimes I'll meet a man whose wife is overweight\u2014but she takes care of herself. She puts some effort into her appearance. She dresses neatly, or does her makeup and hair. If she is comfortable in her own skin and is confident, you don't notice the extra pounds. I look at that husband and think, He did well.\"\n\nThe Secret to Keeping His Attention\n\nWe all envy the couple who seem captivated by each other. You know who they are. They catch each other's gaze across the room, and give a flirtatious wink. Who is this wife who seems to hold her husband's attention in spite of children, financial difficulties, and those extra pounds she has held onto since the babies came?\n\nDon't you want to be that woman? What is her secret? How has this wife managed to keep her husband's attention, and what can you learn from her?\n\nFirst Timothy 2 encourages godly women to focus less on adorning themselves externally and instead, to live in a manner that professes godliness. God's secret to capturing your husband's affection for a lifetime is for you to be devoted to developing your inner beauty.\n\nAn Example of Inner Beauty\n\nA wonderful example of a woman who exuded beauty from within is Ruth. The Bible tells us Ruth lived in Moab. There, she was married to a Jewish man who evidently died at a relatively young age. When Ruth's widowed mother-in-law, Naomi, decided to return to her homeland of Israel, the recently widowed Ruth was determined to go with her. In doing this, Ruth professed her loyalty to the God of Israel and would not be turning back to Moab.\n\nAfter Naomi and Ruth arrived in Israel, they found themselves destitute. Since Naomi was too old to work, Ruth went out daily to glean the leftover grain in the fields. Through God's providence, Ruth ended up gathering grain in a field owned by Boaz, who graciously looked out for her safety and well-being. I especially love when Boaz told Ruth, \"Have I not commanded the young men not to touch you?\"\n\nImagine how frightened Ruth must have been to daily make herself vulnerable by gathering grain in a field where foreign men would likely have not treated her favorably. I get chills when I think about Boaz \"riding in on his horse,\" so to speak, and coming to her rescue. Now that's a knight-in-shining-armor story! So what made this woman from a foreign land so attractive to Boaz?\n\nIn my study Bible I found a list of character qualities that made Ruth not only lovely to look at, but inwardly radiant. I believe she personified the traits found in the excellent wife of Proverbs 31. Let's look at those qualities:\n\nDevoted to Her Family\n\nRuth was devoted to her family. She displayed her devotion to her mother-in-law when Naomi entreated her to return to her people. Ruth's response has become a popular quote for couples to cite in one form or another in their wedding ceremonies:\n\nEntreat me not to leave you, or to turn back from following after you; for wherever you go, I will go; and wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God, my God. Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried. The LORD do so to me, and more also, if anything but death parts you and me.\n\nI am moved to tears when I read about how Ruth pledged lifelong devotion to her mother-in-law. Over the years, Steve and I have taught a six-week premarital course and counseled many engaged couples. The most important aspect of this course is helping couples understand that marriage is a covenant, not a contract.\n\nSteve explains, \"A contract is something that says, 'If you do this for me, I will do this for you.' \" He then goes on to say, \"A marriage covenant is an unconditionally binding promise between you and the Lord. You are not making a covenant with your betrothed, but with the Lord.\"\n\nDo you reflect this kind of devotion to your husband? If Ruth was this committed to her mother-in-law, I can only imagine the loyalty she would have displayed to Boaz when he became her husband. Do you think her devotion would have captured Boaz's attention? I do. And this kind of commitment will certainly capture the affections of your husband as well.\n\nOkay, time-out. Some of you may be saying, \"But you don't understand, Rhonda. I am married to a difficult man. Even if I were to be this committed to him, he wouldn't appreciate it. He's a jerk.\"\n\nScripture tells us of godly women who were married to jerks. For example, there is the story of Abigail and Nabal, which we find in 1 Samuel 25. Verse 3 says of them, \"She was a woman of good understanding and beautiful appearance; but the man was harsh and evil in his doings.\" Nabal, whose name means \"fool,\" acted terribly toward King David, and Abigail was quick to make amends for what her husband had done.\n\nAnd before the king of Persia took Esther as his queen, he had cruelly humiliated and banished his previous wife for simply not \"presenting herself\" at a party for all his drunken friends to ogle at (Esther 1:10-12,19).\n\nEsther's grace-filled life left a lasting legacy because her focus was not on the man to whom she was married. Rather, she was devoted to living in obedience to God's plan for her life. If you are married to an unreasonable man, have you considered that God may want to accomplish great feats through you as you keep your sights on Him and determine to grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord?\n\nDelighted in Her Work\n\nThe next character quality that made Ruth beautiful is that she delighted in her work. Ruth did not shrink back when the only way she would be able to provide for herself and her mother-in-law was to tie up her skirts and gather grain in the fields. The excellent wife in Proverbs 31 can be found preparing meals, making investments, sewing clothes, and generally doing all those things that we say we want to do but never actually get around to accomplishing. Proverbs 31:27 says the virtuous woman's husband praises her because \"she watches over the ways of her household, and does not eat the bread of idleness.\"\n\nHow well do you delight in serving your husband\u2014and your family? Are you joyful when you clean the house, pick up the dry-cleaning, or make a meal? Or do you grumble when you have to clean\u2014as though it is some big surprise to you the house got dirty again? Are you constantly distracted by social media so you neglect your daily tasks? Can your husband and children tell that they are truly the priorities of your life, and that you take joy in caring for them?\n\nDependent upon God\n\nThe next shining quality Boaz recognized in Ruth was her dependence on God. Boaz observed it was \"the LORD God of Israel, under whose wings [Ruth had] come for refuge\" (Ruth 2:12). One great source of security for a godly man is to know his wife is seeking the Lord as she goes about her day. Whether you are working outside the home or managing your household, if your husband knows you are living in full dependence upon God, he can rest assured your choices will be honoring to the Lord. With that assurance, your husband's heart can safely trust you, as did the man married to the Proverbs 31 woman. And when a husband can trust in his wife, adoration is a natural response.\n\nC.H. Spurgeon's father, John, was an extremely busy man. He was often away from home, leaving the task of bringing up the family largely to his wife, Eliza.\n\nOne Sunday while on his way to church, John Spurgeon turned the carriage around and returned home out of concern for the spiritual well-being of his children. When he entered the house he heard the sound of his wife in earnest prayer. C.H. Spurgeon said, \"My father felt that he might safely go about his Master's business while his dear wife was caring so well for the spiritual interests of the children.\"\n\nWould your husband consider you a woman who depends upon God? If he were to come home in the middle of the day, like Spurgeon's father did, would he find you praying for your children, or pulling your hair out?\n\nLearning to daily read and apply truth from the Bible and pray throughout your day will help you develop a habit of depending on God. And when you do this...\n\n\u2022 Your husband can rest in your godly demeanor.\n\n\u2022 Your kids will find security in knowing their mommy regularly seeks wisdom from the Lord.\n\n\u2022 Your inner beauty will flourish, and your husband will be attracted to your gentle and quiet spirit, which is precious in God's sight (1 Peter 3:4).\n\nDedicated to Godly Speech\n\nThe next important quality that will make you the apple of your husband's eye is being dedicated to godly speech. We are told of the Proverbs 31 woman, \"She opens her mouth with wisdom, and on her tongue is the law of kindness\" (verse 26).\n\nDo you think before you talk? Or in the heat of the moment, do you just blurt out whatever comes to mind? There is nothing less attractive to a man than a woman with an unbridled tongue, a woman who spouts condescending remarks or venomous slurs.\n\nWhat are some ways you can be sure you are dedicating yourself to godly speech?\n\nDetermine to never make your husband feel inadequate or stupid in public or private. When he makes a mistake, or shares his thoughts, concerns, or ideas with you, be the one person he can count on to be supportive. When he talks about his ideas, don't make him feel inferior. If you do, he will likely stop sharing his dreams or confiding in you. You don't want that, do you?\n\nSpeak kind words. Ephesians 4:32 says, \"Be kind one to another.\" Does your husband cringe when he comes home from work because he wonders whether you are going to meet him with kindness or harshness? Decide today you will only speak kindness to him when he arrives home. If you do, he will likely come to think you are the most beautiful woman on earth. And he will certainly look forward to coming home to see you.\n\nAlways speak well of your husband. When your husband is not around, can he trust that what you say about him will be honorable? Do you affirm him in public and speak highly of his accomplishments, or does he worry you might embarrass him by belittling him or revealing one of his secrets?\n\nYour husband wants\u2014in fact, he needs\u2014you to be proud of him, and to always have his back. Proverbs 31:12 says an excellent wife \"does [her husband] good and not evil all the days of her life.\"\n\nIf you make a constant effort to be your husband's friend and confidant, he will view your worth as being \"far above rubies\" (Proverbs 31:10) because he will know he can trust you. And a man who treasures his wife will treat her like a treasure.\n\nPractical Ways to Keep His Attention\n\nAlong with developing your inner beauty, there are many ways to help your husband have eyes only for you. Here are a few ideas, and I'm sure you can think of more:\n\n1. Flirt with him. Catch his eye across a crowded room and give him a flirtatious wink. Whisper in his ear at the dinner table how you plan to enjoy his company later\u2014after the kids are put to bed.\n\n2. Present yourself so he will be proud of you. Dress to please him (Proverbs 31:22).\n\n3. Look joyfully toward the future. Rejoice in the times to come (Proverbs 31:25).\n\n4. Forgive him. And then don't keep a record of his wrongs. In the way you would hope your husband forgets about your past offenses, offer him the same grace.\n\n5. Have sex with your husband. Do you realize you are God's gift to him to satisfy his God-given sexual desires? We will discuss this further in chapter 7. But for now\u2014trust me\u2014men whose wives pursue them sexually know they are blessed. Your husband likely knows other men who complain about how disinterested in sex their wives are. If your man is one of the few married men whose wife not only enjoys sex with him, but actually pursues him, not only will you keep his attention, but he will slay dragons for you!\n\nFROM A HUSBAND'S PERSPECTIVE\n\n######\n\nA Word from Steve\n\nI have raised dogs all of my life. When I was a young man, German shepherds captured my attention. But after a less-than-favorable experience with one of my shepherds, I moved on to golden retrievers. Most retrievers are loyal, friendly, and loving dogs\u2014without the killer instincts of a German shepherd. And as puppies, golden retrievers are generally happy-go-lucky and clueless.\n\nMany of us men may try to come off like the German Shepherd, but truth be known, when it comes to knowing how to make our wives feel beautiful or special, many of us are more like clueless puppies.\n\nThrough the years, Rhonda has helped me understand how much she needs me to tell her she looks attractive. For me\u2014and many men I have talked to\u2014it is easy to develop an attitude that says, \"I told you you were pretty when I met you. If I change my mind, I'll let you know.\" But with my wife's sometimes not-so-gentle prompting, it didn't take me long to figure out \"That ain't how it's done!\"\n\nMy beloved has had to remind me numerous times over the years how much she values my words of affirmation. Even after more than 30 years of marriage, she still needs to know I find her attractive. Maybe you can relate?\n\nI'll let you in on a little secret: For some reason I am a little reticent to use the word pretty (a confession I have not even shared with Rhonda\u2014until now because she is editing this section for me\u2014thanks, Babe!). My hesitation to use that word probably comes from some regressed memory that would take a lot of therapy to get through. However, suffice it to say, pretty just doesn't feel like a manly word for me to use. I usually say something like, \"Baby, you look hot!\" But I digress.\n\nThe point is, don't feel hurt if you have to patiently remind your husband of your emotional need to hear him tell you you're attractive to him. We men really want to meet the needs of our wives, but sometimes we feel awkward, or simply forget how much you value our affirmation. If your hubby needs a little prodding, do it patiently and lovingly. Remind him of how much you want to be pretty for him, but you also need to hear from him when you put forth the effort. (If your husband is one who frequently tells you you're beautiful without being reminded, count your blessings and tell him you appreciate his sensitivity.)\n\nWhile we are on this subject, the next time you ask your husband's opinion about how you look in the outfit you are wearing, don't back him into a corner asking him questions like, \"Does my rear look big in these pants?\" Seriously\u2014how is a man supposed to answer that question? And, if you ask your man to choose between outfit A or outfit B, do him a favor and wear the one he chooses. If you're not willing to do so, you would be wise to not ask his opinion in the first place. (How would you feel if your husband gave you two options, and then promptly dismissed your choice?)\n\nHere is one more insight for you: When Rhonda and I are running late, the last thing I want to tell her is, \"Oh yes, Babe, the outfit you had on before looked way better on you. You go ahead and change. I'll just wait in the car watching the clock to calculate how fast I am going to have to drive to make it to the event on time.\" Get my point?\n\nAnd remember, rather than focus on developing external beauty that will not stand the test of time, devote yourself to cultivating the beauty that comes from within the heart. And, as Rhonda pointed out, the secret to capturing your husband's attention for a lifetime is in learning to find your worth in your relationship with Christ. When you spend your life developing your inner beauty and staying focused on the Lord, your husband's affection for you will grow as he observes the lovely woman of God you are becoming. The more consistently you pursue Christ, the more beautiful you will become to your husband, to others, and most importantly, to Christ.\n\n######\n\nTHINKING IT THROUGH\n\n######\n\n1. Read 1 Timothy 2:9-10 and list five positive qualities that will help you develop your inner beauty. What practical steps will you take to develop these qualities?\n\n2. Read through Proverbs 31. From this passage, and in light of what you learned in this chapter, name two steps you will take to become a woman in whom your husband can trust.\n\n######\n\nLIVING IT OUT\n\n######\n\n1. What have you learned about where you should find your value? How can finding your worth in Christ help your marriage?\n\n2. Implement at least two of the \"The Secret to Keeping His Attention\" this week. Observe how your husband responds to your actions.\n\nVisit NoRegretsWoman.com to watch Steve and Rhonda's video link and\/or listen to their suggested audio link.\n\nAll He Wants Is Sex\n\nWhen You Long for Romance\n\n######\n\nAs single adults, Tim and Karen met at church. Karen says, \"From the moment he walked in the door, Tim was the guy every single woman had their eye on.\"\n\nWith a twinkle in her eye, Karen told me how delighted she was the first time Tim's gaze met hers across the crowded sanctuary. And with that gaze, Tim had become the object of her affection.\n\nKaren said, \"Since Tim was a bit awkward in his pursuit, I helped him out by finding reasons to talk to or sit by him at church\u2014you know, to encourage him to pursue me.\"\n\nKaren smiled as she said, \"The day I watched Tim casually saunter across the room to take the seat next to me was the day all the single women knew, This guy's off the market.\"\n\nWhile they were dating, Karen remembers how difficult it had been for them to keep their hands off of each other. To keep their commitment to remain sexually pure until they were married, Tim and Karen determined not to spend time alone. This meant long talks at the coffee shop, walking hand-in-hand at the park, and lots of fun activities.\n\nKaren recalls, \"I seriously couldn't wait to give myself to Tim in our marriage bed. And since I was so sexually motivated before marriage, I was convinced I would enjoy sex with my husband.\"\n\nThe honeymoon did not disappoint Tim or Karen, and they thoroughly enjoyed sex for their first two years of marriage. But when Karen took on a job that required her to stand on her feet all day, and Tim's schedule brought him home late in the evening, their sex life took a backseat to everything else.\n\nKaren remembers thinking, I know we should have sex more often, but I'm just so tired. And Tim doesn't seem to mind\u2014he never says anything anyway.\n\nAs time passed, Tim and Karen found themselves becoming less and less intimate\u2014both in the bedroom and in the way they related to one another. Every night Tim came home and plopped down in front of the television, while Karen busied herself with social media.\n\nWhat Tim and Karen did not discuss was how unfulfilled and lonely they were feeling in their marriage. Whenever Tim approached Karen for sex, he felt as though she accommodated out of obligation, not because she wanted him sexually. And since Tim never seemed to pursue her romantically except when he wanted sex, Karen secretly resented Tim's advances.\n\nDoes Tim and Karen's story sound familiar? I wish I could say it's not the norm for married Christian couples, but sadly, this scenario is more common than you might think. Can you identify with Karen's attitude toward sex?\n\nWhen Steve and I were first married, sex was pretty amazing! The Christian books we had read to prepare us for the marriage bed really paid off. Learning one another's bodies was a delightful adventure we both enjoyed.\n\nAfter a couple of years of marriage, I became pregnant with our first child. I will never forget what a woman at work told me\u2014a woman whom I didn't know very well. She pulled me aside and said, \"Can I give you some advice? When you have your baby, don't make tending to the baby a priority over having sex with your husband. That's a mistake I made when I was a young mom\u2014a mistake you don't want to make.\"\n\nI remember thinking, How odd that this older woman would reveal to me such an intimate secret from her past. But I tucked her words away in the back of my mind.\n\nThe first time I heard our baby cry from her room while Steve and I were having sex, the older woman's words of advice rang in my ears.\n\nI knew Meredith was safe in her crib. So I made a decision to stay in the game, as it were, and not jump out of bed right that second. We took a moment to finish, then I quickly tended to Meredith. I later learned from my husband how much he appreciated what I had done. My actions told him, \"I value you. You are important to me too.\"\n\nWhat Does Sex Mean to Him?\n\nMost women understand men have a strong physical desire for sex. So why do wives make their husbands feel apologetic for wanting sex? I think one reason is because a women's need for sexual intimacy is emotionally driven\u2014we want to feel loved, desired, and beautiful. But when it seems as though a husband's desire for sex is a mere physical urge, it becomes easy to wrongly assume he is acting selfishly and resent it. But what gets overlooked is the fact that a husband's sense of well-being and confidence is very much wrapped up in the sexual intimacy he enjoys with his wife.\n\nFor example, as a woman, you likely find great fulfillment in your marriage relationship through conversation. So you might expect your husband to find satisfaction in this as well. But the truth is that while men can enjoy talking with their wives, most men do not find the same fulfillment in conversation as women do. Your husband's God-given need to connect with you physically means just as much to him as good communication means to you.\n\nNeither of you are wrong; you are just wired differently. By design, God made you to feel emotionally connected with your husband through conversation, and He made your husband to emotionally engage with you through sex.\n\nThe trouble comes when both husband and wife look past the other person's needs and refuse to give what the other one longs for, in hopes of coercing their spouse to meet their own need. This is always a recipe for disaster.\n\nMake no mistake\u2014refusing to satisfy to your husband's deepest need until he gives you the romance you desire will only serve to erode the loving environment you so desperately long for in your marriage.\n\nWhat do you suppose Jesus would advise wives to do when it comes to ministering to their husband's sexual needs? In Matthew 7:12, Jesus said, \"So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them\" (ESV).\n\nOne key way to reflect God's perfect love to others is to treat them the way you want to be treated. In the same way you want your husband to learn how to meet your emotional need for intimacy and romance, God wants you to be willing to understand his emotional need for sex, and determine to satisfy his need\u2014whether or not he ever meets yours.\n\nThe secret to a happy marriage is to take your eyes off of yourself\u2014and your expectations\u2014and focus on following Christ's example of a humble servant when it comes to loving to your husband. Philippians 2:3-8 says:\n\nLet nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself. Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others. Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.\n\nJust as Jesus humbled Himself to serve God by serving others, when you humbly minister to your husband, even in the marriage bed, you are actually serving the Lord.\n\nSo why are wives so resistant to minister to their husband's need for sex? The most common reason is selfishness, plain and simple. Because of our sin nature, the basic problem all people have is a preoccupation with self. In short, every sin results from this preoccupation. (Yes, I just implied that not having sex with your husband is a sin that stems from selfishness.)\n\nWhen you are selfishly devoted to yourself rather than to God and others\u2014in this case, your husband\u2014you will resist giving of yourself to him selflessly. And without Christ's help, you can never reach a standard of selfless love on your own.\n\nNow, in defense of yourself, you might begin to rattle off a list of all the things I do for that man. I am sure you are a great wife who does many acts of service for her husband. But allow me to let you in on a little secret my husband shared with me years ago. As a rule, most men would forego a picture-perfect house\u2014or other things\u2014for great sex. Is it possible you may need to rethink your priorities?\n\nIf you're feeling a little convicted right now, you may be thinking, How can I become less self-focused? Even trying harder not to be self-focused can cause you to remain self-focused. Hebrews 12:2 says we are to be \"looking unto Jesus\"\u2014that is the only place we should fix our eyes.\n\nLooking back, as a young mother, I remember how my self-focus kept me from ministering to my husband's sexual needs. After a day filled with being climbed upon, nursed on, and touched by my kids, the idea of being touched in bed was something I had trouble wrapping my mind around. Maybe you can relate? But one day this thought occurred to me: At work, Steve is likely using most of the 5000 words an average man speaks in a day, and yet I still expect him to talk to me in the evening. I need to treat him the way I expect to be treated. Even though I have been touched all day, I need to joyfully make myself available to his touch.\n\nInspired by this new revelation, I wanted to become a wife who put Steve's needs above my own. And I discovered that the secret to becoming a selfless wife was found in daily Bible study and prayer. Because time in God's Word transformed me more into the woman God wanted me to be. As a result, my prayers and desires became others-focused rather than all-about-me. I also found that when I forsook time with the Lord, I became less interested in meeting my husband's needs and more focused on my own.\n\nAs you are sanctified by God's truth, repent of your selfishness, and pray for your marriage, the Holy Spirit will enable you to selflessly love your husband. You will want to see your husband's need for sex with Christ's compassion, and even want to fulfill his needs\u2014even if your husband isn't making an effort to meet your needs.\n\nOne Bible teacher says, \"[Selfless love] can only come from the indwelling Holy Spirit, whose first-fruit is love (Gal. 5:22). In Jesus Christ 'the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us' (Rom. 5:5). Only Christ's own Spirit can empower us to love each other as He loves us (John 13:34).\"\n\nHe Just Wants You to Want Him\n\nTo help you gain insight into how much men want to be wanted by their wives, one survey revealed that 74 percent of men said they would not be satisfied sexually if their wives offered all the sex they wanted, but did so reluctantly or simply to accommodate their need.\n\nShaunti Feldhahn, author of For Women Only, shares this insight:\n\nAs much as men want sex, most of them would rather go out and clip the hedges in the freezing rain than make love with a wife who appears to be responding out of duty...If she's just responding because she has to, he's being rejected by his wife...\n\nConsider the painful words of this truly deprived husband:\n\n\"We've been married for a long time. I deeply regret and resent the lack of intimacy of nearly any kind for the duration of our marriage. I feel rejected, ineligible, insignificant, lonely, isolated and abandoned as a result. Not having the interaction I anticipated prior to marriage is like a treasure lost and irretrievable. It causes deep resentment and hurt within me. This in turn fosters anger and feelings of alienation.\"\n\nWhen you mistakenly view your husband's need for sex as some sort of primal urge to be satisfied from time to time, you are missing the true ministry God has given you to affirm your husband's deepest emotional needs through sex.\n\nDid you know that when you pursue your husband sexually, you have a profound influence on him in all areas of his life? Men tend to struggle with feelings of inadequacy and loneliness. When you find your husband sexually desirable, and he feels loved for who he is, then you fill him with a sense of strength, well-being, and confidence.\n\nMen are more confident and alive when they are enjoying a healthy sex life with their wives. \"One husband said, 'What happens in the bedroom really does affect how I feel the next day at the office.' Another wrote, 'Sex is a release of day-to-day pressures...and seems to make everything else better.' \"\n\nWhen your husband says he feels better after you have sex with him, you would be wise to understand he is not simply talking about the physical pleasure he experiences through love making. He may never be able to put into words the effect making love to you has on his emotional well-being. But it really does impact him in a big way. You just watch and see if the results aren't reflected in your husband's confidence and overall satisfaction with life.\n\nBut I Want Romance!\n\nWhen Steve and I were dating, he would drive 30 minutes across town during his lunch break just to drop off a bouquet of flowers. Because he had to get back to work before his lunch hour was over, he only had time to knock on the door, hand me the flowers, give me a kiss, and then jump back in his car.\n\nAs I watched Steve drive away, I would bury my face in the flowers and say, \"Oh, how romantic!\"\n\nAfter we were married, Steve often stopped by the flower shop on his way home from work to bring me lovely bouquets. When I became a stay-at-home mom, Steve continued the romantic practice of bringing me flowers. Only this time I did not say, \"Oh, how romantic!\" Rather, I said, \"Oh, how expensive!\"\n\nI made a big mistake when I said that. When my husband's romantic gesture was met with my practical this doesn't fit our stay-at-home-mom budget, I did not realize how my words discouraged him. He was attempting to keep the romance alive in our marriage by doing the one thing I had told him was romantic since our days of courtship. In one fell swoop, I had made him feel like he had failed in his attempt to be romantic, and made him feel bad we were on a tight budget.\n\nDon't mistakenly assume husbands don't care about making romantic gestures. A 2004 survey showed that 84 percent of men say they do want to be romantic, but most say they just don't know what romance looks like to their wives. So help your husband understand what is romantic to you.\n\nSteve and I had a discussion about romance before I sat down to write this chapter. He explained, \"We men really do want to be romantic, but for most of us this means getting out of our comfort zone. When we are afraid we won't measure up to our wife's expectations, it's tempting to just not try at all.\"\n\nSteve went on, \"I know that giving gifts is romantic, but I always put so much pressure on myself to think of romantic gifts to the point I end up at a loss.\"\n\nI then pointed out to Steve how I found it very romantic when he builds something for me. For example, I recently asked him to make a wardrobe mirror for me. He was not sure he agreed with my request to build the mirror's frame out of the reclaimed barn wood we had on our property, but he complied.\n\nWithin a few days, I had the most amazing wardrobe mirror, framed with shabby-chic barn wood, leaning up against the wall in my bedroom. I loved it! So much so I posted a picture of the mirror on Instagram. (Follow me @RhondaStoppe to see more #StoppeEverAfter posts.) This one post created a great deal of chatter among my Instagram followers about how much they wanted my husband to make a mirror for them as well. To which I replied, \"He just does this for me.\" To me that's romance!\n\nSo what says romance to you? You cannot very well expect your husband to know if you're not even sure of the answer yourself. So take some time to consider some of your husband's romantic gestures in the past. And then tell him how you found those actions romantic. For example, when our children were young, I made sure Steve knew the most romantic thing he could do for me was to clean up the dinner dishes and get the kids bathed and into bed\u2014while I took a hot bath. This romantic act was most certainly met with a grateful wife and some sweet lovemaking that evening.\n\nWhen your husband makes an effort to be romantic, help him know when he is on the right track. Remember, he is likely putting himself into a situation where he feels inadequate. This means your husband might think he is risking humiliation if he gets it wrong. He may even believe he will lose your respect if his attempt at romance fails. So if he ruins the dinner he was making, or\u2014as in my case\u2014he pays too much for flowers you can't afford, don't humiliate him.\n\nOne man said, \"If I make the effort to be romantic and she laughs at me, you can be sure I won't put myself in that vulnerable position again for a very long time.\"\n\nHow Does Your Husband Define Romance?\n\nHopefully this chapter is helping you understand that when your husband desires sex, he is not simply looking for a physical release. He likely longs for romance as well. So if most men truly are closet romantics, let's look at what speaks romance to your man.\n\nRemember when you were dating? How did you spend your time together as a couple? Did your husband sit across from you reading poetry or singing songs he wrote just for you as he gazed into your eyes? Probably not. (Or maybe he did, if you're married to an artsy kind of guy.) At any rate, I imagine your courtship hours were spent talking and playing together as a couple.\n\nIf you are like most women, the talking and listening you experienced from your husband-to-be filled your romance tank. By contrast, the times of playing together would likely have ranked number one on your husband's romance chart.\n\nWhich brings me to the first activity most men find romantic:\n\nPlay with your husband. What does he like to do? What activities did you enjoy doing together when you were dating? Did you hike, play golf, or go fishing? If joining your husband in such activities filled up your husband's romance tank then, most likely it will do the same today. (As long as you go along to enjoy his company, and not invade his solace with nagging or complaints about everyday-life issues he may be trying to escape through his playtime.)\n\nThe Day I Became a Biker Chick\n\nThe year our oldest daughter, Meredith, turned 18, my husband came home with a motorcycle. He wanted me to ride on the back with him while leaving our two younger kids at home with Meredith. Up to this point, I had been hesitant to ride with Steve. I thought, Who will take care of our kids if something happens to us?\n\nBut now that Meredith was 18, Steve thought it was a great time to buy a motorcycle. His logic was, \"If something happens to us, Meredith can take care of the kids.\"\n\nSeriously, Steve thought this made perfect sense. So I had a choice to make: I could succumb to my fear, or I could jump on the back of that bike, wrap my arms around my man, and ride off into the sunset.\n\nI chose the latter.\n\nAnd over the past decade, what adventures we have had on our motorcycle! Recently we rode the bike from Northern California to Seattle and back\u20141900 miles round-trip! This experience was pure romance for my husband. And I completely enjoyed the scenery as we rode the coastal highway. As for my romantic tank? Once we made it to Seattle, we caught a cruise ship to Alaska and had a delightful time of romance!\n\nJust like you enjoy time with your girlfriends, there are times your husband would prefer to do activities with his guy friends. But you may be surprised to learn that your husband might not always be looking for guys to do guy stuff with him. Rather. he might be hoping you will do guy stuff with him. And when you do, he is romanced.\n\nHere are two more activities that may fill your husband's need for romance:\n\nLet him pursue you. When you were dating your husband, part of the romance for him was in pursuing you. So devise ways to flirt with and entice him into pursuing you from time to time. When it comes to filling your husband's need for romance, you'll be surprised how far a little flirtation goes.\n\nHave sex with him. When your husband puts forth the effort to pursue you, he is really hoping the evening will end with him enjoying you sexually. And as we discussed earlier, his desire is for you to be looking forward to your time together as well.\n\nWhen you joyfully take your husband to bed, you not only satisfy his physical, God-given need for sex, you become the salve for his soul as well. When you make the effort to deeply engage with your husband through sex, you are saying to him, \"I love you. I want you. I am here for you. I believe in you.\" Is it any wonder why most men put sex as number one in their romance category?\n\nSecrets of Great Sex\n\nWhat if you don't enjoy sex? You're not the only woman who has wondered about this. While this book is not about how to have great sex, I have written an ebook titled A Christian Woman's Guide to Great Sex in Marriage. (Visit NoRegretsWoman.com to download your copy.)\n\nI will let you in on a little secret: The longer you take to enjoy foreplay in the marriage bed, the more your body will prepare you for an incredible sexual experience. While amidst the busyness of life quickies are an important way to connect with your husband sexually, do make time for some marathon sex once in a while.\n\nAs women, when we go without sexual satisfaction for a period of time, we tend to forget how much we like it, while the opposite is true of men. So taking the time to create great sexual encounters will make you want more of those experiences in the future. (And if you have trouble reaching orgasm through intercourse, know that around 75 percent of women have the same challenge. Read my ebook for insights about this issue.)\n\nIf you don't enjoy sex, perhaps it's because you had a bad sexual experiences in the past. In my case, I was molested when I was six years old. So early in our marriage, I had to learn how not to flashback to that experience while Steve and I were making love. By forgiving the man who violated me, talking to my husband about my struggle, and prayer together as a couple and in my own personal prayers\u2014often in the moment I was having the flash back\u2014I was able to conquer the destructive emotions and enjoy sex with my husband.\n\nIf you have been violated, or perhaps you feel shame over sexual encounters you had before marriage, you may want to seek out professional help from a biblical counselor.\n\nSatan loves secrets because they allow him to keep his grip on you. For me, my own abuse as a child played itself out in my early teens through inappropriate physical involvement with boys. It took me more than a decade to even say out loud what I had experienced as a child\u2014or realize how that experience had affected me. But when I made the effort to get godly counsel, my openness took away the shame and fear I had harbored for so many years. God delights in your marriage bed, and through godly counsel, you can be free of anything that would steal, kill, or destroy the good God planned for sex between you and your man.\n\nSo What's the Bottom Line?\n\nGreat sex doesn't happen by accident. Life is busy, so having sex with your husband can easily become a less-than-pressing issue for you. Yet it is critical to the health of your marriage that you schedule times in your week for sex\u2014and romance as well.\n\nWhen you romance your husband, cultivate passionate sexual experiences, and help your husband know how to fill up your romance tank, you will not only transform your sex life, but I believe your marriage will be fundamentally changed as well. You hold the key to building a romantic marriage. By applying the principles in this chapter, you can enjoy a passionate marriage that is deeply satisfying for both of you.\n\nFROM A HUSBAND'S PERSPECTIVE\n\n######\n\nA Word from Steve\n\nRhonda pretty much hit this spot-on regarding the frustration we men have in the romance department. Truth be known, I wasn't really that good at romance before we were married. When we were courting, Rhonda was just keen to look for, and encourage me, when I was romantic. Did you do this for your husband too? What if, as when you were dating your husband, you were to continue to watch for\u2014and celebrate\u2014even his simplest attempts to be romantic? If you do, you may find your husband trying harder to be romantic with you.\n\nSo what about sex? At the risk of being categorized as the guy who just wants sex from his wife \"because men are animals,\" I'll roll up my sleeves and try my best to tackle the topic of what sex means to a man. I feel like I am stepping out on a tightrope, but here goes...\n\nWhen a husband knows his wife desires him sexually, it gives him a special sense of empowerment. This feeling of empowerment, however, is not about \"conquering his woman,\" nor is it arrogance. Rather, it is a quiet confidence that comes over a man when he believes his wife actually wants to make love to him.\n\nI realize that for Christians, our confidence comes from Christ alone. But God also made men to need affirmation in the marriage bed. Have you considered how the Spirit may use you to bolster your husband's self-assurance? When you minister to your husband's deep need for sexual intimacy, you pour courage into his heart.\n\nIn this chapter, Rhonda addressed the sin of selfishness and how it enters this whole equation of intimacy. Let's look at what Philippians 2:3-4 (ESV) says: \"Count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.\"\n\nIf God wants you to put the needs of others before your own\u2014with regard to every person you encounter\u2014how much more important is this attitude in the most intimate relationship you can have this side of glory?\n\nWhen my wife puts my needs above her own through intimacy, she helps me keep my focus on my Savior. She inspires me to continue in my labor of serving Him and brings a sense of fulfillment in the life God has given me.\n\nRhonda's selflessness empowers me to be effective for God's kingdom. And you may be delighted to find your husband energized to accomplish whatever God is calling him to do as well. In my experience, husbands who are sexually satisfied at home are deeply in love with their wives. I wholeheartedly agree with Rhonda's statement that \"when you find your husband sexually desirable, and he feels loved for who he is, then you fill him with a sense of strength, well-being, and confidence.\" And since selflessly having sex with your husband is truly serving Christ, you will be rewarded by our loving Savior as well!\n\n######\n\nTHINKING IT THROUGH\n\n######\n\n1. Name one insight you learned regarding the emotional benefits a healthy sex life has upon your husband.\n\n2. Write out how understanding the way sex ministers to your husband's loneliness, insecurity, or desire to feel loved will influence the way you will offer (or even pursue) sexual experiences with your husband.\n\n######\n\nLIVING IT OUT\n\n######\n\nRead Philippians 2:1-16, and answer the following questions:\n\n1. From verses 2-4, list the instructions Paul gives to Christ's followers.\n\n2. How can you apply the truth of verses 3-4 to your marriage? More specifically, how should you apply this instruction to your sex life?\n\n3. According to verse 5, believers are supposed to \"have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus\" (ESV). What is one Christlike quality you should apply to the way you think toward your husband and his need for sexual intimacy?\n\nVisit NoRegretsWoman.com to watch Steve and Rhonda's video link and\/or listen to their suggested audio link.\n\nPhoto credit: Eric McFarland Photography\n\nIn prayer before son Brandon's wedding.\n\nMore Money Equals Less Stress\n\nGrow Rich in Ways You Never Imagined\n\n######\n\nFrom as far back as I can remember, my husband has wanted to be debt-free. When Steve and I were dating, he used to dream about owning\u2014and living off of\u2014his own land. Because I was in love with Steve, I was \"in love\" with whatever dreams he had for his future.\n\nWhen we got married, we lived in the San Francisco Bay area. Back in 1981, home prices were extremely high, and we quickly learned the only way we could afford our own home was to purchase a fixer-upper. So long before there were television shows about people who bought junky houses and turned them into fabulous dream homes, Steve and I charted into some unfamiliar territory. All our friends thought we were crazy as they watched us move into some of the most run-down properties to fix them up. But we rolled up our sleeves and worked hard, and transformed them into lovely homes. And just as soon as we would finish one house, Steve would come home with that little side grin of his and say, \"Baby, I found another fixer-upper.\" Which meant we would have to sell the house we had just finished and move into yet another construction site.\n\nOne day, Steve came home with a real estate ad for a ranch in the mountains east of San Jose, California. It was an 80-acre ranch at an extremely reasonable price. Steve said, \"If we sell this place [another house we had just finished], we can afford to pay cash for this ranch and finally be debt-free!\"\n\nI agreed to go with him to look at the ranch, which was at the end of an hour-long drive up a treacherous mountain road. To add to my anxiety, the road was icy the day we went to look at the property because it was snowing. At long last, we arrived at a charming, snow-covered, one-bedroom house. My heart melted as I saw my husband's eyes light up\u2014I knew my world was about to change once again.\n\nAnd change it did. We sold our home in the Bay Area and purchased the ranch. When the house closed escrow, we drove back up the mountain to take a look at our \"dream cottage.\" But this time when we arrived it looked more like a shack! The snow had melted, and what stood before us was not the adorable little cottage I had thought we were getting.\n\nI wanted to cry, but when Steve started to laugh, I took my cue from him and we both laughed hysterically for quite some time. Once we found the courage to go inside the house, we discovered someone had left the back door open, and there was evidence animals had been living in the house. (I'll spare you the details.)\n\nBy August we were living in our little house on a ranch. Since there was only one bedroom, we gave it to our two kids\u2014where they slept on a bunk bed because the room was too small to accommodate two separate beds. Steve and I slept on a sofa bed in the living room. We got to sleep in front of a nice wood-burning stove, so we convinced ourselves that was rather romantic. So romantic, in fact, that it wasn't long before we were surprised by our third pregnancy! I slept on the sofa bed through my entire pregnancy. (I'm pretty sure you gasped audibly after you read this.)\n\nEach day, Steve left for work at 5:30 in morning and would not return home until 7:00 at night. This meant long days of me being at home alone with the kids in a remote location. You can imagine how lonely this fast-paced city girl became.\n\nAnd did I mention we did not have power? When we closed escrow, I assumed I'd call the local power company and our electricity would be turned on. How very naive I had been. We ended up living for a year and a half on a generator\u2014yes, a generator. Later, the electric company finally strung power lines to our house with the help of a helicopter.\n\nI wish I could say I had a good attitude all through this transition period. But no\u2014I shed many tears. I remember crying to Steve, \"Please let me go to work and you stay home with the kids. I am living your dream. You get to go to town every day\u2014you're living my dream!\"\n\nThe poor guy would just stroke my hair and remind me we needed his salary if we were going to add on to the house and remain debt-free. I knew he was right, but that didn't make the situation any easier.\n\nEventually we realized we would need to attend a church closer to our home so our kids could make friends with other children who lived nearby (when I say nearby, I mean 45 minutes away from our house). We found a little church in a town called Patterson. The Sunday we joined, I fought back tears because I dearly loved our church family in San Jose. Leaving meant saying good-bye to precious friends and all the wonderful women who had been my mentors.\n\nAs life continued on the ranch, this city girl had some crazy encounters. For example, our neighbor's cows would regularly come over the hill and break our water lines\u2014leaving me with no water until Steve returned home that evening. I remember one day in particular\u2014when I was eight months pregnant\u2014during which I was standing on top of bales of hay and using a two-by-four to try to urge a cow to move away from our water lines.\n\nIn a moment of clarity, I realized how irrational my behavior was\u2014especially since I had left my two-year-old son alone in the house. I threw down the board, stomped my way back to the house, and shouted through tears, \"I don't care if the cows break the water lines. How is this my life? I was homecoming queen!\"\n\nI laugh now, but those years were certainly the trial by fire that the Lord used to purify my heart. It wasn't until all of life's everyday comforts were gone that I came to realize how much worth I had placed on them. Through this awareness, God began to teach me how to live what Jesus commanded in Matthew 6:20: \"Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys.\"\n\nAfter our third child was born, the company Steve worked for moved to Los Angeles, which now meant he was without a job. The small severance check he received allowed him to stay at home for the next several months to work full-time on an addition to our house. This also freed him up to serve as the youth pastor for our church in Patterson. Because we had no house payments, car payments, or even electricity bills, Steve could work for the church for no pay. It was great to discover how being debt-free enabled us to minister freely wherever God called us to serve.\n\nAfter five years, through the Lord's providence, we ended up moving to Austin, Texas, where God surprised us with an opportunity to plant a church. In just one summer, the youth group that met in our home grew to 200 teenagers. While watching our white carpet get dirtied and our furniture worn out, we celebrated as we saw the majority of those teens come to salvation in Christ. And it was through this outreach in our home the Lord brought our oldest son, Tony, into our family. (You can read the story of how Tony became our son in my book Moms Raising Sons to Be Men.)\n\nDuring the six years we ministered in Austin, our church back in Patterson contacted Steve several times, asking him to pray about coming back to be their senior pastor. Finally, Steve told me, \"I think the Lord wants us to move back to California.\" Though our hearts were in Texas and with all the people we were ministering to, I knew Steve was right. We could see, in different ways, that God was calling us back to California. Going back was simply an act of obedience to the Lord. Of course this meant Steve would take a substantial pay cut, and we had no idea how we would be able to make ends meet. But we had seen God provide before, and we knew He would do so again.\n\nWhile we were in Texas, we had let friends live in our ranch house in California. So when we returned, we were able to settle back into our home again. As Steve and I evaluated our circumstances, it dawned on us that the reason it was possible for us to resume serving the church in Patterson was because more than a decade ago, the Lord had placed upon Steve's heart a desire to live debt-free. God had worked all this out over a long period of time, and since our return to California 15 years ago, He has continued to faithfully provide for all our needs. That which He hasn't provided, we have come to realize we don't need. We love our precious church family deeply, and we've been blessed to see many people come to Christ. Truly, God has done \"exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us\" (Ephesians 3:20).\n\nWho Lives Like That?\n\nIf you want to discover how to grow rich in ways you never imagined, make friends with couples who have set their hearts upon eternity\u2014and learn from their example. To get you started, let me introduce you right now to two couples whose eternal perspective influences the way they live.\n\nFirst comes Francis and Lisa Chan. In his book Crazy Love, Francis offers this interesting observation about wealth:\n\nIf one hundred people represented the world's population, fifty-three of those would live on less than $2 a day. Do you realize that if you make $4,000 a month, you automatically make one hundred times more than the average person on this planet?\n\nWhich is more messed up\u2014that we have so much compared to everyone else, or that we don't think we are rich?...Whether we acknowledge our wealth or not, being rich is a serious disadvantage spiritually. As William Wilberforce once said, \"Prosperity hardens the heart.\"\n\nFrancis goes on to say, \"When I returned from my first trip to Africa, I felt strongly that we were to sell our house and move into something smaller, in order to give more away...We ended up moving into a house half the size of our previous home, and we haven't regretted it.\"\n\nBy way of background information, at one time Francis was the pastor of a large church in Simi Valley, California. He surprised his congregation when he decided to resign because things were going very well with the ministry. But both Francis and Lisa were convinced the Lord was calling them to minister somewhere else\u2014and most likely with fewer resources.\n\nPregnant with their fifth child at the time, Francis and Lisa Chan sold their house, having no idea where the Lord would lead. As they traveled through Asia they prayed, asking the Lord daily if this would be where He would have them stay and serve. Chan says of this journey,\n\nIt was an unforgettable time. I can't describe how good it feels to walk through the slums of India with your family, hold hands in prayer, and ask God if He wants you to stay and serve Him there. You would think being homeless and uncertain would be stressful, but this was one of the most peaceful times of my life.\n\nYou may be wondering if Lisa held the same convictions as her husband when they sold everything to follow God's leading. Listen to how Lisa instructed their children when the Chans made the decision to return to the States: \"We can't let people talk us out of things. Sometimes God convicts, but then we let people talk us out of it. We need to stick to our convictions.\"\n\nClearly, Lisa was as passionate about surrendering their comforts and possessions to the cause of Christ as her husband. Can you imagine how differently things would have turned out if Francis wanted to answer God's call but Lisa was too fearful to let go of the security of their home, friends, and possessions? But she\u2014and her husband\u2014had taken to heart what Jesus said in Matthew 6:19-21: \"Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven...for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.\"\n\nGod alone knows what awaits the Chans in eternity because they've chosen to pursue the things of heaven rather than earth. And He knows the treasures that could await you as well\u2014if you learn to desire Him more than anything else in life.\n\nMiddle-Aged Crazy\n\nGene and Diane have been good friends of our family for 25 years. On Sundays after church, when all our kids were little, Diane would invite our family over to their home to swim in their above-ground pool. She would say, \"I can't afford to make lunch for everyone, so bring stuff to make sandwiches and we'll all share!\"\n\nNowadays Gene and Diane are financially comfortable, middle-aged grandparents. Over the years, I have watched them share with others when they had little\u2014and when they have had much. Many people would think that by this time, with an empty nest, Gene and Diane have earned the right to enjoy the fruit of their hard labors. But recently, the Lord put on their hearts a desire to adopt three teenage girls from an orphanage in Bulgaria. As I write, they are at the orphanage visiting these girls for the first time.\n\nAs Gene and Diane gave forth, with an open hand, the little they had when they were young parents, the Lord blessed them with more. And because they have learned to be God's vessel to bless others, He is now blessing them with three new daughters from Bulgaria\u2014bringing even more joy into their lives!\n\nTurn Your Eyes Upon Jesus\n\nDo you feel uneasy after reading about Francis and Lisa, Gene and Diane, or even the adventures Steve and I had when we worked toward becoming debt-free? Realize that God's plans for you and your husband won't look like someone else's. The point of what I have shared is not to make you feel guilty when you look at how other people manage their finances. Nor is it to get you to imitate what others have done. Rather, learn to seek intimacy with Christ, and focus on eternity. Because the more time you spend with Jesus, the less you will obsess over having enough. And the more often you remind yourself that this earth is not your home, the less preoccupied you will be with earthly comforts and possessions. And a major blessing of having an eternal perspective is that there will be less strain on your marriage relationship with regard to finances.\n\nIn his book You and Me Forever, Francis Chan offers this insight:\n\nFew would deny that marriages are destroyed by selfishness. At times we all overvalue our own pursuits while ignoring the desires of God and others. But we can't cure our narcissism by trying to ignore ourselves. The solution is to stare at God. When we actually stare at Him, everything else fades to its proper place.\n\nAs you read this, is the Holy Spirit convicting you of being too focused on earthly treasures? Take some time to ask God about whether any of your marriage conflicts are a result of you and your spouse being distracted by worldly pursuits and possessions. If the Holy Spirit brings to mind anything God wants you to surrender, ask the Lord to help you let go of whatever it may be.\n\nAnd don't get discouraged or confused if, after you submit your possessions to Christ, you end up picking them back up again. The more you pursue intimacy with Christ and fix your eyes on Him, the more He will give you His perspective on finances and possessions. While you might still possess certain things, you'll live with the realization your true treasure is in heaven. In all of this I'm reminded of a song my mother-in-law often sang to us:\n\nTurn your eyes upon Jesus,\n\nLook full in His wonderful face,\n\nAnd the things of earth will grow strangely dim,\n\nIn the light of His glory and grace.\n\nBut We Have Real Money Problems\n\nOver the years, my husband and I have visited with a number of Christian couples whose marital strife stemmed from financial issues. Even when husband and wife are committed Christians, money troubles are difficult to handle. The struggles usually begin when they take their eyes off God as their provider and begin blaming one another for their circumstances. The common complaints we hear from them are \"My husband works too many hours,\" \"She spends too much money on frivolous things,\" \"We are in so much debt we can't breathe,\" and \"The kids are left with no supervision because we both work long hours.\"\n\nSomewhere along the way, these couples\u2014who've been blessed by God\u2014began to become preoccupied with their material goods (or their lack of them). Gradually their focus shifted from Christ, who is their provider, onto themselves. They became consumed with seeking fulfillment from what they had and were working to acquire more.\n\nMaybe you can identify with these couples. Has your focus turned from Christ to career? Have you mistakenly come to think more money equals security\u2014and ultimately a happier marriage? If so, it is time to rethink your priorities.\n\nIf you find yourselves in financial trouble, you may want to ask your pastor if there is an elder in your church who can help you learn some practical money management skills. Or you can visit Christian financial expert Dave Ramsey's website to download free budgeting tools and other helpful resources.\n\nAll of us will face financial concerns at one time or another. Earlier in our marriage, when Steve was a carpenter, sometimes he couldn't find work for months on end because of the rainy season. I can remember standing at the kitchen sink, praying, \"Lord, this is Your house. We will use it for ministry, but You need to make the payment on Your house!\"\n\nIt was during one of those hard times a Titus 2 woman reminded me of Jesus' advice to His followers: \"Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you\" (Matthew 6:33).\n\nAuthor Jim George says that when it comes to priorities, \"you are to seek a life of spiritual growth and following after God's priorities for your life. Then, friend, God will provide for your family. That's God's promise! Seek God...and have everything! Seek the world...and lose everything (Luke 9:25).\"\n\nBut what if it seems as though God hasn't provided for your house payment? What if all you work for is lost? Did God not come through\u2014or is it possible He has a better plan? Read what God says in Isaiah 55:8-9:\n\nFor My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways, declares the LORD.\n\nFor as the heavens are higher than the earth,\n\nSo are My ways higher than your ways\n\nAnd My thoughts than your thoughts (NASB).\n\nA Couple Who Lost Everything\n\nImagine if one day everything you and your husband had worked for was taken away because you were Christians. And not only did you lose your property and your home, but you were also deported. This is exactly what happened to a couple in the Bible\u2014a couple from Italy named Priscilla and Aquila (see Acts 18:1-3).\n\nThe first time we meet this dynamic duo is in the city of Corinth, where they worked as tentmakers. On a missionary journey to Corinth, the apostle Paul met this husband-and-wife ministry team. They ended up becoming close friends. In the New Testament you can find Priscilla and Aquila...\n\n\u2022 risking their lives for Paul's safety (Romans 16:3-4),\n\n\u2022 traveling to Syria with Paul on a missionary journey (Acts 18:18),\n\n\u2022 teaching \"the way of God more accurately...showing from the Scriptures that Jesus is the Christ\" (Acts 18:24-28), and\n\n\u2022 hosting a church in their house (1 Corinthians 16:19).\n\nI have often asked myself, Who are these people? They are amazing! I can't help but wonder if the apostle Paul was thinking of Priscilla and Aquila when he penned the statement, \"Godliness with contentment is great gain\" (1 Timothy 6:6). Don't you wish you could have been friends with Priscilla and Aquila? I do.\n\nThe people in the Bible faced many of the same difficulties we experience today. And in many cases, God didn't reveal to them any special insight about why they were going through the trials they endured. For example, when Priscilla and Aquila lost their home and were exiled, nowhere in Scripture do we read that God told them, \"Hey, I know you are losing your home and you'll have to flee the country, but don't worry. I'm going introduce you to this guy named Paul, and with him you are going to have some amazing adventures as you share the gospel.\"\n\nWhat if, when the couple had lost everything, Priscilla had become distraught with fear and worry? Or what if she had blamed Aquila for not figuring out a way to keep their home? Imagine the life of ministry Priscilla would have forfeited if she had spent the rest of her years lamenting over what was lost in Italy. Consumed with fear, worry, or bitterness, Priscilla would not have been a \"vessel of honor\" ready for the Master's use (see 1 Thessalonians 4:4).\n\nPriscilla and Aquila built a no-regrets life in their joyful service to Christ by encouraging the apostle Paul, influencing their generation with the gospel, and providing a place for Christians to meet together in their home in Corinth. But more than that, they took to heart Jesus' exhortation in Matthew 6:20 to lay up for themselves treasures in heaven.\n\nSure, they lost all their earthly possessions when they were forced to leave Italy. And take it from a woman who used to hold church in her home\u2014you pretty much hold your house with an open hand when you use it for ministry. But I guarantee you that Priscilla and Aquila are rejoicing in heaven today, with no regret over what following Christ cost them in the short time they were on earth.\n\nA Modern-Day Priscilla and Aquila\n\nOver the past several years, the economy has been rough in California. And we know a number of people who have lost their homes. One couple stands out above the others. Their names are Dale and Amy.\n\nDale and Amy purchased their home 25 years ago. Over the years, Amy has been a stay-at-home mom, written a Christian column for a newspaper, served as a substitute teacher in the public schools, and ministered to the women in her church. Dale has worked in the corporate world, and has also devoted himself to ministry in the church.\n\nAbout ten years ago, Dale and Amy's son\u2014who had been a prodigal\u2014wanted answers about life from the Bible. Dale and Amy offered to meet with their son and his friends once a week to answer their questions. Amy cooked a meal for anyone who would come\u2014and come they did.\n\nOne by one, the young adults who met in Dale and Amy's home surrendered their lives to Christ. Each week, Dale would teach the group. And week after week, more students would come. Soon there were college-aged men and women seated all over Dale and Amy's house, up the stairway, and on the floor.\n\nAs the years passed by and the young adults grew in their faith, many became active in ministries in their church. A good number of them married one another and established godly homes.\n\nWhile God was blessing Dale and Amy's ministry abundantly, the worsening economic climate put a strain on their investments. Soon it became apparent they would have no other choice but to move out of the house they loved so dearly\u2014the home in which they had raised all their children.\n\nAmy was sad to walk away from her home, but through her tears she continued to cling to the God she serves. Later, the Lord provided Dale and Amy with a quaint house in the country. Interestingly, Amy had always dreamed of living in the country.\n\nWhat's more, Dale and Amy's daughter and her family ended up moving into a house right next door to them. Now Amy spends her days enjoying her four grandchildren. And yes, Dale and Amy still minister to the young adults in their church.\n\nWhile Amy would tell you she wouldn't have expected change of this magnitude in this season of her life, she is thankful that the Lord knew their need\u2014even before they asked. And God has blessed Amy and Dale for keeping their eyes on Him even when life's circumstances seemed to disappoint.\n\nWhat About You?\n\nWhen God moved Steve and me to the country so many years ago, He did not tell us that one day Steve would pastor a small church and our debt-free lifestyle would provide a way for us to be in full-time ministry. In similar ways, all the couples mentioned in this chapter gave up earthly comforts and possessions in exchange for heaven's treasures:\n\n\u2022 Francis and Lisa Chan sold their home to follow the Lord when they didn't know where He would lead. Francis now pastors a church in San Francisco, California.\n\n\u2022 Gene and Diane are spending their retirement years caring for three adopted teenage daughters from Bulgaria.\n\n\u2022 Priscilla and Aquila were exiled from Italy. They had no idea the Lord would use them to minister to the apostle Paul and host a church in their house\u2014as well as be an example to Christians who continue to read about them 2000 years after their deaths.\n\n\u2022 Dale and Amy had a tremendous ministry going when they lost their home. God did not explain why He had allowed this to happen. Instead, He gave them His peace and joy, and reminded them of the home in heaven they would one day have forever. And because of this couple's selfless humility, God continues to use them today.\n\nWhat about you? What will history say about the way you've been handling your finances and possessions? Will your kids grow up remembering all the arguments their mommy and daddy had over money? Or will they learn, from your example, how to store up treasures in heaven?\n\nLet's Review\n\nTo discuss finances is always touchy, especially when money is the main cause of conflict between you and your husband. But to ignore these issues is to leave problems unresolved in your marriage. In review, I'd like to repeat a couple of key points from this chapter that I don't want you to miss:\n\n1. The more you keep your eyes fixed on Jesus, the less you will care about the temporal comforts and possessions so many married couples fight over. If you choose to live contentedly within your means and hold your possessions with an open hand, your marriage will be blessed because your focus is off earthly things and on Christ\u2014and His kingdom purposes.\n\n2. Realize that God's highest good for your marriage is not to make you happy by giving you everything your heart desires. Rather, God wants to make you holy through His Son so He can accomplish His perfect plan through you\u2014so you will enjoy His blessings for all eternity.\n\nAs a believer, the only place you will find true satisfaction is in God\u2014in His control over your life and His provision for your needs. When you remember He is the One who sees, hears, and meets the needs of His children, you can stop looking to your husband (or other earthly means) to make you feel secure through material gain. Through times of abundance and times of need, God is doing His work to mold you more and more into the image of His Son. When you commit to seeking first His kingdom and His righteousness, you will find contentment and peace in your marriage\u2014and life.\n\nFROM A HUSBAND'S PERSPECTIVE\n\n######\n\nA Word from Steve\n\nIt's not always possible for us to live debt-free\u2014I get that. So don't feel you need to do as Rhonda and I did, and go sell your house and move into a shack in the middle of nowhere. That is not the point of this chapter.\n\nIn Christian circles there is a tendency for us to ascribe absolute principles for non-absolute circumstances. For example, if a person feels led by the Spirit to simplify his lifestyle to the point of great sacrifice, it would be wrong for him to impose his conviction on every other Christian he met.\n\nWith that said, you should know 1 John 2:15 instructs all believers, \"Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.\" The best way to not set your heart on temporal things is to ask God to help you store up treasures in heaven\u2014treasures that will last.\n\nYou would be wise to ask God often to help you discern the distinction between what you want and what you need. Over and over I am amazed to see how faithful God is to the meet the needs of His children when they learn to keep the pursuit of Christ as their life's priority, rather than storing up earthly treasures.\n\nHebrews 12:2 says we are to look unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. When you discipline yourself to focus on Christ and seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, you will come to realize what matters most are the treasures you store up in heaven. And when you live with an eternal perspective, you will also learn to recognize God's gracious provision in this life as well.\n\nI know a lot of people who, later in life, regret working to attain wealth while their marriages and their families crumbled around them. Sadly, their regret often comes too late to change the consequences of their choices.\n\nWhen you hold all you possess with an open hand, you will discover how God's blessings often come in nontangible ways\u2014such as peace in your home, inexplicable joy in life (even in times of hardship), and having children who follow Christ.\n\nI can say from experience that there is nothing I have worked to attain in this life that is more valuable to me than observing the faithfulness of my children as they grow up to serve our Savior\u2014nothing. God is truly faithful and so worthy of our praise!\n\nKeeping your focus on Christ and His Word is key to a marriage unencumbered by materialistic pursuits. Learn to weigh the motivation of your every decision by asking yourself these questions:\n\n\u2022 Is this desire self-serving?\n\n\u2022 Is this pursuit self-centered?\n\n\u2022 Will this activity promote my agenda or God's purpose?\n\n\u2022 Does my spouse feel pressure to perform because of my wants?\n\n\u2022 Do I truly desire this item, activity, or pursuit so that Christ may be exalted, His truth may be promoted, and others might be blessed when they see the love of God through me and my spouse?\n\n\u2022 Am I willing to sin to attain this desire? (If so, you can know your motivations are wrong.)\n\nGod may never ask you to sell certain belongings, or go into full-time ministry, but you can know He does want you to surrender all you possess to Him so He can bless others and reflect His glory through you. If you are consumed with career and cash, it's time you do some serious soul-searching. If you are a wife who learns to trust the Lord for provision rather than looking to your husband, then your spouse might find the freedom to step out in faith and serve the Lord in new ways.\n\nI cannot promise how the Lord will use you and your husband when you have a proper attitude toward earthly possessions and pursuits. But 1 Corinthians 2:9 promises you cannot even begin to imagine what God has planned for those who make loving Him their life's pursuit:\n\nAs it is written: \"Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him\" (1 Corinthians 2:9).\n\n######\n\nTHINKING IT THROUGH\n\n######\n\n1. What do your pursuits reveal about your goals in life? What truths stood out to you most in this chapter, and how can you apply them?\n\n2. Read Philippians 3:7-11, and write out the insights you glean from this passage.\n\n3. Read Luke 12:48, then take some time to prayerfully consider how God wants you to respond to what you have read.\n\n4. Ask God to show you how you can apply what you have learned in this chapter to any money-related conflicts in your marriage. Write your thoughts.\n\n######\n\nLIVING IT OUT\n\n######\n\n1. Name at least one insight you learned from this chapter that you can put into practice the next time you are tempted to disagree with your husband about finances.\n\n2. In this chapter, which couple's story resonated with you the most, and why? From their example, what will you apply to your own marriage?\n\nVisit NoRegretsWoman.com to watch Steve and Rhonda's video link and\/or listen to their suggested audio link.\n\nEvery Couple Fights\n\nEight Steps to Making Peace\n\n######\n\nWhen Julie and Greg were married, neither of them anticipated the baggage that Julie was bringing into their relationship from her first marriage. Julie Gorman, author of What I Wish My Mother Had Told Me About Men, says, \"In an attempt to keep from being hurt, I added more and more conditions to my growing list of needs...Our marriage continued to weaken. Though we loved each other passionately, we also fought passionately. As our fights progressed, our Christian conduct regressed. Expletive adjectives assailed our once-redeemed vocabulary. Four-letter words became a common exchange...I was desperate, needy, and extremely smothering. His growing hostility culminated into an eruption.\n\n\"That's when it happened: the frightful night of painful revelation...the night that demanded my change...the night God got hold of my attention in order to set me free.\"\n\nIt wasn't until Greg stormed out of the house shouting, \"I love you, Julie\u2014but I can't live like this any longer!\" that Julie realized the fragile state of her marriage. And only then did Julie fall to the floor and cry out to God for His help.\n\nAnd God did help. Julie says, \"I'd love to say God healed our marriage instantaneously, but He didn't...it took at least a year for the Holy Spirit to overhaul our relationship and realign our thoughts with His. But that night...that fight...changed everything...And it provided a foundation that would heal our marriage.\"\n\nLooking back, Julie says, \"I was a control freak! I had constantly tried to align Greg to my endless conditions. I wanted\u2014no, needed\u2014him to function within my controlled environment. Any deviation threatened my security.\"\n\nSo Why Do You Fight?\n\nFortunately for Greg and Julie, their story ends happily. But after more than 30 years of mentoring women, I am sad to say I have seen too many couples run to divorce court when the \"final fight\" erupts between them.\n\nWhenever you and your husband have a disagreement, does it turn into a battle? Or maybe you're not a couple who resorts to name-calling or four-letter words, but what about the silent treatment? Couples who don't learn how to resolve conflict in a Christ-honoring way will tend to either lash out with angry words, or\u2014just as harmful\u2014ignore one another. Both kinds of responses hurt the relationship.\n\nSo why would two people who promised to love one another till their dying breath resort to fighting with one another whenever a disagreement surfaces? James 4:1-2 offers this insight: \"What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel\" (ESV).\n\nJames is saying that ultimately, selfish desires are the cause of quarrels. And, because one or both people in the conflict are focused on what they wrongly believe they must have to be happy, they will \"fight to the death\" to get what they want. And for some, this means the death of their marriage. Do you feel so strongly about getting your way that you will fight for it?\n\nYears ago, Steve and I were counseling a married couple who were constantly fighting. On more than one occasion, the police had been called to subdue the husband after he became extremely angry.\n\nWhen the husband visited alone with Steve, he said, \"I don't know why I get so angry. She just talks so fast, and comes at me with so many accusations. Before I can respond to one, she is on to the next.\" Finally, out of the frustration of not being able to get a word in edgewise, this husband had put his fist through the wall.\n\nAt the same time, when I met privately with the wife, she went through a long list of ways her husband had let her down. She shared with me that each time she began to tell her husband what he had done to once again not measure up to her expectations, his defenses went up, her voice got more shrill, and the two would jump headlong into another battle.\n\nIt was easy for Steve and me to see how both contributed to their volatile arguments, but since each was convinced they alone were right\u2014and their spouse was wrong\u2014they would not change the way they related to one another in times of conflict. Sadly, their hurtful words and destructive actions chipped away at their marriage until it was destroyed.\n\nBut How Do We Stop the Fighting?\n\nIf you and your husband have developed a habit of fighting with each other, or torturing one another with the silent treatment, know that bad habits do not end by merely wanting to stop them. As with anything in life, success comes from hard work. And that is true about healthy conflict resolution.\n\nIt is not enough to merely read the Bible and pray for a marriage free from conflict. Along with prayer, you must study the Scriptures and yield in obedience to what you learn. Listen to how desperately the psalmist yearned to keep God's statutes:\n\nOh, that my ways were directed to keep Your statutes! Then I would not be ashamed, when I look into all Your commandments...Your word I have hidden in my heart, that I might not sin against You...I have rejoiced in the way of Your testimonies, as much as in all riches. I will meditate on Your precepts, and contemplate Your ways. I will delight myself in your statutes; I will not forget Your word (Psalm 119:5-6,11,14-16).\n\nAre you truly desperate to keep God's statutes? If there is discord in your marriage, the key to change is for you to determine that obeying God's precepts is more important than having your own way.\n\n\"But how do I apply Scripture to my life?\" you ask. In his book The Pursuit of Holiness, Jerry Bridges offers these practical steps: \"As you read or study the Scriptures and then mediate on them during the day, ask yourself these three questions:\n\n\u2022 What does this passage teach concerning God's will for a holy life?\n\n\u2022 How does my life measure up to that Scripture?...Be specific; don't generalize.\n\n\u2022 What definite steps of action do I need to take to obey?\n\nBridges goes on to say, \"Avoid general commitments to obedience and instead aim for specific obedience...We deceive ourselves when we grow in knowledge of the truth without specifically responding to it (James 1:22).\"\n\nWhile it is glorious to delight in what Jesus did on the cross to save you, rejoicing in the gospel coupled with repentance and yielding yourself in obedience to God's Word is what will transform you into a wife who can resist the temptation to fight with your husband.\n\nAs you wrestle with old habits, don't get discouraged if you don't find instant victory. Any training requires hard work, and you can expect that at first you will experience some failures. But if you persevere in this process of studying what God's Word says about your sin, and prayerfully apply it to your life, you will gradually see progress. Eventually you will succeed more often than you fail, until one day heated conflicts with your spouse become a distant memory. And, when your passion for Christ overrides your passion to win an argument, you'll enjoy peace in your marriage relationship.\n\nSo the next time you look longingly at a genuinely happy couple and say, \"I'll bet they never fight. I wish our marriage was as happy as theirs,\" realize they didn't just get a happy marriage and you got a difficult one. No, you can be sure a happily married couple makes a determined effort to be happy and to resolve their conflicts in a way that does not tear down their marriage.\n\nEight Steps to Making Peace\n\nOnce you decide to apply biblical principles to how you handle conflict in your marriage, you will bring peace into your home. Here are eight practical steps to beginning the process:\n\n1. Admit You Have a Problem\n\nStop saying, \"I'm fine\" or \"Everything is fine\" when it isn't. For example, if you and your husband have occasional fights that result in hurtful words or actions, you have a problem. Or if your disagreements result in days or even weeks of the two of you not speaking to one another, you have a problem. And if your husband says whatever he thinks you want to hear to keep the peace, you have a problem.\n\nMaybe most of your fights occur at a certain time of the month, and when your hormones settle down, you tell yourself, The fight wasn't all that bad. He knows I didn't mean what I said. It was just my hormones. He just needs to understand I can't help myself. If so, you have a problem!\n\nAfter you admit you have a problem, the next step to peace is...\n\n2. Acknowledge Your Sinful Bent\n\nWe are all fallen creatures who are susceptible to sin. And in Genesis 3:16, God told Eve the consequences that all women would experience as a result of her disobedience: \"To the woman He said, \"I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth; in pain you will bring forth children; yet your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you' \" (NASB).\n\nEver since Adam and Eve sinned in the garden, marriage has been plagued by two people who are bent on getting their own way. One Bible teacher observes,\n\nBecause of sin...husbands and wives will face struggles in their own relationship. Sin has turned the harmonious system of God-ordained roles into distasteful struggles of self-will...Husbands and wives will need God's help in getting along as a result. The woman's desire will be to lord it over her husband, but the husband will rule by divine design (Ephesians 5:22-25).\n\nAt the onset of a disagreement, are you willing to ask yourself if your bent toward trying to rule over your husband is at the root of the conflict? Will you then yield your self-will to God's plan for marriage, and ask Him to help you submit to the authority He has placed over you? Even if your husband is not acting in a respectful manner, out of obedience to God's command, you are to offer respect to your husband. One way to do this, for example, is to respond softly when your husband is harsh. Proverbs 15:1 says, \"A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger\" (ESV).\n\nIn Genesis 3:16, when God promised women would have pain in childbirth, He wasn't kidding. With my first baby, I endured 52 hours of labor\u2014without any pain meds! So we all agree having a baby hurts.\n\nAlong with the pain in childbirth, women are plagued with monthly periods, cramps, and hormone issues. Let's visit the topic of hormones, shall we? After my third child was born, I was left with postpartum depression. And later, I was plagued with terrible PMS. So when my hormone levels dropped, I became weepy and agitated. I experienced horrible feelings of being out of control, along with bouts of anxiety.\n\nOne day when I was crying\u2014ranting, really\u2014to Steve about how hard my life was, I looked into his face to see him trying desperately to understand how he could make things better for me. In that moment, the Lord opened my eyes to see how much I was hurting my husband\u2014and our marriage. I decided right then I would never again allow myself to vent my frustrations to him while my hormones were affecting me. After that, for a few days each month I withdrew from my husband and kids\u2014to keep from treating them harshly. This also proved to be hurtful to my husband because my actions made him feel like I was rejecting him or giving him the silent treatment.\n\nWhen I tried to explain to Steve how hormonal changes in my body influenced the way I interacted with him and the kids, he just looked hurt and disappointed. Finally, I figured out an analogy I could use to help Steve grasp my situation. I said, \"Imagine if every time there's a full moon, you turn into a werewolf\u2014no matter how hard you try not to. So your only hope is to ask the people you dearly love to lock you up, and keep you locked up, until the full moon has passed so you don't attack or hurt anyone. That's what PMS is like for me. I can't stop it, I know it's coming, and the best thing I can hope for is to keep away from those whom I love until I am myself again.\"\n\nI wish you could have seen Steve's face. The werewolf analogy not only gave him a glimpse of the lack of control I feel when my hormones act up, but it also gave him a sense of how he could best help me get through such times\u2014by keeping the kids occupied, and giving me as much space as possible for those few days.\n\nBecause I was willing to admit I have a problem\u2014rather than blaming Steve for the way I was acting\u2014I helped my husband see how desperately I needed his help and understanding. (And now, as a middle-aged woman, I am having to ask Steve once again to understand not only the emotions that go along with menopause, but also the crazy hot flashes! If you are going through menopause, you may find encouragement and insight from my ebook The Midlife Wife. Visit NoRegretsWoman.com to download a copy.)\n\nOnce you have admitted you have a problem, and have acknowledged you have a sinful bent to be reckoned with, the next step to keeping peace in your relationship is...\n\n3. Refuse to Be Argumentative\n\nHave you ever been with a couple who, no matter what the husband says, the wife is ready to correct him? While the couple bickers back and forth, I find myself thinking, Who cares if the story your husband is telling happened on Tuesday or Wednesday? And why do you think we want to hear you argue with your husband about who said what to whom, and when?\n\nI don't know about you, but for me to spend an evening with a couple who quarrels is an exhausting experience. I cannot imagine how worn-out a person would feel if they lived in a constant state of conflict. Listen to what Proverbs 27:15-16 says about a quarrelsome wife: \"A continual dripping on a very rainy day and a contentious woman are alike; whoever restrains her restrains the wind, and grasps oil with his right hand.\"\n\nAnd consider these instructions from the apostle Paul: \"The Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil...eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace...If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all\" (2 Timothy 2:24; Ephesians 4:3; Romans 12:18 ESV).\n\nBecause conflict steals our joy, causes anxiety, and robs us of our peace, immediately after Paul addressed the two women who were in conflict at the church in Philippi he said,\n\nRejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.\n\nThe next time you feel like arguing with your husband, remember 1 Corinthians 13:4-5: Love does not insist on having its own way, nor is it irritable or resentful. By refusing to be argumentative, you will show Christ's love to your husband and initiate peace in your relationship. Which leads me to the next step to establishing peace in your relationship:\n\n4. Make Peace a Priority\n\nGet rid of whatever causes discord in your marriage. Whether you and your husband fight over finances, how to spend your free time, or how to discipline your children, it's time to STOP! No argument is worth winning when the love and unity of your marriage is at stake.\n\nI have heard couples bicker and get into full-blown arguments over the most insignificant issues\u2014all because they want what they want. Because of the stress involved in preparing for and going on a vacation, that's when some couples get into their biggest arguments. Others argue each month over their lack of money to cover their bills. If you are fighting over where or how to take a trip, don't take the trip. And if you have a monthly battle over not having enough money, look at how you can downsize or sell off what you don't need. And then realize that ultimately, God is your provider, not your husband.\n\nI remember one couple who came to Steve and me for advice. They were so strapped financially that both husband and wife had to work long hours each week to pay their bills. Which meant their three teenagers were left unsupervised at home late into the evenings. After the wife shared about their financial burdens, the lack of intimacy in their marriage, and concern over their children, I gently suggested they consider selling off some of their possessions and moving into a house they could more readily afford. That would then allow them to cut back on the number of hours they had to work.\n\nIn response, the woman explained how inconvenient it would be to move, how uncomfortable they would be in a smaller house, and how she worked hard to have nice things. Therefore, she was unwilling to make any changes. I said, \"If my children were at risk and my marriage was in trouble, I would sell all I had, move into an apartment, and work to bring healing to my family.\"\n\nSadly, she did not like my response. Within a year, she and her husband were divorced. They moved into separate apartments, and the kids ended up being less supervised than before.\n\nKing Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, said, \"Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a fattened ox and hatred with it.\" I agree with Solomon\u2014it's better to enjoy love and live on salad every night than to have prime rib all the time and be in a hateful marriage. I'll take lettuce and love over steak and snarls any day\u2014how about you?\n\nNow, you may be thinking, I hear what you are saying, Rhonda, but I am not the one who is argumentative. My husband picks at everything I do, and is constantly looking for a fight. If this is your situation, my heart goes out to you. I can only imagine how discouraged you might feel. And while I cannot change your husband, I know who can\u2014God.\n\nI have a dear friend whose harsh husband became more peaceable when she stopped fighting with him and trusted God to change him. And God can work wonders through your obedience as well.\n\nWhen you determine to practice righteous living no matter how your husband responds, God can bring His peace into your relationship. \"Peace cannot be divorced from holiness. 'Righteousness and peace have kissed each other' is the beautiful expression of Psalm 85:10. Where there is true peace, there is righteousness, holiness, and purity. May those things characterize you as you strive to be a peacemaker.\"\n\nSo what can you do as you wait on God to change your husband? In these final steps to making peace, here are a few suggestions from God's Word:\n\n5. Pray Without Ceasing\n\nIt is the effectual, fervent prayer of the righteous that avails much, so keep your heart pure before the Lord, and never stop praying for God to help your husband grow to be more like Christ (see 1 Thessalonians 5:17; James 5:16; 1 Peter 3:12). And if your husband is not a Christian, never give up praying for his salvation.\n\n6. Forgive Your Husband as Many Times as Necessary\n\nDon't keep a list of your husband's infractions to throw in his face the next time he lets you down. In Matthew 18:22, Jesus instructed us to forgive 70 times 7. His point? Be willing to forgive\u2014always. While our natural fleshly tendency toward withholding forgiveness makes this very difficult to do, remember that through Christ's strength, all things are possible (see Philippians 4:13; Matthew 19:26).\n\n7. Seek Godly Counselors\n\nLook for an older Christian woman whom you trust, and ask her to pray with you and teach you from the Bible how to love your husband. Read Christian books about marriage. And consider seeking advice from your pastor or a biblical counselor (see Titus 2:1-5).\n\n8. Learn to Be a Peacemaker\n\nJesus said, \"Blessed are the peacemakers.\" You can trust that God will bless you when you determine to be a wife who makes peace with her husband.\n\nWhat Is a Peacemaker and How Can I Become One?\n\nAs a middle child, I have many memories of being curled up on the couch with my fingers in my ears as I watched my siblings fight with one another. Because of this experience, I learned to shut down\u2014or flee\u2014whenever I was exposed to conflict. Since I would avoid conflict at all costs, I considered myself a peacekeeper. But I later learned that being a peacekeeper and a peacemaker are not the same thing.\n\nIn his book The Peacemaker, author Ken Sande says,\n\nPeacemakers are people who breathe grace. They draw continually on the goodness and power of Jesus Christ, and then they bring His love, mercy, forgiveness, strength, and wisdom to the conflicts of daily life. God delights to breathe His grace through peacemakers and use them to dissipate anger, improve understanding, promote justice, and encourage repentance and reconciliation...I have observed how even the most difficult...issues can be resolved constructively when even one...decides to breathe grace in the midst of conflict.\n\nWhen people are faced with conflict, they will usually respond in one of two ways:\n\n\u2022 Flee from the conflict\n\n\u2022 Attack the one with whom they are in conflict\n\nWhen you find yourself in conflict, which response is your natural tendency? The kind of family you grew up in may have a lot to do with how you respond when conflict arises. For example, if you come from a family where parents and siblings exhibited the attack response, you may have learned the same behavior. Or if you came from a family who \"stuffed\" their feelings to escape conflict, you may turn and run whenever an argument begins.\n\nCan you imagine how troubling it would be for a person who chooses to flee to have their spouse continue to attack them verbally while the person tries to avoid the conflict? The one in flight may be thinking, I would have to really despise someone to treat them like this. They must really hate me to say such hurtful things. (Take it from a person who flees\u2014whenever someone comes at me aggressively with hateful words, I instinctively think, They must hate me!)\n\nAt the same time, the spouse who is in attack mode may feel like the one who is trying to escape doesn't care enough to fight it out. Do you see how either response\u2014flee or attack\u2014can serve to undermine and eventually destroy harmony in a marriage?\n\nBiblical Conflict Resolution\n\nThe only way to build a marriage free of hurtful conflict is through biblical conflict resolution. Are you ready to roll up your sleeves and do the hard work of learning the right way to resolve conflict in your marriage? Here are some steps you can take to work through disputes with your spouse in a Christlike manner:\n\nAsk God to help you bring glory to Him by how you respond to conflict. When two imperfect people live together, there is bound to be conflict. A good marriage is defined by how you and your husband respond when you have disagreements.\n\nLooking for ways to reflect Christ's love to your husband when you see the beginning of a dispute will do more to strengthen your relationship with your husband than you can imagine. Many wives get so caught up in winning an argument at any cost they fail to see the long-term damage they are doing to their marriages\u2014and their families. How do you respond when you and your husband do not see eye-to-eye?\n\nIn the middle of an argument you can have a wonderful opportunity to reflect Christ's character by working to resolve the conflict in a way that honors your husband. When you determine to live in a manner that brings God glory, you give a correct estimation of His character to those who are watching how you live\u2014beginning with your children. And when your life reflects God's character, He can use your example to create in your children an appetite to know Christ. (On the contrary, any hypocrisy on your part could make your children reject your faith.)\n\nBack when I was involved in youth ministry, some of the most amazing kids I knew grew up in homes where they watched their godly mother respond in a Christlike manner to a harsh husband. Because these kids witnessed their mom's genuine faith, displayed through her difficult circumstances, they were drawn to a personal relationship with Christ as well.\n\nSometimes the best way to glorify God is to keep your tongue from evil (see Psalm 34:13). So the next time you and your husband begin to argue, ask God to help you stop yourself from saying words that will make matters worse. Psalm 139:4 says, \"There is not a word on my tongue, but behold, O LORD, You know it altogether.\" So in the time it takes a quarrelsome remark to get from your mind to your tongue, the Holy Spirit can\u2014and will\u2014remind you not to speak it. It is your job to ask Him for help, and then yield yourself in obedience to the Spirit's prompting. The more often you respond in obedience to God, the more He will transform you into a peacemaker who glorifies Him.\n\nThe next way you can respond with Christ's character is...\n\nTake responsibility for your own contribution to the conflict. When you have a disagreement with your husband, is blaming him for the problem your natural default mode? In an attempt to be helpful to your husband, do you tend to point out his flaws? You should know that regularly blaming your husband may make him feel attacked and will likely invite a counterattack\u2014or cause him to flee your presence.\n\nLearn from what Jesus said: \"Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?\" Is it possible you've become so focused on your husband's shortcomings that you have failed to acknowledge your own? When you are willing to overlook your husband's offenses and honestly admit your own faults, you just might find he will begin to offer to you the same grace.\n\nDon't bring up your husband's past failures. In the heat of an argument, are you tempted to pull out the list of your husband's past infractions? For example, if he overspends on a particular item, causing you to have less money for groceries that month, do you immediately harp on every other time he has committed a similar offense? Reacting in this way will certainly build a wall of discord between the two of you.\n\nWhen we were newly married, Steve was invited by a man he worked with to invest in a business. The man told Steve his investment would pay out tenfold if he gave him a certain number of dollars. Steve and I talked about the investment and decided to take a chance by throwing our money into the venture. Not long after Steve wrote the initial investment check we learned there would be no payout\u2014and we would never see our money again. We were disappointed, but learned a valuable lesson that day.\n\nI hadn't given another thought to the bad investment until more than a decade later when my husband was teaching a marriage seminar. He recounted the story to the audience, and said, \"Men learn from their mistakes. And I learned a good lesson that day about get-rich-quick schemes.\"\n\nThen Steve addressed the wives in the group. He said, \"Rhonda has never again mentioned the loss of that money. Even though she could have thrown it in my face a number of times when we were struggling to make ends meet, she never did\u2014never. Ladies, I cannot tell you how much you will bless your husband if you forgive and forget when he makes mistakes.\n\n\"As a result of how Rhonda responded to me in that experience, my admiration, trust, and respect for her grew tremendously. And when you do the same, I am confident your husband's trust and respect will grow for you as well.\"\n\nWhenever your husband lets you down, trusting him to do better the next time communicates your commitment to reconciliation. Are you willing to do whatever it takes to daily communicate forgiveness and reconciliation to him?\n\nFreedom from Conflict\n\nMany wives will weep for a good marriage, but they will not roll up their sleeves to do what it takes to get there. When you draw on Christ's grace, follow His example, and put His teachings into practice, you can find freedom from impulsive, self-centered decisions that contribute to conflict. As you employ the aforementioned eight steps to making peace, and determine to stop fighting with your husband, loving conflict resolution is within your grasp. And when you become a peacemaker who lives to glorify God, your Christlike character will certainly bring peace to your marriage.\n\nFROM A HUSBAND'S PERSPECTIVE\n\n######\n\nA Word from Steve\n\nA woman once told me, \"If I just had a different husband, everything would be okay.\" Have you ever made this same statement or one like it? While you might think your life would be better if you had a different husband, if there is conflict in your marriage, odds are that he is only half the problem. And since part of the responsibility for conflict lies with you, if you were to divorce your husband, you would just be dragging yourself\u2014and your unresolved issues\u2014into yet another relationship.\n\nEven if you could find a man who would always let you have your way, if you've never dealt with your selfishness or any of the unbiblical ways you relate to others, it would only be a matter of time before the fighting started up again.\n\nIf you're like most married couples, the conflicts in your marriage relationship come as a result of disappointment. For example, when you have a specific expectation and your husband does not measure up to it, you will become irritated, hurt, or even angry. Maybe your husband refuses to squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom of the tube (which I admit is a pet peeve of mine), even though you have repeatedly asked him to change his behavior. So how do you respond? First you start to nag him about it. Then maybe you dwell on thoughts like, Doesn't he know how hard I work to keep the bathroom clean? He doesn't even respect all I do around here. (I know this sounds silly, but believe me, a majority of arguments in a marriage begin at this level of disappointment.)\n\nMaybe you don't lash out or say anything at all when you are disappointed. Instead, you just determine to keep your mouth shut\u2014all the while mentally rehearsing in your mind what you would like to say to your husband. Keeping your mouth shut \"to keep the peace\" without changing your negative thinking is like putting a Band-Aid on cancer and hoping it will go away. Obviously, just covering up the problem won't make it leave. You have to address the problem itself.\n\nIf you want to stop fighting with your husband, take a good, long look at yourself and bring the truth of God's Word into the ways you interact with your husband. Evaluate your contribution to your marriage conflicts, and confess your sins to God. Ask your husband to forgive you, and allow God's Word to transform you. Every one of these actions will go a long way toward bringing more peace into your marriage.\n\nLook again at the eight principles Rhonda laid out in this chapter. Make those steps the habits of your life. Developing new habits takes continued effort. When you fail, confess it to the Lord, then do the right thing the next time. And don't give up!\n\nHebrews 12:14 says, \"Pursue peace with all people.\" God has called His children to dwell in peace with one another. What more important place can you begin to live out peaceful relationships than in your own home? Discipline yourself to become a woman of peace, and soon you will find that resolving conflict God's way will become your passion. When this happens, your home will be a place where peaceful relationships are enjoyed. And without harsh conflict in the home, your children will feel more secure, and will come to learn the keys to biblical conflict resolution for their own marriages.\n\n######\n\nTHINKING IT THROUGH\n\n######\n\n1. Write out and memorize Romans 12:18.\n\n2. When conflict arises, do you tend to flee or attack? How does your husband respond to conflict? From the eight steps to becoming a peacemaker, name two specific steps you will employ to bring peace into your marriage.\n\n3. With regard to the onset of an argument, what insight do you learn from Proverbs 15:1?\n\n######\n\nLIVING IT OUT\n\n######\n\n1. What does James 4:1-2 say is the reason for fighting and quarrels?\n\n2. Are you so passionate about getting your way that you will fight to get it? If so, name at least one way you will let God redirect your passions to glorify Him and bring peace to your marriage.\n\n3. If you grew up in a home where people fought\u2014or if your marriage has been characterized by strife\u2014the idea of conflict-free living may be unfamiliar to you. Don't give up. Your persistence will result in progress, and God will be glorified as peace reigns in your marriage. Take a moment now to pray and commit yourself to biblical conflict resolution.\n\nVisit NoRegretsWoman.com to watch Steve and Rhonda's video link and\/or listen to their suggested audio link.\n\nOur Marriage Would Be Better if Bad Things Would Stop Happening\n\nThe Joy of the Lord Is Your Strength\n\n######\n\nSeveral years ago, Steve went on a dirt-bike camping retreat with some of the men in our church. Around four o'clock in the afternoon on the second day of their retreat, my phone rang. You know the call you get that causes your heart to sink? This was that kind of call. A friend on the other end of the line said Steve had been seriously injured in a motorcycle accident. I was told that Steve lay unable to move in a canyon where emergency personnel were having a hard time rescuing him. Rescuing him? I thought.\n\nI asked, \"How bad is his injury?\"\n\nMy friend didn't have much information except that Steve was hurt badly and was waiting to be rescued by helicopter. She also said that it had started to snow, so Steve was in the elements and going into shock as he waited. With the promise of a phone call when she knew more, I hung up the phone. I happened to be at my brother's house when I received this disturbing call, so we all stopped to pray for Steve and his impending rescue.\n\nHours went by\u2014and no phone call. Because there was no cell service where the men were camping, I was unable to reach any of them. Finally, about four hours later, I called my friend Denel, who said her husband, John, had just walked in the door from the camping trip. John informed us that a rescue team had just hiked Steve to the top of the canyon, where they were now airlifting him to the hospital. In the end, Steve had lain in the dirt and cold, and in excruciating pain, for seven hours while waiting to be rescued.\n\nAround nine o'clock that night I finally received a call telling me which hospital Steve would be flown to. My brother then drove me the 90-minute ride to Stanford Hospital.\n\nI was so relieved when I finally got to see Steve at the hospital that I immediately covered his face with my kisses\u2014and my tears. He was pale, covered with dirt, and still had gravel in his mouth, which I immediately began to scoop out from inside of his cheeks. It was then I learned that Steve had shattered his right hip and would require extensive surgery. I'll spare you all the gory details of what is involved in putting a person with a shattered hip socket into traction while they await surgery, but suffice it to say, our oldest daughter, Meredith, nearly passed out.\n\nOnce Steve was admitted to the hospital and given something to dull the pain, the severity of the incident began to dawn on me. The doctors were concerned his right leg would no longer be able to function, and words like wheelchair and prosthetics were being thrown out as they showed me X-rays of Steve's injury.\n\nMy husband was fragile\u2014fragile! I didn't know what to do with that. This was the man who would cut off the tip of his finger and then keep working (true story). Steve had always been the rock in our family. And no matter what went wrong, he would always say, \"It's going to be okay\"\u2014and we would believe him. Now who was going to say, \"it's going to be okay\"\u2014and make me believe it?\n\nFor nine days, Steve was in traction awaiting surgery. I never once went home. Over the course of those days, Steve had so many visitors the hospital staff was amazed at the party that was continually going on in his room. And the kids from our church made a mural to hang in Steve's room that told the story of his accident through their drawings\u2014complete with helicopters, motorcycles, and red blood spurting out of Pastor Steve's leg. Steve loved it!\n\nAnd, of course, our own kids were by our side through the whole ordeal. We laughed, prayed, and thoroughly enjoyed one another as we were gathered around Steve's traction-extended body. Our son Brandon turned 18 the night before Steve's surgery, so we all gathered up in Steve's room and sang happy birthday to Brandon, and then prayed for the Lord to guide the surgeon's hands as he repaired Steve's hip\u2014and make it so he would be able to walk again.\n\nSteve's surgery went well, in spite of the excruciating pain. The Lord graciously provided Steve with one of the best\u2014if not the best\u2014orthopedic surgeons in the nation. After placing a metal plate where Steve's hip socket had once been, the surgeon did an incredible job of repairing the damage that had been caused by the accident.\n\nAfter Steve was out of surgery, we all prayed together and thanked the Lord for sending us such an amazing physician. Then everyone went home\u2014with the exception of me and our friends John and Denel.\n\nI had encouraged John and Denel to go home too, but they had spent their own sleepless nights in the hospital when their daughter Cassie had had open-heart surgery, and they said they were staying. I gratefully accepted their offer. (Talk about living out 2 Corinthians 1:4\u2014they comforted us with the comfort by which they themselves had been comforted.)\n\nAnd If the Accident Wasn't Enough...\n\nAbout one-and-a-half hours after our two youngest kids had gone home, I received a phone call from our daughter Kayla, who was crying hysterically. She reported how icy and snowy it was up at our house. I immediately said, \"Oh, Lord\u2014no, not another accident!\"\n\nKayla calmed down enough to say, \"No, we are fine. It's the house. It's completely flooded with water!\"\n\nApparently during all the time we had been spending at the hospital, the water pipes in our house had slowly filled up with ice and finally burst. Because our wood-burning stove had not been lit for a number of days, the house had become very cold. And because Steve had just filled our 5000-gallon water tank before he left on his camping trip, the entire tank had emptied into our house when the pipes had burst.\n\nEven as I tell this story here, I have to stop and take a deep breath because of the enormity of all that was happening at the time. As I sat in the hallway of the hospital hearing the news about our flooded house, all I could think of was how relieved I was that the phone call had not been about Kayla and Brandon being in an accident. I kept telling Kayla, \"It's okay, honey. It's just stuff. It's going to be all right.\"\n\nThe nurses at the nurses' station (who had become good friends by now) were all watching me as I hung up the phone and dissolved into tears. Once I composed myself, I was able to smile and again repeat, \"It's just stuff.\" And to the watching nurses I was able to share how I had peace from knowing my God would work all things together for good (see Romans 8:28).\n\nI was so thankful John and Denel had stayed the night because they were able to encourage us while we were in shock over yet another catastrophe. It wasn't long before they even had us laughing at the \"comedy of errors\" the whole fiasco had been.\n\nAfter the kids' call, I called my brother, who immediately drove up to our house. Then I called our church family, who by the next morning were at our house removing all of the water and saturated flooring. All the while, they lovingly ministered to our kids.\n\nOnce we got home from the hospital, Steve's recovery was long and painful\u2014and I never left his side. I was determined not to leave him to feel lonely or discouraged. \"We're in this together, baby,\" I would tell him.\n\nAll through the long, sleepless nights and the sorrow I experienced while watching my sweet husband in so much pain, the Holy Spirit kept whispering to my heart, \"The joy of the LORD is your strength\" (Nehemiah 8:10). No, I did not hear an audible voice, but as loudly as I can describe to you as one's heart can hear God speaking, over and over again He reminded me the joy of the Lord is your strength. I shared this with no one, but pondered it in my heart during the darkest moments of those difficult days. Taking God's words seriously, I determined to fight for joy in spite of how difficult it was to watch my love suffer so. And all through that time we were living on concrete floors and sorting through possessions that had been ruined by the flood.\n\nThe Joy of the Lord Is Your Strength\n\nWhile Steve was recovering from surgery, I was very protective over him. Well-meaning people who wanted to visit could not know how little sleep Steve was getting, or how much pain he was enduring. One person in particular kept calling and asking to come up and visit with Steve. Several times I said no, but then Steve said, \"Ah, let him come up. It'll be okay.\"\n\nReluctantly I said to the caller, \"You can come up, but you can't stay long.\"\n\nWhen the man arrived, I left him alone with Steve to talk. By the time they were done, Steve had led the man to the Lord! (And here I was being a protective wife when God wanted to use my husband in his weakness.)\n\nThe first Sunday that Steve and I were able to attend church, we could hardly wait to see our sweet church family, who had so blessed us with prayer, food, and continuing on in the work of the ministry while we were away.\n\nAfter the service, the man who had accepted Christ in our home gave me an envelope to \"encourage me,\" he said. Inside was a lovely card with a beautiful scripture across the front. And when I opened the card, there it was\u2014an incredible love note to me from the Lord!\n\nUpon a small tile placed inside of the card was inscribed, The joy of the LORD is your strength\u2014Nehemiah 8:10.\n\nJust remembering that makes me cry! I hadn't told anyone about the Lord getting me through each day with those words from Nehemiah 8:10\u2014no one! And our heavenly Father, in His kindness, sent this new believer to me with a loving note from His Word\u2014the very words His Holy Spirit had been whispering to my heart. Grateful tears spilled from my eyes that day, just like they are now. In that moment, Psalm 139:17 washed over my heart and mind: \"How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God! How great is the sum of them!\"\n\nThe same God who so gently walked us through our trials is the One who will walk with you through yours as well. How do you and your husband respond when you are going through difficult events? Are you drawn closer to one another as you look to Christ for answers? Or do you turn on one another and blame each other for the calamity?\n\nI have a friend whose son was hit by a car and killed. He told me that after the accident, a wedge grew between him and his wife. Both were grieving, and both were blaming themselves and each other for the accident. Sadly, over time, they got divorced.\n\nAre You Surprised by Trials?\n\nWhy is it some marriages fall apart when they go through hard times while others seem to grow stronger? Let's unpack this question, shall we?\n\nOver the years that I have been involved in ministry, the one common response I have observed in Christians when they encounter a trial is they are often taken by surprise. This includes individuals who know that bad things happen to good people (one even wrote a book about that). But when their own little world is visited by difficulties, they are not only shocked, but they are downright bewildered. And this is often when Christians begin to question God's love for them.\n\nThe apostle Peter warned that we should fully expect troubled times and warned, \"Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you\" (1 Peter 4:12 ESV).\n\nIn that verse, the word \"happening\" in the phrase \"as though something strange were happening to you\" means \"to fall by chance.\" One Bible teacher explains it this way: \"A Christian must not think that his persecution is something that happened accidentally. God allowed it and designed it for the believer's testing, purging and cleansing.\"\n\nBecause people tend to question God's goodness when trials come, it is important for you to understand how God allows\u2014and even orchestrates\u2014trials in the lives of His children to accomplish His purposes.\n\nIn Isaiah 55:8, God says, \"My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways.\" When we learn to trust that God's ways are good regardless of how difficult our circumstances are, then our lives\u2014and marriages\u2014can grow stronger to reflect more clearly His glory to those around us. And if during your darkest hours you and your husband remind one another of God's goodness and encourage one another with Scripture, your hearts will move toward one another as you grow closer to Christ.\n\nFirst Peter 1:6 says, \"In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while, if need be, you have been grieved.\" In other words, that which brought grief to you can become a reason for rejoicing.\n\nSo wait a minute: Am I to believe that Steve's accident was not really an \"accident\" but something God allowed\u2014dare I say God deemed necessary\u2014for our spiritual growth?\n\nI believe the answer is yes! Sure, the pain my husband endured was terrible. And yes, the road to healing was long and difficult. However, there's no question that God accomplished good through what had happened. And we will never fully know all the good that God did until we stand in heaven, where God will reveal to each of us all the good He did on our behalf.\n\nAll through our trial, God continually gave us the peace to endure, and He provided for our every need. And when the house was flooded, our kids discovered a deep love and willing helpfulness from our church family. They showed us God's love not only by cleaning up the house but also by generously purchasing new flooring for our home.\n\nWhat's more, during Steve's time of recovery, the church was robbed and Steve's laptop\u2014with all his sermon notes\u2014was stolen. And the money the church had collected for our flooring turned up missing. (By this point, all we could do was laugh when yet another \"trial\" came into our already topsy-turvy lives.)\n\nThrough it all, the joy of the Lord truly was our strength. We and our children learned where the source of joy was during that time\u2014the Lord Himself. In the years since, we have watched our kids and their spouses fight for joy whenever trials have visited their lives. When Meredith and Jake gave birth to our new granddaughter, we were heartbroken at the news she had serious birth defects. Yet the Lord continues to be their strength and ours as we pray for our sweet little Ivy.\n\nLooking back at all the ways the Lord took care of us gives us more reason than ever to trust God in every circumstance.\n\nDon't Look at the Waves\n\nMost of us have heard the story of when Peter stepped out of the boat during a storm to walk on the water toward Jesus:\n\nPeter answered him, \"Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.\" He said, \"Come.\" So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came to Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid, and beginning to sink he cried out, \"Lord, save me.\" Jesus immediately reached out his hand and took hold of him, saying to him, \"O you of little faith, why did you doubt?\" And when they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, \"Truly you are the Son of God\" (Matthew 14:28-33 ESV).\n\nPeter took a great step of faith when he stepped out onto the raging sea\u2014a faith I'm not too sure I would have had. How about you? Summoning his courage, he put one foot in front of the other as the waves raged around him. That had to be very intimidating\u2014even terrifying! But then he took his eyes off of Jesus and focused instead on the stormy wind and waters, and he began to sink. Before the waves could swallow Peter, Jesus reached out and pulled Peter to Himself\u2014and to safety.\n\nI know many sermons have been preached on the importance of keeping our eyes on Jesus when the storms of life come, but the message bears repeating. So let's look a little closer at this familiar story and see if we can gain a better understanding of how and why God permits trials in the lives of His followers. As we do so, I'd like for us to start by looking at the bigger picture of what happened in Matthew 14.\n\nFrom the Mountaintop\n\nRight before the disciples were caught in that terrible storm, they had just experienced the glorious miracle of Jesus feeding the 5000 with the loaves and fishes. Talk about a mountaintop experience! Top that off with the fact everyone who was fed witnessed the miracle too. That had to be incredible\u2014wouldn't you agree?\n\nRight after the 5000 were fed, Jesus made the disciples leave. Matthew 14:22 says, \"Immediately Jesus made His disciples get into the boat and go before Him to the other side, while He sent the multitudes away.\"\n\nJesus knew what was next\u2014a raging storm. And I wonder if the disciples were a little disappointed that they didn't have more time to bask in the glorious experience they had just been through.\n\nHave you ever found it hard to leave a place where you saw God's hand in action? For Steve and me, youth camp was one such place. There were many times when we saw the Spirit of God convict kids and draw them to surrender to Christ. At the end of each camp, we hated having to leave because we knew how the world would try to pull those kids away from their commitments to the Lord. Can you think of a time when you saw God do an amazing work\u2014and then you immediately had to go back to everyday life experiences? That's hard, isn't it?\n\nInto the Storm\n\nJesus did not join the disciples in the boat, He stayed behind to pray (Matthew 14:23). But He knew where the disciples would be. When we face trials, it can often feel like Jesus is far away. And yet Hebrews 13:5 promises that Jesus will never leave nor forsake us. Even though He may send us into a tumultuous sea, we can know Jesus is right there with us, and He is always praying for us as we toil in our specific situation (see Romans 8:34).\n\nMaybe you've had times when it seems as though Jesus doesn't respond immediately to your pleas for help. Remember when Mary and Martha sent for Jesus to come heal their sick brother? Jesus did not come right away. Instead, He waited two whole days. And He said to the disciples, \"This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified through it\" (John 11:4).\n\nI love how the apostle John assures the reader, \"Now Jesus loved Mary and Martha\" before he tells us that Jesus waited two more days before going to them. Don't you sometimes feel like God doesn't love you when He doesn't rescue you in a timely manner? Satan loves to whisper in your ear, \"If God really loved you, He wouldn't have allowed this to happen.\" Don't fall into the trap of believing this lie and walking away from the only One who can turn your trials into something beautiful for your good and His glory (Romans 8:28).\n\nFighting the Storm\n\nAfter fighting the storm late into the night, the disciples saw Jesus walking toward them on the water. But at first they didn't recognize Him. In fact, they thought He was a ghost and they cried out in fear (Matthew 14:25-26). Sometimes when we are in the midst of a terrible storm, we are so focused on fighting it that we don't recognize Jesus when He comes to us. And because the disciples were not expecting Jesus to rescue them, it may have never occurred to them to even watch for Him.\n\nIn the same way, do you find yourself working so hard to pay the bills, fight an illness, or heal your marriage that you are not even watching the horizon for your Savior to come and help? Maybe your eyes are fixed on your circumstances, and you are hoping that somehow, everything will work out. Are you placing your trust in yourself instead of the Lord?\n\nResting in God Himself\n\nWhen Jesus arrived at the boat, He told the terrified disciples, \"Take heart; it is I. Do not be afraid\" (Matthew 14:27 ESV). Notice Jesus didn't say, \"Don't be afraid; I am going to fix this situation.\" No, He simply said, \"Guys\u2014it's Me!\" When Jesus speaks, hearts are calmed and hope is renewed.\n\nWhenever you are going through a struggle, the best place to find courage is from our Lord Himself. Some people cry out, \"God, give me a sign\" or \"Show me what to do,\" when Jesus simply wants you to focus on Him\u2014not on how He is going to make everything better.\n\nWhen the apostle Paul struggled with an infirmity and asked God three times to heal it, God responded, \"My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness\" (2 Corinthians 12:9). Then Paul said, \"Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in needs, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ's sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong\" (verse 10).\n\nOnly God knows the reasons He has allowed the trials you experience. And the sooner you let go of trying to figure out how to escape the trial or how to fix the problem, the sooner your faith will grow and God's peace will rule in your heart. This goes for your marriage as well. When you stop looking to your husband to resolve the problem and let him off the hook, and he sees you walking in faith through the raging sea, peace will wash over your marriage in a beautiful surge, and you will find that the joy of the Lord is your strength.\n\nThere's one more observation I'd like to share from Matthew 14.\n\nStepping Out in Faith\n\nWhen Peter recognized that it was Jesus who was approaching the boat, he said, \"Lord, if it is You, command me to come to You on the water.\" And Jesus said, \"Come\" (Matthew 14:28-29). I love how Peter responded here. Poor Peter often said things that got him in trouble, and even today people talk about the times when he lacked faith. But here, Peter was the only disciple who stepped out in faith when Jesus called to him. All the other guys stayed in the boat. Oh sure, they watched Peter walk on the water. Maybe they were even cheering him on. But none of them had the courage to step out and join him.\n\nDo you have that kind of faith? When you fix your eyes on Jesus and remember that He is sovereignly in control of all of life's circumstances, you will not only weather the storms of life, but you may even find the courage to say, \"Bring it on, Jesus. Call me to step out in faith. My eyes are on You.\"\n\nYou Are on a Mission\n\nEvery follower of Christ is called to reach people for God in their generation. We are to make Christ known so that people might come to redemption. As a Christian, anything you do in your life should be filtered through this missional statement:\n\nTo know Christ and make Him known.\n\nWhen you and your husband learn to live with a mission perspective, you will stop looking to each other to fix a difficult situation and turn to God instead. And you will trust that whatever trials or blessings God allows to come your way are divinely orchestrated by Him so \"that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world\" (Philippians 2:15 ESV). This allows God to use whatever means necessary to shine His glory through your obedient life so that through your testimony, He can create an appetite in other people to know Christ.\n\nTo shine brightly means to use your blessings to bless others, and to always acknowledge that it is the Lord who provides\u2014rather than taking the glory for your accomplishments. And it means walking through painful circumstances with joy so that Christ's peace will be seen by everyone who is watching.\n\nAll through our marriage, Steve and I have experienced great blessings and deep sorrow. I am confident the Lord has more in store for us as we seek to serve Him and share the gospel with the people He brings across our paths. What about your marriage?\n\nI challenge you to stop here and take a moment to ponder the highs and lows of your married life. Have there been times when you felt alone in the boat on a raging sea? How did you respond? Did you blame your husband for not making enough money, or not being sympathetic enough when you were hurting? Or maybe you have not yet gone through a truly painful experience. If so, I hate to break it to you: you will. So rather than hope that will never happen, you would do well to begin growing your trust in the character of Christ through prayer and studying the Bible.\n\nIt is through Scripture that God has chosen to reveal His ways to us. So when you read God's Word, ask Him to help you know Him better and trust Him more. Then you will be better prepared to not only survive life's storms, but actually thrive in times of trouble.\n\nDetermine to live with a missional perspective. This means daily asking God to do those good works He planned to do through you before the foundation of this world (see Ephesians 1:3-6; 2:10). When you wake up each day, ask God to give you a passion to seek His face through His Word so you can learn to trust Him more.\n\nWill you courageously ask God to use every circumstance in your marriage to show others that a relationship with Christ is the only way to true happiness? Even if your husband does not keep his focus on Christ, when you do you can joyfully build a marriage that will grow stronger through life's blessings and sorrows\u2014and God will be glorified.\n\nFROM A HUSBAND'S PERSPECTIVE\n\n######\n\nA Word from Steve\n\nWhat Rhonda didn't tell you about my dirt-biking accident is how the accident came about.\n\nAn insight you may not know about men is that we have an uncanny ability to squeeze all the excitement we possibly can out of a day of fun with our buddies. The day of my accident was no exception. We were coming to the end of our day of riding into a canyon and jamming up the other side of the bowl on a moist shale hill while throwing a rooster tail of dirt and rock behind us. This spectacle looked awesome to those who were watching from the top of the canyon. (I know this information is likely neither here nor there to you, but your husband would probably appreciate it!)\n\nWith evening upon us, the inevitable words came: \"One more time!\" (I'm told it was me who shouted those words, but in my defense, I really cannot remember.) Within a few seconds I was on the ground in excruciating pain. During the seven hours I lay there with a shattered hip, many things went through my mind. Of course I questioned the wisdom of my zeal to take one more run at the hill, but mostly I was just wondering how I was ever going to get out of my predicament. And after enduring several hours of intense pain, I remember telling the Lord, \"It's really okay if You want to take me home now.\" Have you ever been in such great pain that death didn't look so bad? Scary, isn't it?\n\nWhen bad things happen, how do you respond? Most people work their way through a variety of responses, such as sadness, anger, fear, blaming others, blaming themselves, or even blaming God. I am amazed at how often people blame God for their struggles. Even when they can look back and see that the cause of their difficult circumstance was their own doing, they continue to blame God for the consequences of their poor choices.\n\nI have no doubt my poor judgment was the cause of my accident, but I am equally convinced the Lord allowed the trial to bring about His good in my life and the lives of those around me. Can you think of a time your poor choices brought about painful circumstances? In those times, how did you respond? Did the trial put a wedge between you and your husband, or did it draw you closer together as you looked to Christ for comfort?\n\nWhen you find yourself amidst an unexpected trial, is your automatic reflex to blame your husband? What would happen if, instead, you began to develop a habit of looking to Jesus? With your eyes fixed on Him\u2014rather than the trial\u2014you will find His peace and hope even if your circumstance doesn't change.\n\nWhen you learn to look for what good God might accomplish through the hardship you are facing, you will discover how to glorify Him in the trial. When you suffer, God can be glorified in a number of ways:\n\n\u2022 God will show Himself powerful on your behalf by rescuing you from the pain.\n\n\u2022 God will grow your trust in Him to prepare you for an even greater trial to come.\n\n\u2022 God will draw others to know Christ because of the faithfulness they observe in you.\n\n\u2022 Fellow believers will be encouraged as they observe your joyful trust and commitment to Christ.\n\n\u2022 The faith of your children can increase greatly when they see you and your husband determine to trust Christ through difficult times.\n\nJesus warned His disciples, \"These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world\" (John 16:33). I love that Jesus gave His followers\u2014and us\u2014this assurance so that we can face life's trials with His peace.\n\nAnd Jesus' words should help you to realize that nothing surprises God. Every struggle, heartbreak, and disappointment is filtered through His loving hand. Ultimately, His purpose is to make Christ known through you. Remember that as a Christian, you are on a mission to shine brightly the hope of Christ to a world who desperately needs Him. Any blessings or struggles you experience are opportunities for the Lord to redeem the lost, encourage fellow believers, and mold you and your spouse more into the image of His Son. Living with this perspective will enable you to build a marriage that not only withstands the storms of life, but also holds out hope to those the Lord brings into your path.\n\n######\n\nTHINKING IT THROUGH\n\n######\n\n1. Some of my favorite scriptures to recite when I am amidst a trial are listed below. To prepare yourself to focus on Christ during your next trial, write out and then memorize each one.\n\n2 Chronicles 20:12\n\nHebrews 12:2\n\n2 Corinthians 4:7-9\n\n2. Read Psalm 119:25-32, then make a list of actions you should take when your soul is \"covered with dust.\"\n\n######\n\nLIVING IT OUT\n\n######\n\n1. With pen in hand, list some of your favorite people in the Bible. Next to their names, write out a trial they endured and how God used that trial to show the world that He is the one true God. If you need some prompting, I have provided some names and passages below:\n\nDavid: 1 Samuel 17 (pay specific attention to verses 34-37)\n\nJoseph: Genesis 39\u201341 (notice Joseph's perspective in Genesis 50:20)\n\nHeroes of the Faith: Hebrews 11\n\nAfter you are done, spend some time in prayer. Ask God to help you live like these heroes of the faith. Pray that you will remember you are on a mission to hold out the hope of salvation to a generation in desperate need of Jesus.\n\n2. Why do you think looking to Jesus during a trial will help your marriage grow stronger? What good habits can you develop in preparation for the next time you find yourself facing one of life's storms? Write them.\n\nVisit NoRegretsWoman.com to watch Steve and Rhonda's video link and\/or listen to their suggested audio link.\n\nPhoto credit: JPlazaPhotography\n\nIf Momma Ain't Happy, Ain't Nobody Happy\n\nIt's Not Your Husband's Job to Make You Happy\n\n######\n\nFrom the time Jim and Elizabeth George first met, they fell in love. Elizabeth says, \"Ours was truly love at first sight as we passed and smiled at each other regularly on our way to and from classes.\"\n\n\"It was a bright autumn day at the University of Oklahoma. As I hurried toward my first class after lunch, I noticed him again. He was smiling as he came my way...Well, evidently he noticed me, too, because soon [in November] a mutual friend set up a blind date for us.\"\n\nOn Valentine's Day, Jim asked Elizabeth to be his bride. And by June, 22-year-old Jim and 20-year-old Elizabeth were married. Of their courtship, Elizabeth says, \"There was never a dull moment, and fun was the center of all we did...Wow, what a whirlwind of excitement!\"\n\nOf their honeymoon, she adds, \"Truly, it seemed like we were standing on the threshold of a lifetime of joy, love, excitement, and passion...This is how our wonderful friendship and marriage all began.\"\n\nAfter the honeymoon, however, it didn't take long for reality to set in. Elizabeth was working full-time, and Jim worked long hours with a one-hour commute each way to his job. With life's demands weighing heavily on their marriage, Jim and Elizabeth focused on the work in front of them.\n\nElizabeth remembers, \"Things went well for a while. And then...both Jim and I would tell you that after eight years, things became awfully empty and got pretty rocky...\" She says,\n\nWe fumbled, we argued, and we let each other down. Because we didn't find fulfillment in our marriage we poured our lives into causes, friends, hobbies, and intellectual pursuits. Having two children also didn't fill the emptiness we each felt. Our married life droned on for eight frustrating years until, by an act of God's grace, we became a Christian family...Giving our lives to Jesus Christ made a tremendous difference inside our hearts.\n\nBecoming a Christian did not change overnight the habits that had been established in their marriage. As time went on and they learned to apply the Bible's truths to their relationship, theirs became a happy marriage. And they have since written a number of books in which they share what they have learned about God's design for marriage.\n\nIn her book A Wife After God's Own Heart, Elizabeth offers this valuable insight:\n\nYour commitment to follow God's plan for a wife makes a tremendous difference. How? It will make a difference in the atmosphere in your home, in your communication as a couple, in your heart as love for your husband blossoms and abounds, and in the way you treat him with great respect. It will also improve the climate of your marriage, paving the way for the two of you to dwell together in harmony.\n\nIn addition, Elizabeth strongly recommends that wives make sure to keep the fun in their marriage. One morning some years ago, Jim added the word fun to Elizabeth's daily planner to playfully remind her to include some downtime into their busy schedules. She says, \"If Jim and I aren't careful, we can give ourselves to all work and no play! So just as we learned to persevere at our work and in the upkeep of our home, we have learned (and are still learning!) to remember to have some fun along the way.\"\n\nCan You Relate?\n\nCan you relate to Jim and Elizabeth's experiences? I can. Before the wedding, did you dream of how much fun it would be to be married? Setting up house and caring for your man were likely welcome tasks on your list. But when the life you imagined doesn't happen, disappointment is sure to set in.\n\nIf you find yourself in the middle of an unfulfilling or even difficult marriage, do not despair. Jim and Elizabeth turned their marriage around, and with God's help, so can you. Let's find out what is involved in making that happen.\n\nDecide to Enjoy Your Spouse\n\nSome of the best marriages are enjoyed by couples who make the time and effort to playfully delight in one another. Right now, can you think of a couple whose joy is contagious? Don't you just love to spend time with them? Don't you long to be them? What can you do to become more like the couple you desire to emulate?\n\nFirst off, think back to a time when it was downright fun to spend time with your man. How did you enjoy one another back when you were dating? You didn't fold your arms, tap your foot, and say, \"Ok, I'm here. Now make me happy.\" No\u2014more than likely, you planned to have a good time simply because you were happy to be together with your love.\n\nWith all the distractions life throws at you each day, you have to decide daily to enjoy your spouse. And when you determine each day to celebrate the time you spend with your husband, you have taken an important step toward making your marriage a delight.\n\nI remember a brief conversation my parents had when I was 17 years old. My father, who had the day off and was working in the garage, came into the house and said to my mother, \"Hey, I need to run to the store to buy a ladder. Wanna come?\" Without even looking up from washing the dishes, my mom replied, \"Why would I want to go with you to buy a ladder? That's not fun.\"\n\nI watched my dad's face fall and shoulders shrug as he walked back out to the garage. My mom was completely oblivious to how her response had dashed my father's hopes for a fun trip to the store. However, the incident made an indelible impression on me.\n\nWhen you are looking for ways to enjoy your husband, even running the simplest of errands together can provide an opportunity for some fun. When our kids were young, Steve and I would wait until the little ones had gone to bed, and then leaving them in the care of their older sister, we would sneak off to a 24-hour home improvement store. Steve was doing yet another remodel of our home, so there were frequent purchases to be made. This meant we had little money to spend on dates, and less time than usual for Steve to devote to me.\n\nSo I had a choice to make. I could have insisted Steve do all the shopping himself and complained that he never had money or time to spend with me. Or I could go with him to the home improvement store and find ways to enjoy an otherwise arduous task. Remembering how my mother missed an opportunity to have fun with my dad, I chose to go with Steve.\n\nEven now I am smiling as I remember those late-night runs. We were surprised to discover the store played some pretty amazing music late at night. Steve and I actually danced in the aisles when our favorite '70s songs played. (He's probably going to grimace when he finds out I told you this.)\n\nWhen Momma Ain't Happy\n\nDo you ever feel like happy times are always just out of your grasp? No matter how much you try to plan time to enjoy one another, something always seems to hijack your plans? I know there are seasons in marriage when there is so much work to do that it seems impossible to make time for each other.\n\nWhen our children were young, there were days when I was simply exhausted. Our youngest daughter, Kayla, was plagued with ear infections that would inevitably flare up in the middle of the night. And after staying up through the night to comfort her, I could not go back to bed because our two-year-old son would wake up and need my attention. Have you had similar experiences?\n\nI remember how difficult those days of raising little ones were. I recall how Steve would attempt to bring a jovial atmosphere into our home only to have one of the kids spill their milk at the table, causing more work for me, as I so rudely chided. Even as my harsh words were leaving my lips, I would immediately regret them. My poor husband didn't stand a chance with my hormonally imbalanced, sleep-deprived disposition.\n\nAre you the mom of little ones? Or maybe you have teenagers in your home who are skilled at working Mom and Dad into an argument so they can get their way. Raising kids is both hard and wonderful\u2014exhausting and exhilarating.\n\nIn my own experience, when I allowed my circumstances to dictate my joy, my family was destined to ride with me on the roller coaster of my emotions. I did not become a joyful wife and mom until I learned the importance of spending time in prayer and daily Bible study. In other words, I needed to look to God. I could not expect Steve to give me a life free from difficulty so I would be happy. I could not ask him to do for me what only God can do.\n\nThe only way you can experience true joy\u2014no matter what your circumstances\u2014is by pursuing intimacy with Christ on a daily basis. As you determine to seek joy in your relationship with Him, you will discover that your happiness comes not from how well your day turns out, but from Jesus Himself.\n\nAs a young mom, when I determined to be daily cleansed by \"the washing of water by the word\" (Ephesians 5:26), I came to know a deep, abiding joy within my heart\u2014regardless of how the day unfolded. When you determine to know Christ through the pages of Scripture, then God's peace, wisdom, and joy will spill out of your life and into your home.\n\nYou may be tempted to believe you are too busy to practice the spiritual disciplines required to be a happy wife. Don't fall for that kind of thinking\u2014don't allow the urgent to take priority over the essential.\n\nWhile kids and their needs often present a sort of urgency, what they really need is a mom filled with God's wisdom and joy. Take this advice from an older woman: The season during which your kids need you will be over before you know it. Your husband, by contrast, needs you for a lifetime. Devote yourself to becoming a happy wife, and you will build a marriage both you and your husband will enjoy for the rest of your lives.\n\nCelebrating Your Anniversary at a Biker Bar?\n\nSome years ago when we were still raising our kids, Steve's parents lived with us on our ranch because his mom suffered from Alzheimer's disease. At this time, we were also remodeling our one-bedroom house. As our wedding anniversary approached, Steve and I talked about going out on a date to celebrate.\n\nSince Steve's father was dealing with his wife's illness, and we didn't have any babysitters living nearby, we resigned ourselves to not being able to go out. However, the more we acquiesced to the possibility of not celebrating, the more determined I became to figure out a way to have our date. In the end, we put our younger two children to bed, and left our 11-year-old daughter with the telephone in her hand on speed-dial to her grandfather, who lived next door.\n\nSteve and I drove five minutes up the road to a little biker bar\u2014the only eatery within an hour of our home out in the country. Sitting at the bar, we ordered burgers and fries. It didn't take long before we both were laughing long and hard at our circumstances. I remember saying, \"Here I am, a city girl, excited for an anniversary date with her man at a remote biker bar.\"\n\nBecause I chose not to sulk or complain about our circumstances, we had a wonderful evening. And do you know what I found out? First, the place we ate at makes an amazing burger\u2014and the fries were out of this world. Second, we were both reminded that the reason we got married was because we truly enjoyed spending time together\u2014no matter what we were doing. Even if it meant celebrating our anniversary by playing pinball at a biker bar in the middle of nowhere.\n\nHave you forgotten how to enjoy your husband? When your idea of a perfect evening cannot be met, do you sulk or complain? Have you noticed that when you grumble it drives your husband away from you? Complaining to your husband about not spending time with you is not going to make him want to spend time with you.\n\nThe Bible says, \"It is better to live in a corner of a roof than in a house shared with a contentious woman\" (Proverbs 21:9 NASB). Get the picture? Complaining about how disappointed you are when you can't have your way will not make your husband want to spend time with you. On the contrary, as this proverb points out, your contention will drive him away from you\u2014maybe to the garage, to longer hours at work, or even to the very corner of the housetop!\n\nHusbands are energized by a joyful wife. When you learn to become a person your husband enjoys spending time with, you may discover him looking for more opportunities to refresh himself with your company.\n\nThere Is Hope\n\nIf you are reading this and thinking, That's me! I am not a happy person. No wonder my husband doesn't enjoy spending time with me, well, there is hope! The first step to becoming a joyful wife is to realize you can change.\n\nWhen Elizabeth George's kids were little and her husband was busy working four jobs, she admits, \"At first I handled our new situation in the wrong way. I whined. When that didn't work, I cried. When that didn't work, I screamed. When that didn't work, I stomped and sulked, making good use of 'the cold shoulder.' What a brat I was!\"\n\nIn the same way God took Elizabeth from throwing tantrums to teaching other women how to be a wife after God's own heart, He can transform you as well.\n\nAre you ready to make some changes? To help make the following points easy to remember, let's use the word H-O-P-E as an acrostic:\n\nHate the sin.\n\nOpen your eyes.\n\nPray for God's help.\n\nEnjoy your husband.\n\nHate the Sin\n\nTake an honest look at the kind of wife you have become. Do you think your husband would say you are fun to be with? If your husband seems to look for reasons not to be with you, could it be because he doesn't enjoy your company? If so, it is time to face up to your part in what is lacking in your relationship. No matter how much you may be able to assign fault to your husband, will you courageously ask the Lord to help you see your sin in the situation? And then ask God to help you be ruthless with your sin so you hate it and its destructive consequences as much as God does? Colossians 3:5 says, \"Put to death...what is earthly in you\" (ESV).\n\nOpen Your Eyes\n\nStop placing all blame on your husband and take responsibility for what you can do to build a happy marriage. Jesus said, \"Why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye?...Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.\"\n\nHuman nature seeks to blame others for our unhappy circumstances. So if you are blaming your husband for the lack of pleasure you find in your marriage, you should know Jesus calls you to evaluate your own sin before you criticize your husband's shortcomings.\n\nOne Bible teacher says, \"Most people feel free to judge other people harshly because they erroneously think they are somehow superior...Other people are not under us, and to think so is to have the wrong view of them...The wretched and gross sin that is always blind to its own sinfulness is self-righteousness...The very nature of self-righteousness is to justify self and condemn others.\"\n\nDo you have a self-righteous attitude toward your husband? Have you developed a habit of blaming him for your unhappiness? Won't you open your eyes to your own sin? Once the plank is removed from your eye, then you can see yourself, God, and others more clearly. And only then will you be in the right mind-set to humbly take steps toward making your marriage a more enjoyable union.\n\nIn this age, happy marriages are rare. People often ask my husband and me, \"What's your secret to a happy marriage?\" This question provides us with a wonderful opportunity to tell them about Christ. Steve and I are careful to share how God is the source of our happiness, and through His Son, they too can experience true joy.\n\nOne of the most dynamic evangelistic resources you have at your disposal is a happy marriage that reflects the joy of the Lord. And the first place you as a couple should share the gospel is to your own children. Sadly, many children raised in Christian homes reject Christ because of their parents' unhappy marriages. When you and your husband are not in unison, not only will you lack joy, but others will be negatively influenced as well\u2014especially your children. On the contrary, when you and your husband are enjoying one another, your joy will spill over to all of your other relationships\u2014including those with your children. \"Your decision to live in obedience to God will reverberate righteousness in generations to follow...how glorious it will be for you to look back at your life and see the godly influence your actions had upon your children and grandchildren.\"\n\nPractical Advice to Becoming a Joyful Wife\n\nTo be happily married\u2014is this the longing of your heart? I know this was my desire as a young bride, but because I had no healthy marriages in my own family to learn from, I was unsure of how to make this happen.\n\nAs life's responsibilities pressed in, I realized I was not the fun-loving, joy-filled wife I had hoped to be. So I cried out to the Lord for help. He sent to me several older ladies in my church\u2014ladies who were Titus 2 women. And what did these godly women teach me? Were they quick to rattle off a list of things I needed to change? No. First, these wonderfully wise women befriended me.\n\nThen, over time, as these women became my friends, they were able to discern what I needed to learn from them so they could help me learn how to be a better wife. And their insights were life-changing. Here are some of my favorite pointers from my Titus 2 friends:\n\n\u2022 Take a nap when the baby sleeps so you are not too tired to stay up with your husband after the children go to bed. A well-rested wife is a joyful wife.\n\n\u2022 Keep your house clean, but don't obsess over making it so perfect your husband is not comfortable in his own home.\n\n\u2022 Never, ever raise your voice to your husband. Speak calmly and quietly when you are in disagreement because \"a soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger\" (Proverbs 15:1).\n\n\u2022 Always guard your husband's reputation. Never talk behind his back.\n\n\u2022 Never belittle or make fun of your husband.\n\n\u2022 Make time to enjoy each other.\n\n\u2022 Fight for joy, because \"the joy of the LORD is your strength\" (Nehemiah 8:10).\n\n\u2022 Pray for your husband.\n\n\u2022 Love God's Word and study it daily, and commit to applying its truths to your life. God's Word will be a lamp to your feet and a light to your path (see Psalm 119:105).\n\nThe last point is the most important one I learned\u2014to love God's Word. As I studied the Bible each week with these women and they helped me apply God's truth to my life, I began to be transformed by the renewing of my mind (Romans 12:2). My thinking became different. As a result, my marriage became different as well\u2014for the better. Life's experiences were being filtered through God's truth, and that truth was changing who I was.\n\nHappiness Is Contagious\n\nIn my book Moms Raising Sons to Be Men, I observed the following about these Titus 2 women:\n\nWhen I spent time with these women, I observed their peaceful responses to the chaos of life. They displayed a resolve to seek after the Lord in every situation. They were not just church ladies who did good things for God; their hearts reflected His heart. They were by no means perfect, but they were genuine.\n\nSteve and I chose to fellowship with these women and their husbands, and we were captivated by how much they delighted in one another. They made having fun with their spouses, and other happy couples, a priority. And their happiness was contagious. Our marriage was blessed as we took time to camp, water-ski, play games, and laugh out loud with these delightful couples.\n\nMy friendships with these women are among the greatest treasures of my life. For more than three decades, I have had the privilege of watching their marriages flourish and glorify Christ. And now, in this season of their lives, I am learning how a Titus 2 woman finds sweet joy even when her love goes home to be with the Lord.\n\nPray for God's Help\n\nAbout her own attempt to change her unlikable ways, Elizabeth George says she learned to pray at the first hint of frustration or self-pity. She also advises wives to pray three times a day for their husbands. Doing this will help you to draw closer to your husband and get to know him and his needs better, and most important of all, love him as God does.\n\nWhile there are many books written on the topic of prayer, might I suggest you just take time to pray? One tip I can share is that when I learned to talk out loud to the Lord, my prayer life became much more personal. Here is a prayer I have prayed for my husband for more than 30 years:\n\nLord, cause me to love my husband with Your selfless love. Help me not to keep a record of wrongs and to forgive quickly. Give me Your joy in my marriage, and Your peace in my home. Help my husband to have eyes for me only, and grow his love for me ever stronger by the power of Your Spirit.\n\nEnjoy Your Husband\n\nWhen your husband tells you about his day, or recounts a story, stop what you are doing and look him in the eye. Lean toward him as he talks. Smile, nod, and laugh when it's appropriate to do so. Don't make him work to get a response or chuckle out of you. Remember how any attempt he made to be funny while you were dating was met with your laughter? How about you bless him with that kind of attention again?\n\nDetermine to be his girlfriend. One way to do this is to simply sit with him while he works on a project. Not to criticize, or to add your two cents, but to enjoy watching him work. And if your husband asks you to go with him to the hardware store, drop everything and go with him. You never know\u2014you may find yourselves dancing in the aisle to music at midnight.\n\nRealizing your husband is not the source of your happiness and learning to find joy in your relationship with Christ is the key to a happy marriage. Elizabeth George determined to be a wife after God's own heart, and it transformed her marriage. When you do the same, there is H-O-P-E for your marriage as well.\n\nFROM A HUSBAND'S PERSPECTIVE\n\n######\n\nA Word from Steve\n\nIn this chapter Rhonda talked about how Elizabeth George grew to be a wife after God's own heart by determining to grow in her walk with Christ. So I thought it would be good to take a moment to share from the perspective of Elizabeth's husband, Jim. In his book A Husband After God's Own Heart, Jim says:\n\nI would like to report that my spiritual growth, which started when I was just six years old, was a magnificent upward spiral, and that it had few, if any valleys. But no. Sad to say, my spiritual growth in those early years was an up-and-down roller coaster. And the downward drop on that roller coaster continued into my early adult life and had a serious effect on my marriage...\n\nSpiritual growth is the key to all that is important in life. That's what Jesus meant 2000 years ago when He told a listening audience not to be anxious about life and living. He said, \"Do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we wear?' \" (Matthew 6:31). These things are definitely needful, but they are not what's really important. They are not your first priority. What's really important is your spiritual growth.\n\nIt's true that spiritual growth takes terrific effort. But, my friend, it's also true that the rewards are great...No matter how old you are or how long\u2014or short!\u2014you've been married, the day you accelerate your growth in the Lord is the day your marriage is positively impacted, improved, and strengthened\n\nAs I look back upon Jim and Elizabeth's story, I am encouraged to learn how God transformed both of them\u2014and their marriage. It happened because they devoted themselves to prayer, the study of God's Word, and living in obedience to what they learned from Scripture.\n\nRhonda and I have discovered that as well\u2014that the key to a happy marriage is found in spiritual growth. And I know the same will be true for you and your marriage.\n\nWhen I use the phrase spiritual growth, please understand I am not encouraging you to be more religious. Jesus urged His followers to love the Lord their God with all of their being (Mark 12:30). When your love for God becomes the single most important goal of your life, then prayer, reading your Bible, walking in obedience to His Word, and loving your husband will all become natural outpourings of your love for Christ.\n\nAs you devote yourself to spiritual growth, you will find lasting joy because you will learn to think biblically about your marriage relationship and life's circumstances.\n\nWill you commit to making whatever sacrifices are necessary to grow in your walk with Christ? The result will be for your blessing and God's glory, and your marriage will shine a bright light of hope to a generation who desperately needs to know that following Christ is the only answer to all of life's problems\u2014and the source of a happy marriage.\n\n######\n\nTHINKING IT THROUGH\n\n######\n\n1. Write out what hope you find from the following verses:\n\nPhilippians 2:13\n\n1 Peter 2:9\n\n2 Peter 1:3\n\n2. Are you devoted to spiritual growth? Take a few moments now to ask yourself these questions, and read the following scriptures:\n\n\u2022 How genuine is my love for God (Mark 12:30)?\n\n\u2022 Am I daily adjusting my life to the precepts I learn in Scripture (Psalm 119:1-8)?\n\n\u2022 Do I walk in obedience to Christ because of how much I love Him (John 3:36)?\n\n\u2022 Or do I practice a religion with no real love for Jesus (Mark 7:6)?\n\n\u2022 Am I in awe of Jesus as I discover His character through Bible study (Hebrews 1)?\n\n\u2022 What steps can I take to make growing in my love for Christ a top priority (Psalm 119:9-16)?\n\n######\n\nLIVING IT OUT\n\n######\n\n1. Would your husband say you are fun to be with? What are some ways you can make your times together more enjoyable for him?\n\n2. Have you been blaming your husband for your lack of joy? Who alone should be your source of joy?\n\n3. From what you've learned in this chapter, explain how you can become a joyful wife.\n\nVisit NoRegretsWoman.com to watch Steve and Rhonda's video link and\/or listen to their suggested audio link.\n\nHappily-Ever-After Is a Fairy Tale\n\nTen Keys to a More Fulfilling Marriage\n\n######\n\nDo you ever wonder what Peter's wife was thinking on the day her husband came home to announce he would be leaving the family fishing business to follow Jesus? Would this woman, who is unnamed in Scripture, have questioned Peter's decision to forsake all he had worked for to follow the One he believed was the Messiah? The Bible doesn't give us any insight into how Peter's conversion affected his marriage, but you can be sure that when I get to heaven I plan to find Peter's wife and ask her for the details of their story.\n\nWhat very little we do know about Peter's wife includes the fact that Jesus healed her mother (Peter's mother-in-law) from a serious fever. Luke 4:39 tells us that \"He stood over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her. And immediately she arose and served them.\" We aren't told if Peter's wife witnessed this healing, but if she did, I would think this would have persuaded her to get behind her husband's decision to devote his life to following Jesus.\n\nAs we'll see in a moment, history reports that Peter's wife was a courageous follower of Jesus until her final breath. This dynamic couple must have been a powerful influence for the gospel at a time when Nero was persecuting Christians. At one point, when Peter was commanded to stop talking about Jesus, he responded, \"We cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard.\"\n\nThe commitment of Peter and his wife to boldly proclaim what they witnessed of Jesus' life, death, burial, and glorious resurrection would eventually cost them their lives. Eusebius, a well-learned Roman historian who lived from about AD 260 to 340, made this observation about the final moments between the apostle Peter and his beloved wife:\n\nThe blessed Peter, seeing his own wife led away to execution, was delighted, on account of her calling and return to her country, and that he cried to her in a consolatory and encouraging voice, addressing her by name: \"Oh thou, remember the Lord!\" Such was the marriage of these blessed ones.\n\nCan you imagine the final moment between Peter and his wife? How their eyes must have communicated volumes to each other as she was marched toward her execution? What courage she must have received to hear her sweet husband proclaim, \"Remember the Lord!\" as she was escorted along the path to her death. Did Peter's words remind her that in a few moments the Lord would be waiting to receive her into His kingdom?\n\nHappily-Ever-After?\n\nPeter and his wife were a powerful testimony for Christ to their generation. Do you realize the Lord wants to use you and your mate as a testimony to people as well? Have you ever considered that God brought you together with your husband because He has a mission for the two of you to accomplish\u2014together?\n\nSadly, many Christian couples become so focused on themselves or their personal pursuits that they never reach their full potential in this life. Sure, they may work to raise good kids, pay their bills, and go to church, but in all of these pursuits it is easy to become preoccupied with the things of earth. Jesus wants us to stop focusing so much on our own comforts and happiness and instead, to store up treasures in heaven, \"where neither moth nor rust destroys.\"\n\nCan you imagine how glorious it will be to one day stand before the Lord shoulder to shoulder with the people you and your husband have led to Christ? I long for that day! I simply cannot wait to stand next to Steve and celebrate with him over the many people we will meet in heaven who came to know Jesus because God allowed us to share the gospel with them. I don't care if we never get to retire, buy a motor home, and travel the world. Nothing will compare to the day we realize how every sacrifice, every prayer, and every tear was worth all that God had planned to do through us before the foundation of this world (see Ephesians 1:4; 2:10). And God has plans for you and your husband as well.\n\nAuthor Francis Chan shares this about his wife, Lisa:\n\nIt is our mutual love for Jesus that binds us, and our love for His mission in particular. We both love helping people repent of their sin, turn to Jesus and be filled with the Spirit. I love watching her share her faith...This may sound weird, but watching her minister attracts me to her even more...We love being on mission together. In fact, it is the times when we neglect the mission and just focus on our own desires that conflict arises. Staying on the mission is what draws us closer together.\n\nLooking back on our years of marriage, Steve and I can attest to the truth of Chan's statement. When you and your husband learn to take your eyes off of yourselves to focus on Christ and the purpose for which He has brought you together\u2014to know Christ and make Him known\u2014you will experience a happily-ever-after marriage that will reap joyful rewards far beyond what this life has to offer.\n\nFor some, the story of Peter and his wife's final days would seem to end in tragedy. But for those who realize we are all sojourners in this life, their story really does end happily. For when they breathed their final breath, they found themselves together in the presence of the Lord rejoicing over the fruit of their labors\u2014fruit that will abide forever.\n\nTen Keys to a More Fulfilling Marriage\n\nThroughout this book we have visited a number of myths wives tend to believe about marriage. And the key truth affirmed in every chapter is that true happiness is not to be found in your relationship with your husband, but in your relationship with Christ. Let's bring it all together now and review ten key principles to a more fulfilling marriage:\n\n1. Your Husband Was Never Meant to Be Your Happily-Ever-After\n\nAsking your husband to be the source of your happiness is an unfair expectation. You were created to delight in Christ and to be consumed by your love for Him.\n\nWhen Christ invades your life, what spills over is a passion for Him and for His kingdom purposes...Your willingness to lay aside anything that besets your passionate pursuit of Christ and His leading will not only set an example for [others] to follow, but create an appetite in [them] to do the same...you must be set on fire by the single most glorious purpose of life\u2014to know Christ and joyfully exhibit His greatness in all areas of life\n\nWhen you resolve to pursue loving Christ with all of your being, you will find the secret to happiness lies in your relationship with God alone. Only then can you enjoy fellowship with your husband in a way that honors Christ and blesses your husband.\n\n2. Respecting Your Husband Will Inspire Him to Love You More\n\nRemember David and Michal's story? Michal failed to see the big picture when David danced through the streets of Jerusalem on the day the Ark of the Covenant was brought into Jerusalem. Because Michal loved herself and her reputation more than she loved her husband, she responded by chastising him for his actions. Michal's disrespectful attitude alienated her husband from her for the rest of her life.\n\nGod created your husband with a deep longing to be respected by you. Just as deeply as you long to be loved without condition, your husband desires to receive unconditional respect from you. Notice I said unconditional respect. This means you don't get to hold hostage your respect for your husband when you aren't happy with him. Ephesians 5:33 says, \"Let the wife see that she respects her husband\" (ESV). This is not a suggestion; this is the Lord's command to us as wives.\n\nWhen you believe in your husband, rely on him, and celebrate his accomplishments, you are meeting one of his deepest emotional needs. As much as you value your husband's efforts to treat you in a loving manner, he will be grateful for your effort to treat him with honor. And when you do, don't be surprised if your husband responds to you in a more loving manner.\n\nYour respect can motivate your husband to accomplish great achievements\u2014because a man who is honored by his wife can do great things!\n\n3. Staying in Love Is All About Your Love for God\n\nI've said this multiple times already, but I believe it bears repeating here: Any wife who displays godly character by loving her husband will tell you that the key to loving your husband does not lie in how well he measures up to your expectations, but in how well you love God.\n\nBefore you were married, when you fell in love with your man, you had positive and loving thoughts about him. In marriage, you must work to continue to think such thoughts about him. The Bible provides a wonderful formula that can be applied to how you think of your husband:\n\nWhatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me\u2014practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you (Philippians 4:8-9 ESV).\n\nIf you have not made a habit of thinking the best about your husband, you will need to determine to take \"every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.\" With God's help, you can gain victory over negative thoughts about your husband and replace them with thoughts that are honorable, lovely, and commendable. In our many years of biblical marriage counseling, Steve and I have seen relationships transformed when wives committed to thinking well of their husbands.\n\nJesus said the ultimate priority of life is to love God with all of your being. When you do so, you will find yourself enabled to obey the second greatest commandment: \"Love your neighbor as yourself\" (Mark 12:31). In this case, your husband is your neighbor.\n\nI am confident that pursuing intimacy with God was the single most important influence in transforming my marriage, and that can be true for you too. When your love for God is right, He will help you to love your husband.\n\n4. Parenting as One Brings Unity into Your Marriage and Security to Your Kids\n\nYour children's security lies in the health of your marriage relationship. When you learn to live with your sights upon God's calling on your life\u2014to know Christ and make Him known\u2014this will influence how you live at home. God intends for you to live in a manner that draws your kids to Christ.\n\nRemember that your genuine love for the Lord\u2014no matter how happy or trying your marriage may be\u2014will do far more to draw your kids to Christ than any words you can ever say to them. Whatever trials you and your husband encounter, if your children see the two of you united in purpose to display Jesus' character in your home, they will experience security. Isn't that your desire?\n\nIf your husband is not a Christian, do not fret. God can shine brightly through a godly woman who determines to honor the Lord in how she relates to her unbelieving husband. Acts 16:1 tells us Timothy's mother, Eunice, had been married to a Greek man whom some Bible commentators say might not have been a believer. Listen to how Paul commends Eunice: \"I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you as well.\" And because Timothy's mother taught him sound doctrine from his childhood, he was ready to receive the gospel when he heard it preached (see 2 Timothy 3:15).\n\nIn the same way, if your husband is not a believer\u2014or he's not a strong Christian\u2014your commitment to teach your children to love God's Word can prepare them to respond to the gospel.\n\nRemember, your kids will be most secure when they observe their parents united, so don't disagree with your husband in front of your children about certain rules or disciplines he may impose. Determine to bow together united in prayer, rather than stand in conflict with one another, because \"the effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much\" (James 5:16).\n\n5. The Grass Is Not Greener on the Other Side of the Fence\n\nGod created you with a longing to feel loved and valued\u2014by Him. Problems in marriage begin when you look to your husband to find your worth. God wants to fill the longings of your heart with Himself. Only through knowing Christ and living in intimacy with Him will you discover fulfillment.\n\nBecause of sin, you and I struggle with self-worship. And when you are in a state of self-love, if you're not satisfied with how your husband treats you, you may fall for the myth that you would be happier with someone other than your husband. When you find yourself toying with that idea, you can know that Satan\u2014who comes to steal, kill, and destroy (see John 10:10)\u2014is seeking to ruin you and your family.\n\nWhen your marriage relationship fails to satisfy your longings, you would be wise to remember that no relationship can fill the void that only God Himself can fill. Realizing it is wrong to receive your sense of worth from your husband is the first step to setting him free from the burden of trying to give you what only God can give. And when you determine to find your worth in Christ, you will no longer need others to fill the void only Jesus can satisfy.\n\n6. The Secret to Keeping Your Husband's Attention Is Finding Your Worth in Christ\n\nWhat's the secret to keeping your husband's attention? While there are many points I could make to answer this question, I prefer to revisit a statement my husband, Steve, made in chapter 6 of this book:\n\nThe secret to capturing your husband's attention for a lifetime is in learning to find your worth in your relationship with Christ. When you spend your life developing your inner beauty and staying focused on the Lord, your husband's affection for you will grow as he observes the lovely woman of God you are becoming. The more consistently you pursue Christ, the more beautiful you will become to your husband, to others, and most importantly, to Christ.\n\n7. Pursuing Your Husband Sexually Will Fill Him with a Sense of Well-Being\n\nDon't make your husband apologize for wanting to have sex with you. Pursue him sexually, and you will have a profound influence upon him in all areas of his life. When you make your husband feel sexually desirable, he will feel loved for who he is. You will fill him with a sense of well-being, confidence, and overall satisfaction with life.\n\nGod has given you a ministry of affirming your husband's deepest emotional needs through sex. In the same way that you long for your husband to romance you with his words and acts of love, he desires to be romanced by you through sexual intimacy.\n\nWhen you happily take your husband to bed, you not only satisfy his God-given physical need for sex, but you bring healing to his weary soul as well. To learn more about this, download my ebook A Christian Woman's Guide to Great Sex in Marriage.\n\n8. Grow Rich in Ways You Never Imagined\n\nHave you become consumed with career and cash? Do you fall into the trap of believing that security for you and your family lies in how much you can attain in this life?\n\nRealize God's highest good for your marriage is not to give you everything your heart desires so you can be comfortable and happy. Rather, God wants to make you holy through His Son so you can live out His perfect plan for you\u2014so you will reap His blessing for all eternity.\n\nWhen Steve and I moved to our little house in the country so we could live debt-free, we had no idea how God was preparing us to serve Him in full-time ministry. The people we have led to Christ, taught and mentored in truth, and fellowshipped with in ministry are greater treasures than any possessions we may have given up. And the hope of one day, for all eternity, worshipping with those people around the throne of Christ is the greatest treasure we could ever have.\n\nIn the same way, the more you keep your eyes fixed upon Jesus, the less you will care about possessions or the earthly issues many couples fight over. Once you determine to daily seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness (Matthew 6:33), you will find contentment and peace in your marriage\u2014as well as God's purpose for your life.\n\n9. Be a Peacemaker in Your Marriage Relationship\n\nThe only way to build a marriage free of hurtful discord is through biblical conflict resolution. By way of review from chapter 9, here are eight steps to making peace:\n\n\u2022 Admit you have a problem. Take an honest look at why you are in the conflict.\n\n\u2022 Acknowledge your sinful bent. Realize in your sin you will either want to win the argument at any cost, or flee the conflict and stuff your feelings of resentment.\n\n\u2022 Refuse to be argumentative. \"The Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil...[Be] eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace...If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all\" (2 Timothy 2:24; Ephesians 4:3; Romans 12:18 ESV).\n\n\u2022 Make peace a priority. Learn to talk through a disagreement for the purpose of resolution. And determine to get rid of whatever causes discord in your marriage. No argument is worth winning when the love and unity of your marriage is at stake.\n\n\u2022 Pray without ceasing. When God's people pray with a pure heart, their prayers are powerful and effective. So before you pray, be sure to ask God to reveal any sins within your heart so that you may confess them to the Lord. And never stop praying for the Lord to work in you\u2014and your husband\u2014to make you more like Christ (see 1 Thessalonians 5:17; James 5:16; 1 Peter 3:12).\n\n\u2022 Forgive your husband as many times as necessary (Matthew 18:22).\n\n\u2022 Seek godly counsel. Search out godly women in your church who can mentor you (Titus 2:1-5).\n\n\u2022 Learn to be a peacemaker. Jesus said, \"Blessed are the peacemakers\" (Matthew 5:9).\n\nMake yourself so familiar with these eight steps that the next time you and your husband begin to argue, you can stop yourself from fighting and instead, take time to reflect on how you can show Christ's character. By working to resolve conflict in a way that honors your husband, you can begin to live in a manner that reflects the Lord's character to those who are watching how you live\u2014beginning with your children.\n\nWhen this happens, your home will be marked by peace. Your children will feel more secure, and the peacemaking habits you practice in your home will, in turn, train your kids how to make peace in their relationships\u2014including their future marriages.\n\n10. The Joy of the Lord Is Your Strength\n\nLife is filled with blessings and struggles. Learning to see each experience as an opportunity for the Lord to shine His light through you is the first step to realizing God has a purpose in whatever He allows to come your way\u2014even a difficult marriage.\n\nThe apostle Paul and Silas are great examples of people who determined to be joyful amidst a terrible situation. After they were beaten and imprisoned for preaching the gospel, we could easily understand if they had bitterly questioned God's love for them. But that wasn't their response. Instead, they chose to sing hymns of praise to God (Acts 16:25).\n\nAuthor Richard Blackaby observes,\n\nThis story teaches an important life lesson. Jesus promised that no one could take His joy away from believers (John 16:22); Paul and Silas proved this to be true. When these two men were unfairly abused, they had to make a choice. They could let resentment overtake their hearts, or they could allow Christ to fill them with His joy even in that awful situation. They chose joy.\n\nWhen you choose joy in each experience you encounter, you can become a vessel for the Lord to reach the lost and encourage others\u2014as well as mold you, your husband, and your children more into the image of Christ. When you live with this perspective, you will discover the secret to living above life's circumstances\u2014and the joy of the Lord will indeed be your strength.\n\nAs I write this chapter, Steve and I just received news from our youngest daughter, Kayla, and her husband, Estevan, that the baby she was carrying in her womb has died. Steve and I are in somber awe as we watch our daughter and her husband walk with God-centered joy through this grievous circumstance. This joy is shining brightly to their Christian friends as well as their nonbelieving friends. I cannot help but think how the past trials Kayla and Estevan have endured have taught them to choose joy no matter what happens. And this, in turn, will bring honor to God.\n\nOne Last Love Story\n\nCharles Haddon Spurgeon is a man whom I admire very much. God used him as an evangelist and a preacher to bring a great revival to England in the 1800s. Although his story is inspiring, my goal in talking about him is not to tell of his accomplishments, but rather to share with you the wonderful love story of Charles and his wife, Susannah.\n\nWhile Charles Spurgeon is widely recognized for the tremendous impact he had in his era, his wife, Susannah, had an invaluable place in the molding of her husband's character and ministry. We are told that \"he never could have been what he was without her...No two souls on earth from the first fair dawn were more perfectly adapted to each other than Charles and Susannah Spurgeon.\"\n\nTheir paths would likely never have crossed were it not for God's providence. Susannah was a refined city girl, and Charles came from the countryside. After her first encounter with Charles, the cultured city girl said, \"I was not at all fascinated by the young orator's eloquence, while his countrified manner and speech excited more regret than reverence.\"\n\nHowever, as the Lord divinely brought about more opportunities for interaction, Charles began to pursue Susannah. And two-and-a-half months later, he sent her a gift. It was a copy of John Bunyan's book Pilgrim's Progress, in which he inscribed:\n\nMiss Thompson\u2014with desires for her progress in the blessed pilgrimage\n\nFrom C.H. Spurgeon Ap. 20, 1854\n\nNot long after Charles gave Susannah the book, the two attended a grand gala event in London with some friends. They found opportunity to sit near one another, and also take a walk in a beautiful garden. It was at this time that Susannah realized her love for Charles: \"During that walk, on that memorable day in June, I believe God Himself united our hearts in indissoluble bonds of true affection...From that time our friendship grew apace, and quickly ripened into deepest love.\"\n\nWithin a few weeks, Charles pledged his love to Susannah and asked her to marry him. She describes the occasion like this:\n\n[He] told me how much he loved me...I trembled and was silent for joy and gladness...To me, it was a time as solemn as it was sweet, and with a great awe in my heart. I left my beloved, and hastening to the house and to an upper room, I knelt before God, and praised Him with happy tears, for His great mercy in giving me the love of so good a man.\n\nEven though the two were in love, early in their courtship they had to work through some difficulties. For example, on one occasion Charles invited Susannah to go with him to a place where he was speaking. Because of Charles's popularity, he was swarmed by people at the event and swept away from his love. Absentmindedly, Charles forgot about Susannah\u2014which wounded her deeply. Finally, in anger, Susannah took a cab home, where she spilled out her grief to her mother.\n\nSusannah's mother wisely explained to her daughter that she was going to marry a husband who was no ordinary man. She told Susannah that Charles's whole life was dedicated to God and His service, and if she was to be his wife, she must never hinder him by trying to put herself first in his heart. (A lesson this pastor's wife needs to be reminded of as well from time to time.)\n\nLater, Charles showed up at Susannah's home looking for her. He kindly listened to her as she spilled out how indignant she had felt earlier.\n\nOn January 8, 1856, Charles and Susannah were married. Afterward they enjoyed a ten-day honeymoon to Paris. (Now that sounds like a romantic honeymoon\u2014well done, Charles!)\n\nThat Susannah learned how to be the selfless wife of a man whose whole heart was devoted to serving Christ was what made her so beautiful\u2014and well suited\u2014for Charles. Their wonderful union shone brightly to all they would meet through their many years of serving the Lord together. Listen to Spurgeon's own words about his beloved:\n\nThough He who chose us all worlds before,\n\nMust reign in our hearts alone,\n\nWe fondly believe that we shall adore,\n\nTogether before His throne.\n\nFor nearly 40 years, Charles and Susannah served God side by side. Their pilgrimage took them through the heights of glory and the depths of sorrow and hardship. Through it all, their love for one another\u2014and the Lord\u2014grew to immeasurable proportions.\n\nThe Lord certainly answered the \"prayer\" Charles had written in the front of the book he had given Susannah when they were courting, for God had given Susannah \"progress in the blessed pilgrimage.\"\n\nAfter Charles died on January 31, 1892, Susannah was left alone to continue on in ministry. Although sorrow and loneliness were often evident in her words after her husband's death, she also wrote with a sense of glorious triumph that is known only by a woman who has walked near to the Savior:\n\nI have traveled far on life's journey, and having climbed one of the few remaining hills between earth and heaven, I stand awhile on this vantage ground and look back across the country through which the Lord had led me...\n\nI can see two pilgrims treading the highway of life together, hand in hand\u2014heart linked to heart. True, they have had rivers to ford, mountains to cross, fierce enemies to fight and many dangers to go through. But their Guide was watchful, their Deliverer unfailing, and of them it might truly be said, \"In all their affliction He was afflicted, and the Angel of His presence saved them; in His love and in His pity He redeemed them: and He bare them and carried them all the days of old.\"\n\nMostly they went on their way singing; and for one of them at least, there was no greater joy than to tell others of the grace and glory of the blessed King to whose land he was hastening. And while he thus spoke, the power of the Lord was seen and the angels rejoiced over repenting sinners.\n\nBut at last they came to a place on the road where two ways met. And here, amidst the terrors of a storm such as they had never before encountered, they parted company\u2014the one being caught up to the invisible glory, and the other, battered and bruised by the awful tempest, henceforth toiling along the road\u2014alone!\n\nBut the \"goodness and mercy\" which for so many years had followed the two travelers, did not leave the solitary one. Rather did the tenderness of the Lord \"lead on softly,\" and choose green pastures for the tired feet, and still waters for the solace and refreshment of His trembling child.\n\nHe gave, moreover, into her hands a solemn charge\u2014to help fellow pilgrims along the road, therewith filling her life with blessed interest, and healing her own deep sorrow by giving her power to relieve and comfort others.\n\nAnyone else need a tissue? I just love this kind of love\u2014don't you? Charles and Susannah were used mightily by God\u2014all because they lived in wholehearted devotion to Christ.\n\nWhile your husband might never be like Charles, still, your place as his wife is to determine to devote yourself to the Lord. That's essential no matter what your husband's spiritual state. When you live with a heart of surrender, God can work through you to accomplish incredible feats for His kingdom.\n\nD.L. Moody is a good example of how God can work through a person who is completely yielded to Him. Moody was a contemporary and friend of Spurgeon, and was moved to follow God in total abandon when he heard the British evangelist Henry Varley say, \"The world has yet to see what God can do with and for and through and in and by the man who is fully and wholly consecrated to Him.\" After hearing that, Moody thought to himself,\n\nHe said \"a man.\" He did not say a great man, nor a learned man, nor a rich man, nor a wise man, nor an eloquent man, nor a smart man, but simply \"a man.\" I am a man, and it lies with the man himself whether he will or will not make that entire and full consecration. I will try my uttermost to be that man.\n\n\"As [Moody] came to realize that it is God who does the actual work of ministry and that the most effective channel for ministry is a wholly surrendered life, he resolved more than ever to avail himself completely for the Lord's use.\"\n\nIn the same way, God will work effectively through you to transform you and your marriage for His purpose\u2014if you resolve to live wholly consecrated to Christ.\n\nParting Is Such Sweet Sorrow\n\nI can hardly believe we have come to the end of this book. I have thoroughly enjoyed walking through these pages with you\u2014so much so that I don't want for this to be my final admonition to you. On the other hand, after my having spent months on writing this book, Steve can't wait to have his wife back!\n\nI feel the need to encourage you not to simply set this book aside and chalk up another Christian self-help book to your reading list. If you determine to apply the truths you learned in this book, they will change you and your marriage because they are based on the life-transforming Word of God. So please keep this book nearby, review it from time to time, recommend it to your friends, host a book club, and then talk with each other about what you learned.\n\nAs we close, I want to emphasize once again what I believe is the key to building a no-regrets marriage: Jesus said the ultimate priorities of life are to love God with your whole being, and then to love others as you love yourself (Mark 12:30-31). I believe these are the most important admonitions I can leave with you.\n\nWhen your love for Christ becomes the single most important pursuit of your life, you will understand your worth in your relationship with Him. And then fellowshipping with Him through Bible study and prayer will become the longing of your heart. And when loving God becomes your passion, loving your husband for who he is\u2014and not who you want him to be\u2014will become a natural outpouring of your love for Christ.\n\nWill you commit to making whatever sacrifices are necessary to grow in your love for Christ? In this way, your marriage can become one others will want to emulate. And the result will be for your blessing and God's glory. Your marriage will shine a bright light of hope to a generation who desperately needs to know that Christ is the only answer to all of life's problems\u2014and the only source of a happy marriage.\n\n######\n\nTHINKING IT THROUGH\n\n######\n\nSpend some time praying over the \"Ten Keys to a More Fulfilling Marriage.\" List in a notebook what steps you feel most compelled to apply to your marriage. Write out some ways you can adjust your life to what you have learned.\n\n######\n\nLIVING IT OUT\n\n######\n\n1. Commit to reviewing what you've learned in this book by choosing to do one or more of the following:\n\n\u2022 Over the next 12 months, review one chapter each month and ask the Lord to show you how He would have you continue growing in your love for Him and your husband.\n\n\u2022 Using the principles in this book, mentor another Christian woman (or start a small group or online study group and go through the book together).\n\n\u2022 Use this book as a resource to share the gospel with a non-Christian woman in need of marriage help.\n\n\u2022 Buy a copy of this book for a Christian woman engaged to be married.\n\n2. Pray, pray, and pray some more for God to transform you through His Word. Ask Him to give you His perfect love for your husband, and pray for Him to make your marriage one that shines brightly the message that Christ is the answer to every need.\n\nVisit NoRegretsWoman.com to watch Steve and Rhonda's video link and\/or listen to their suggested audio link.\n\nPhoto credit: JPlazaPhotography\n\nPhoto credit: Eric McFarland Photography\nAppendix:\n\nHow to Have a Relationship with Jesus\n\n######\n\nWhat on earth could she possibly mean by a relationship with Jesus?\" you ask. I am so glad you want to know!\n\nDid you know that God created people so that He could have a relationship with them? When the Lord created Adam and Eve and put them in the Garden of Eden, He did not leave them there with a list of religious rituals to perform while He observed from afar. No, Genesis 3:8 says that God walked with Adam and Eve in the garden in the cool of the day. He spent time with them!\n\nYou have likely heard some form of the story of how God put a tree in the garden and commanded Adam and Eve not to eat of its fruit, or they would surely die (Genesis 2:17). Genesis chapter 3 records how one day Satan came and tempted Eve to partake of the forbidden fruit. Eve was deceived and seduced by Satan's lies and ate the fruit\u2014and of course Adam followed suit. In the moment that they disobeyed God's command not only did their bodies begin to die physically, but what's worse is that they died spiritually. Can you imagine how empty they must have felt when that happened?\n\nYou see, once Adam and Eve sinned, they had rejected God's rule and yielded themselves to Satan. And without someone to rescue them, they were without hope of ever being in right standing with God again. Because of their rebellion against God, they could no longer fellowship with Him, for God cannot allow sin in His presence. And unless God provided a way that Adam and Eve\u2014and by extension, all of mankind\u2014could have that relationship restored, they would forever be without hope. Every one of us was destined to spend eternity in hell, separated from God's presence.\n\nHowever, because of God's great love for His creation, He had planned a way to rescue us and bring us back to Himself (that's why we use the word salvation!).\n\nHave you ever wondered, Why did God put that tree in the garden anyway? I mean, if it hadn't been there, Adam and Eve would never have been tempted. That's a good question, and it's one I have pondered myself.\n\nI used to think that somehow Adam and Eve's sin caught God by surprise, and that the Trinity (God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit) entered into a holy huddle to figure out Plan B for mankind's redemption (redemption is a big word that basically means \"buy back\"\u2014see Revelation 5:9).\n\nI have since learned that God knew that Adam and Eve would fall. Revelation 13:8 says that Jesus was \"slain from the foundation of the world.\" That means even before God created the world or people, He knew that all of us would need a Savior. And because of His great love for us, and His desire to have a people who would choose to love and serve Him, He put the tree in the garden to give Adam and Eve a choice. When they sinned (and He knew they would) God told them that He would offer up His Son to pay the price for their disobedience (see Romans 5:12-21).\n\nImagine\u2014God loved us so much that He sacrificed His only Son, that whoever believes in Him will not die but will live forever (John 3:16)! God says the very act of offering His greatest treasure, Jesus, was His way of showing you and me just how very much He loves us. \"God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us\" (Romans 5:8). What an amazing way for Him to show us how much He loves us, huh?\n\nSo what does it mean to believe in Him like John 3:16 says? Is it a mere mental assent to the truth that Jesus is fully God, and being fully God He took on the form of a man when He was born through a virgin? And that Jesus lived a sinless life, and willingly gave Himself up to die a cruel death on a cross, and then He victoriously rose from the dead\u2014so that His blood could wash away our sins and He could give us eternal life? While all of those statements are true, if you simply agree with the facts about Jesus, that does not mean you have a relationship with Him. In fact, James 2:19 says even the demons believe, and they tremble in fear because they know who Jesus is, and what He accomplished when He died for our sins.\n\nNo, having a relationship with Jesus is entering into a personal covenant (that's a big word that means \"vow\" or \"promise\") with Jesus. He wants us to make a lifelong commitment to Him\u2014but how?\n\nFirst, God wants you to repent of your sins (repent means to agree with God that you are a sinner in need of a Savior, and that you will turn away from your sins). The Bible says, \"All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God\" (Romans 3:23). Only the blood of Jesus can wash away your sins (Hebrews 9:14).\n\nI know it's easy to take offense when someone says, \"You're a sinner,\" but let's be honest: You and I both know that even though we try to do what's right, our natural instinct is to disobey God's laws.\n\nYou see, God gave us those laws not so that we could try to become sinless by doing all that they command, but to show us that we will never be able to measure up to the sinless life God requires of us to have a relationship with Him and enter into heaven when we die (see Galatians 2:16; 3:24).\n\nSo where does that leave us? If Galatians 2:16 says that no man is justified by the works of the law, then how can we possibly be restored to God and go to heaven? If God isn't making sure our good deeds outweigh our bad deeds by the time we die (a completely bogus concept not taught in Scripture), and if, as Romans 6:23 says, \"the wages of sin is death,\" how can we be rescued from judgment?\n\nI'm glad you asked! For the Bible also says, \"The gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord\" and that we are justified (made right) \"by faith in Jesus Christ\" (Romans 6:23; Galatians 2:16).\n\nThe Bible teaches that Jesus is not simply one of many ways to salvation; He is the only way. In John 14:6, Jesus said, \"I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.\" Those are Jesus' words, not mine. The only way to an intimate relationship with God is through Jesus. It is only when you receive His free gift of salvation that Jesus' blood washes away all of your sins. God Himself says, \"Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow\" (Isaiah 1:18).\n\nThink of it\u2014God promises to wipe the slate completely clean! No matter how many bad decisions you have made up to this point, no matter how shameful your past, Jesus is offering you freedom from all of it! Freedom from shame and the bondage of sin.\n\nOnce Jesus washes away your sins, He promises never to throw them in your face again. The Bible says, \"As far as the east is from the west\" is how far God removes our sins from us (Psalm 103:12). (You do realize that east and west never meet, right? That means that in Christ, our sins are taken away forever!)\n\nBut you don't get to just say some magic words, \"I believe,\" and then go back to life as usual. Jesus says He wants you to surrender all that you are to Him. \"If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved\" (Romans 10:9-10).\n\nJesus doesn't ask you to simply add Him onto your life. He wants to be your life. And to anyone who becomes Jesus' follower, He promises that He will give you a new and pure heart. Second Corinthians 5:17 says, \"Old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.\"\n\nBelieve me when I tell you that without a relationship with Jesus I was a selfish, arrogant, fearful, and materialistic woman. But when I accepted Jesus' free gift of salvation and surrendered my life to Him as my Lord, I was set free. I have never looked back! Jesus took the mess that I was and gave me a new heart. Through Jesus, God forgave all of my sins\u2014all of them! And when I said yes to entering into a relationship (there's that word again) with Jesus, He put within me His Holy Spirit. (So that's what was missing!) And God wants the same for you.\n\nWhen God fills you with His Spirit, life makes sense! In fact, it's the life you were born to live, in fellowship with your Creator. Nothing else in this life will ever satisfy your longing for Him\u2014nothing.\n\nIf you enter into a relationship with Jesus, you never have to worry about being \"good enough\" for God to love you or let you into heaven when you die. To those who are in Christ, God says He adopts us as His very own children. \"Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God!\" (1 John 3:1). Jesus says we can call God \"Abba! Father!\" (that means \"Daddy\"\u2014Romans 8:15). And God says His great love for us is perfect, immeasurable, and nothing we could ever do will make Him stop loving us! (see Romans 8:35-39). To top it off, God promises you will never be alone again. Jesus promises He will never leave you nor forsake you (Matthew 28:19-20; Hebrews 13:5). How awesome is that?\n\nAnd there's one more thing: If you decide to believe that Jesus died for you, and you choose to agree with God that you are in need of a Savior because of your sinful heart, and if you pray and submit to Jesus as the Lord of your life, then God's Spirit will fill your heart with His presence, peace, and purpose.\n\nWhen you receive Jesus' free gift of salvation, He promises to lead you, guide you, and accomplish great things for His kingdom through you for the rest of your life. Ephesians 2:8-10 says, \"By grace [that means you can't earn it] you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For [you] are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand.\" God has a plan for your life. Isn't that exciting?\n\nSo now you know what it means to have a relationship with Jesus. It is my prayer that the Holy Spirit is drawing you to Christ even at this moment, and that you will pray to receive Jesus as your Lord and Savior so that you can begin this wonderful journey of walking with Him for the rest of your life, and on into heaven in the next!\nNotes\n\nChapter 1\u2014If He Would Change, I'd Be Happy\n\n. Luke 19:17 (ESV).\n\nChapter 2\u2014I Will Respect Him When He Earns My Respect\n\n. The MacArthur Study Bible (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1997), study note for 2 Samuel 6:16.\n\n. Dr. Emerson Eggerichs, Love and Respect (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2004), 15.\n\n. Eggerichs, Love and Respect, 3-4.\n\n. Eggerichs, Love and Respect, 87-89.\n\n. Eggerichs, Love and Respect, 89.\n\nChapter 3\u2014I'm Falling Out of Love with Him\n\n. Francis Chan, Crazy Love (Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 2013), 103-4.\n\n. Matthew 5:7.\n\n. John MacArthur, Daily Readings from the Life of Christ (Chicago, IL: Moody, 2008), 72.\n\n. Luke 6:36.\n\n. Shanti Feldhahn, For Women Only (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 2004), 166, 169.\n\nChapter 4\u2014Our Kids Would Obey If He Were a Better Father\n\n. John MacArthur, Twelve Extraordinary Women (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2005), 92.\n\n. MacArthur, Twelve Extraordinary Women, 95.\n\n. Francis and Lisa Chan, You and Me Forever (San Francisco, CA: Claire Love Publishing, 2014), 163.\n\n. Steve Miller, D.L. Moody on Spiritual Leadership (Chicago, IL: Moody, 2004), 109, citing D.L. Moody, Great Joy (New York: Treat, 1877), 245.\n\n. The name of the Bible study that Steve referred to is Experiencing God by Henry Blackaby (Nashville: B&H, 1998).\n\n. James 5:16 (ESV).\n\nChapter 5\u2014I Would Be Happier Married to Someone Else\n\n. Paul David Tripp, What Did You Expect? (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010), 210.\n\n. Dr. Emerson Eggerichs, Love & Respect Video Conference, Colorado Springs, Focus on the Family (2004).\n\n. See 1 Peter 5:8; John 10:10.\n\n. Tripp, What Did You Expect?, 196.\n\nChapter 6\u2014He Would Love Me More if I Were Prettier\n\n. Janet & Geoff Benge, George M\u00fcller, the Guardian of Bristol's Orphans (Seattle, WA: YWAM Publishing, 1999), 43.\n\n. Benge, George M\u00fcller, the Guardian of Bristol's Orphans, 75-76\n\n. Benge, George M\u00fcller, the Guardian of Bristol's Orphans, 79-80.\n\n. Song of Solomon 1:8.\n\n. Julie Gorman, What I Wish My Mother Had Told Me About Men (Franklin, TN: Authentic Publishers, 2013), 25.\n\n. Genesis 3:11-12.\n\n. Jeremiah 17:9.\n\n. Elyse Fitzpatrick, Idols of the Heart (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2001), 130, 132.\n\n. Hebrews 4:12.\n\n. Psalm 139:23-24.\n\n. Jerry Bridges, The Pursuit of Holiness (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 1986), 78.\n\n. Shanti Feldhahn, For Women Only (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 2004), 166, 169. Italics in original.\n\n. Ruth 2:9.\n\n. The MacArthur Study Bible (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1997), 373.\n\n. Ruth 1:15-18; Proverbs 31:10-12,23.\n\n. Ruth 1:16-17.\n\n. 2 Peter 3:18.\n\n. Ruth 2:2,7,17,23; Proverbs 31:13-21,24,27.\n\n. Ruth 2:12.\n\n. Proverbs 31:11.\n\n. Rhonda Stoppe, Moms Raising Sons to Be Men (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2013), 180. Quote originally from Arnold Dallimore, Spurgeon, A New Biography (Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2005), 36.\n\n. Ruth 2:7; Proverbs 31:26.\n\n. 1 Corinthians 13:5.\n\nChapter 7\u2014All He Wants Is Sex\n\n. John MacArthur, Daily Readings from the Life of Christ (Chicago, IL: Moody, 2008), 184.\n\n. Shaunti Feldhahn, For Women Only (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 2004), 94.\n\n. Feldhahn, For Women Only, 99, 101-2.\n\n. Feldhahn, For Women Only, 99.\n\n. Feldhahn, For Women Only, 139.\n\n. To find out more about biblical counseling and counselors near you, go to the website for the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors at <http:\/\/www.biblicalcounseling.com>.\n\nChapter 8\u2014More Money Equals Less Stress\n\n. Francis Chan, Crazy Love (Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 2013), 89-90.\n\n. Chan, Crazy Love, 133.\n\n. Chan, Crazy Love, 177.\n\n. Chan, Crazy Love, 181-82.\n\n. Francis and Lisa Chan, You and Me Forever (San Francisco, CA: Claire Love Publishing, 2014), 27.\n\n. Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus, Words and Music by Helen H. Lemmel, 1864\u20131961.\n\n. Jim George, A Husband After God's Own Heart (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2004), 11.\n\n. To learn more about Dale and Amy's prodigal son\u2014and what to do if your child is wayward\u2014read my book Moms Raising Sons to Be Men (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2013).\n\nChapter 9\u2014Every Couple Fights\n\n. Julie Gorman, What I Wish My Mother Had Told Me About Men (Franklin, TN: Authentic Publishing, 2013), 63.\n\n. Gorman, What I Wish My Mother Had Told Me About Men, 65.\n\n. Gorman, What I Wish My Mother Had Told Me About Men, 120.\n\n. Jerry Bridges, The Pursuit of Holiness (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 1986), 104.\n\n. The MacArthur Study Bible (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1997), study note for Genesis 3:16.\n\n. If you suffer side effects from PMS, consider going to a doctor who specializes in hormonal issues.\n\n. Philippians 4:4-7 (ESV).\n\n. Proverbs 15:17 (ESV).\n\n. John MacArthur, Daily Readings from the Life of Christ (Chicago, IL: Moody, 2008), 78.\n\n. To find out more about biblical counseling and counselors near you, go to the website for the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors at <http:\/\/www.biblicalcounseling.com>.\n\n. Matthew 5:9.\n\n. Ken Sande, The Peacemaker (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2004), 11.\n\n. Luke 6:41-42 (NASB).\n\nChapter 10\u2014Our Marriage Would Be Better if Bad Things Would Stop Happening\n\n. The MacArthur Study Bible (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1997), study note for 1 Peter 4:12.\n\nChapter 11\u2014If Momma Ain't Happy, Ain't Nobody Happy\n\n. Elizabeth George, A Wife After God's Own Heart (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2004), 14.\n\n. Elizabeth George, A Woman After God's Own Heart (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 1997), 57.\n\n. George, A Wife After God's Own Heart, 162, 14.\n\n. George, A Wife After God's Own Heart, 43, 162.\n\n. George, A Wife After God's Own Heart, 14.\n\n. George, A Woman After God's Own Heart, 58.\n\n. George, A Wife After God's Own Heart, 37.\n\n. George, A Wife After God's Own Heart, 171.\n\n. George, A Wife After God's Own Heart, 52.\n\n. Matthew 7:3-5.\n\n. John MacArthur, Daily Readings from the Life of Christ (Chicago, IL: Moody, 2008), 177-79.\n\n. Rhonda Stoppe, Moms Raising Sons to Be Men (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2013), 71.\n\n. I also share about this in Stoppe, Moms Raising Sons to Be Men, 15.\n\n. Stoppe, Moms Raising Sons to Be Men, 14.\n\n. Jim George, A Husband After God's Own Heart (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2004), 9-11.\n\n. George, A Husband After God's Own Heart, 10.\n\nChapter 12\u2014Happily-Ever-After Is a Fairy Tale\n\n. Acts 4:20.\n\n. Eusebius Pahmphilus, Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1974), 115-16.\n\n. Matthew 6:20.\n\n. Francis and Lisa Chan, You and Me Forever (San Francisco, CA: Claire Love Publishing, 2014), 112.\n\n. John 15:16.\n\n. Rhonda Stoppe, Moms Raising Sons to Be Men (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2013), 188.\n\n. 2 Corinthians 10:5.\n\n. Scripture doesn't specifically say if Timothy's father was or wasn't a believer. Rather, it points out that he was a Greek, whereas Timothy's mother was Jewish. Some commentators believe this points to Timothy having access to both Greek and Jewish cultures, while others think it's a clue that Timothy's father was an unbeliever.\n\n. 2 Timothy 1:5 (ESV).\n\n. Rhonda Stoppe, A Christian Woman's Guide to Great Sex in Marriage, www.NoRegretsWoman.com.\n\n. Richard Blackaby, Unlimiting God (Colorado Springs, CO: Multnomah, 2008), 131.\n\n. H.L. Wayland, as cited in Arnold Dallimore, Spurgeon: A New Biography (Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1987), 54.\n\n. Iain Murray, ed., C.H. Spurgeon Autobiography: The Early Years 1834\u20131859 (London: Banner of Truth, 1962), 280.\n\n. Iain Murray, as cited in Dallimore, Spurgeon: A New Biography, 56.\n\n. Iain Murray, as cited in Dallimore, Spurgeon: A New Biography, 57.\n\n. Dallimore, Spurgeon: A New Biography, 61 (emphasis added).\n\n. Susannah Spurgeon, Ten Years After (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1895), vi-vii. Dallimore, Spurgeon: A New Biography, 150.\n\n. Steve Miller, D.L. Moody on Spiritual Leadership (Chicago, IL: Moody, 2004), 22.\n\n. Miller, D.L. Moody on Spiritual Leadership, 22.\nAbout the Publisher\n\n* * *\n\nTo learn more about Harvest House books and to read sample chapters, visit our website:\n\nwww.harvesthousepublishers.com\n\nHARVEST HOUSE PUBLISHERS\n\nEUGENE, OREGON\n\n* * *\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\nThe dust of just beginning\n\n# **The dust of just beginning**\n\n**Don Kerr**\n\n(C) 2010 Don Kerr\n\nPublished by AU Press, Athabasca University  \n1200, 10011 -- 109 Street  \nEdmonton, AB T5J 3s8\n\n**Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication**\n\nKerr, Don  \nThe dust of just beginning \/ Don Kerr.\n\n(Mingling voices, ISSN 1917-9405)  \nPoems.  \nIssued also in an electronic format (978-1-897425-93-0).  \nISBN 978-1-897425-92-3\n\nI. Title.\n\nII. Series: Mingling voices\n\nPS8571.E71D88 2010 C811'.54 C2010-904774-5\n\nCover and book design by Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design.  \nCover image by Don Proch, _Asessippi Valley_ (2006).  \nAuthor photo by Hans Dommasch.  \nPrinted and bound in Canada by Marquis Book Printing.\n\nPlease contact AU Press, Athabasca University at  \naupress@athabascau.ca for permissions and copyright  \ninformation.\n\nA volume in the Mingling Voices series:  \nISSN 1917-9405 (Print) ISSN 1917-9413 (Online)\n\n## **Contents**\n\nJUST BEGINNING\n\na height of prairies\n\nBilly\n\nthe lady gardener, Anne Szum\n\nthe voice of Anne\n\nsun\n\nthe jesus poems\n\nthe body poems\n\nthe waters of life\n\nwhat then is free?\n\nthe rote beads\n\nthe last day\n\nI told you I could drive\n\nIla\n\na memory\n\noh then\n\ngone large gone small\n\nthe dust of just beginning\n\nFOR IT'S LOVE\n\nlove poems\n\nmall\n\nbody poems II, the black poet\n\nJOURNEY MAN\n\na fearful carnality\n\nlost and found\n\nmy road\n\nthe first day\n\nwhere are we going next year?\n\nto the tax man\n\njourney man\n\nyou dream the poem\n\ntough terrain\n\nmind riding\n\nBlue River\n\nWE ARE THE ECHO\n\nkelly's alley\n\nhunting rabbits\n\non the line\n\nsummer south\n\nCousin Lynda\n\nwater boy\n\nwe are the echo\n\nthis is the day nothing happens\n\nbody idling over\n\nTO ESCAPE ONTO PAPER\n\ninto the woods\n\nword off\n\nvictim of story\n\nat the end of his fifth whiskey\n\nthe dead tired poem\n\nthe anonymous clouds\n\nnever start from here\n\nSamuel Beckett\n\nacknowledgement[s]\n\nabout the author\n\n## **JUST BEGINNING**\n### **a height of prairies**\n\na height of prairies over the river  \nsideways sun in the brown  \nstubble, twisted speech  \nof dead trees, the duplicitous  \nsun, but in decline, eyes  \nseeing for miles, all  \nat the same moment, elsewhere  \nthe room with the blinds drawn,  \nthe cancer advancing like traffic\n\nor the smell in the corridor  \nof cooking, a fire hose for decor,  \na life, long at its time, unmet  \nin words, a day in the  \nShirley apartments, the smell  \nof cooking, long demolished,  \nhome to a bowling alley,  \nautomobile garage, passing  \nunmarked\n\na day in Connaught  \nin Ladbroke Road\n\n### **Billy**\n\nlook, Billy dead, the city empties,  \nthe city of London empties,  \nif we don't enter we needn't  \nremember, nor see others  \nin his room, his things  \nscattered, his ghost thin  \nin my belly what is there to say  \nwithout the listening man?\n\nyour death Billy,  \nconfounding time, burying  \nyour friends, burying the stories,  \nplentiful as books in your room,  \nyour Vancouver, long buried,  \nlong demolished, sun the liar  \nsaying this is the last of all days, yet  \nwe bound for the next day, your music  \non the tape deck, we travel  \ntwo ways now, playing you  \none day at a time\n\nBilly at Notting Hill  \nat Ladbroke Road  \nat Gennaro's, at Prost's,  \ntalking the eyes out of a girl,  \ndancing near the wide Saskatchewan  \nin shoes shiny enough to show  \nthe mossy face, Billy leaving  \nChristmas at Finchley for the  \neight-mile walk or crying  \nin the crowded hospital at Paddington  \nand saying I don't usually cry,  \nthe pain swallowing Billy\n\n### **the lady gardener, Anne Szum**\n\nthe night edges over the house  \ninto the branches of the tree  \nthe branches of the dark green fir  \ninto the forest of the peony  \ninto the dirt under the peony\n\nin the dead centre of the day  \nin the mid of the mid day  \nthe sun like a perennial  \nthe bluebells happy in the  \nsweet breeze the lilies  \npointing skyward the raspberries  \nin spiky bud all wait oh they all wait  \nfor their first love the lady  \ngardener but she is unavoidably  \ndetained the faces of the pansies  \nthe petunias watch and wait but  \nshe is unavoidably  \ndetained\n\n### **the voice of Anne**\n\nif your words fall into her ear  \nand you are in the same room  \nthe one with the column of cds  \nthe heater that eats logs  \nthe walls insulated with books of poetry\n\nin that room, your words falling  \ninto that ear, need no other home  \nuntil she, the lady gardener,  \ndwells only in our rooms  \ncluttered as they are  \nwith all matter of the living  \nabsently watching cars  \npeople and the faintest  \nof faint snow falling  \nfrom a heaven grey as ghosts  \nor your eccentric angels falling  \ninto the pie-shaped lot  \non Connaught saying in their  \nodd way for heaven's sake  \npick the raspberries  \nred as thick blood  \nthe sparrow hopping about  \nlooking for the ear to pour  \nits song into while I, bereft,  \nfall back into the habit of books\n\nand she sits, makes tea,  \ntends the garden, reads,  \nin the voice of Anne,  \nall days in disarray\n\n### **sun**\n\nif there is no sun  \nand the sky draws down  \nyou walk through  \na veil of mist and are not  \nat home\n\nsun shone before you knew  \nsun and wherever you travel sun  \nis your home your dream  \nof Rome sun rising  \nand falling in Claude  \nof Lorraine the wide bay  \nor the bones leaning like flames  \ninto only sun\n\nwhen you see sun  \nrocking the lake, firing the woods  \nwith a latticework that greens  \nthe ferns, laying great hands  \non the hills, scouring the bare  \nvalleys and the small forests  \nof your arms and legs,  \nwould you praise god?  \nor let the mind go dead,  \nthe body drowsy bathing  \nin sun heat and day light\n\n### **the jesus poems**\n\n1.\n\njesus held me  \nin the grip of hell  \nmy grade three teacher  \nlit the fire  \nand only prayer  \nsaid over and over and over  \nmight keep me green and cool  \nterrified always to re-enter  \nthe brick prison of St. Joe's School  \nor to tell the terror  \nheld me in thrall\n\nbaseball was the way  \nand the light of day  \njesus never played baseball  \nmaybe umpire or scorekeeper  \nbut the soft bunt down third  \nthe leaping catch at second  \nto be lead-off batter  \nto wait in the on-deck circle  \nto do the chatter  \nto win at tough  \nSt. Mary's to forget the fire  \nconcentrating on the next pitch  \nwas the best way out of  \nall that other stuff\n\n2.\n\nThere is nothing I believe  \nwith mathematical precision,  \nno equation out of the self.  \nIf lonely enough or vanishing enough  \nwould Odetta effect a cure?  \nPatsy Cline or _Casablanca?_  \nYet there is the temptation,  \nthe nothing into everything,  \ntrue life in death, the miracle  \nof the cross, the Catholic  \ncalculating machine.\n\neasy enough to say  \nblack on a health day\n\n3.\n\nsweet church, its large  \nemptiness, candles burning  \nfor the dead, the boy counting  \nhow many souls could fit and fly  \nin the large auditorium of god,  \nquits at thousands, looks  \nat silence, the creak of a kneeler  \nechoes, he kneeling, hands clasped  \nholy, sinks his teeth into the  \nvarnished pew to leave his mark,  \nunder St. Joseph in the brown  \ncloak with a staff the candles  \nburning like souls, like hell,  \nlike purgatory and so beautiful,  \neyes caught, body gone quiet  \nhe crosses himself,  \nwalks down the stone steps  \ninto the wide street\n\n4.\n\nthis was the sermon  \nthat a great garden  \nour heart's desire  \ngreen and golden  \nwas surrounded by a high fence  \nwith a narrow entrance  \nand outside all was fury and fire  \nstorm and stormy plains  \nthe land of all fear\n\nI knew I would never  \ndiscover that narrow way  \nto the green garden  \nand day after day  \nI picked the deadhead poppies  \nin my mom's garden that they  \nwould flower orange and yellow  \nlike fire all the days  \nof summer\n\n5.\n\nIs it possible to be a fallen away  \nUnited Churcher? Like my dad.  \nWe discovered in the apple-box  \nbookshelves in the basement his prize  \nfor bible studies in grade six  \nin Nokomis. That wasn't  \nthe father we knew. He attended  \nCatholic mass with my mother  \non Easter Sunday and was reading  \na detective novel in the back pew  \nwhen the priest, confessions over,  \nasked him if it was the good book.  \nMy dad, halfway through  \na Rex Stout, grinned. He was  \nan accountant but not  \na Catholic. His balance sheet  \nwas numerical. \"Who made you?\"  \n\"God made me to... \" After church  \nwind in trees makes shadows.\n\n6.\n\nWhat was it you called me?  \ncatholic or socialist.  \nCall me something less  \nsomething you know little of.  \nCall me baroque.  \nFellini says labels  \nshould go on suitcases.\n\nThe old house on eleventh  \nwith so many gimcracks  \non the lawn folks could not  \nfathom the lady maker, mad  \nthey said, their clothes  \nshrinking. Or a church  \nI saw as a kid, basement  \nonly, or the one tree left  \nwhere we necked in the shadow  \nof long-gone Rosary Hall we edging  \nnearer to finale but hanging  \nfire anteroom to living room  \nand if you talk\n\ndon't focus\n\nokay\n\n7.\n\nfor fear, I moved silently  \nfor fear, I said little  \nfor fear, I kept to myself  \nfor fear, on my knees in prayer  \nfor fear, never entering  \nfor fear, never entering  \nfor fear, no life but fear\n\n### **the body poems**\n\n1.\n\nthe body is sick  \nthe head says  \nthe body is growing  \nmosquito bites  \nankle aches belly boils  \nand the like  \njust to spite mind  \nno choice but to live above that damn body  \nhead whose clarity reviles  \nthe accident of body  \nwants to be left alone  \nfeels trapped in  \nerrant & bloody sullied  \nstink of flesh and bone\n\n2.\n\nnearing the end, the body failing,  \nyou learn modesty in all desires,  \nexcept the desire for desire,  \na modest thirst, the rose hip  \nor the lemon or the mint tea,  \nsettling inoffensively in that body\n\noh that was\n\nin its time so arrogant,  \nso easy in its words  \na soft-shoe body  \ndancing body  \nblues body\n\nahh\n\n3.\n\nwhen I feel awful, so far at least,  \nit's provisional, like a hangover  \nthat has always its slow end  \nencoded in the very libations  \nyou drank, and at this moment  \non a cool morning in October  \nthe fumes from my coffee  \npour over this page like  \nclouds in fast motion, so  \nlight a grey, so tentative,  \nso provisional\n\n4.\n\nthe worm under the skin  \nleaches colour, rolling  \nin the sun, basking in dark,  \nthe colour of cement, pocked,  \nscarred with cracks, worn,  \nwalked on, the day on the move,  \ncars talking in their boring way,  \nthe sun blueing the sky, the worm  \ngrinning over its first coffee of the day\n\n5. a modest carnality\n\nwhen I ordered a grande au lait  \non Denman the girl asked,  \ntwo or three shots of espresso  \nand I said two, I wasn't man  \nenough for three and she said  \nshe was, the modest carnality,  \nin the swing-walk of the waitress,  \nin the hug of greeting, in the  \namazing summer legs of the  \nserver girl, in this  \nlight touch and that,  \nin the communion of smiles,  \nthe perfect stranger, the  \ntouch on the shoulder, the purring  \nof invisible antennae,  \nin for a penny\n\n6. the dance\n\nthose times ago the dance  \nenveloping us none other  \nthan dance hip check  \neye trap sun  \nrising in a series of steps  \ndown the railroad hotel  \nbody wakes in the shank  \nof next afternoon the sun  \nimprinting itself in the brain  \nfind a beer start a  \nslow dance waiting  \nfor the music of your lover  \nto take you over  \nand over again\n\n### **the waters of life**\n\nwhich then are the waters of life?  \nat Fishing Lake on quiet days  \nthe water lolling about  \nlike a lazy fish\n\nat Windermere the bonfire  \nof evening at the end  \nof the lapping day\n\nat English Bay the eye  \ndrawn to the line  \nwhere water ends  \nand sky begins\n\nwaves washing ashore  \nunder the still water sky\n\n### **what then is free?**\n\nlike water to find your own level  \nwithout guilt  \nto fade from view  \nwhile others talk  \nto arrive at each day  \nwithout a plan but with,  \nlet us say, poems to write  \nin the sun of morning  \nto have an appointment for lunch  \nyou want to keep\n\n### **the rote beads**\n\nHe knew he should be bereft  \nat the prayers for his mother  \nit was what he felt but  \nwhen the old priest did  \nthe stations of the rosary  \nthe rote beads he felt  \nonly anger. His mother  \nhad said the trouble  \nwith the Catholic seniors  \nresidence was everybody  \nwas so damned religious.  \nAge eating at her  \nnever got all the way.\n\n### **the last day**\n\nhe forgot one wound  \nin another  \none ghastly presence  \nreplaced by another  \na kind of motion disease  \nfrom body part to body  \npart, head to belly to  \nlimb, this day the last day  \nof the freshly dead  \nhearing all the words  \nthat lay you under  \non the last ride  \nthe cars smelling each other  \ndown memorial drive  \nunder the elm roof  \nshredding the sun\n\nthen the day too is done\n\n### **I told you I could drive**\n\nI've become a brandy drinker  \na swirl at the bottom of the fat-bellied  \nglass, with the elegant scent\n\non a particular day  \nof no particular sort  \nmy mother, having received  \nher first driver's licence,  \naged 72, drove to my father's grave  \nand said, \"See, Cam, I told you I could drive,\"  \nused one tank of gas and sold us the car\n\nit's not a bad brandy  \nI should be drinking  \nrye and ginger  \nmy father's and his brother's  \nand Canada's national drink\n\na toast to our fallen comrades\n\n### **Ila**\n\nIla who tended  \nour kids with verve,  \nleaving us now behind  \nthe wind beating us  \ndown swallowing all  \ntestimonials, chilling us  \nto the bone, driving us  \nto the warm cars,  \nyou betcha,  \nIla in the cold, cold  \nground, brother took the soil  \ntemperature, four inches  \ndown it was only thirty  \ncan't plant, yep, clouds  \nbundling over the April grey  \nstubble, cars gone, you  \nbetcha\n\n### **a memory**\n\na memory  \nrattling in the head  \nthe face of one long  \ndead in the dream  \nin the city you've never been  \nthe ambulance in its white coat  \nits cargo dying  \nin the dead of winter\n\nthe ghost in the belly\n\nsong by Mabel Mercer  \nby Oscar Brown  \nby Nina Simone  \nis then and then\n\noh then\n\n### **oh then**\n\nwhile journeys end  \nthey begin again  \nall finales provisional  \nthe meeting over the walking begins  \nthe walking over the bus begins it's  \nhardly news years ago there was  \none sunset I decided would never  \nend colours blurring the evening  \nby the river whatever evening  \nit was remains still colours blurring  \nall going down and every  \nsundown is a replay  \nof that evening antennae  \nquivering\n\noh then\n\n### **gone large gone small**\n\nis it rooms or parks  \nwe desire wombs or space  \nlow roofs or sky high  \nthe friend in the room  \nat Ladbroke has died  \nthe room at Connaught  \nthe room where the stories  \nwere stored gone dark  \nthe city empties  \nstreet by street  \ngone large gone small\n\n### **the dust of just beginning**\n\nthe trees by the river yellowing  \nthe day without breeze  \ngolden coins hovering  \nin the blue sun  \nthe car tailing through  \nparkland or prairie  \na chill in the air  \nfirst taste of winter  \nwhite and cold  \nis the taste of the first melt  \non the south side of stores  \non Broadway where the low rise  \nencourages spring arriving  \nstreet by street everywhere  \nthe scent of dust  \nslow stepping spring  \nin the nostril  \nthe dust of just  \nbeginning\n\n## **FOR IT 'S LOVE**\n### **love poems**\n\n1. for it's love\n\nfor it's love owns the body  \nmakes it bend like a tree  \nin the wind all one way\n\nfor it's love owns the heart  \nmakes it drown in the flood  \nin the wild tide of love\n\nfor it's love owns the head  \neyes look where they will  \nthere are no thoughts but love\n\nthe day going on forever  \nall parts caught by love  \nnowhere to turn but love\n\n2. remembrance of love\n\nremembrance of love  \nthe internal collapse as you  \nwalked in the door in any  \nroom at all in church  \nthe icon my eyes  \nprayed to oh then  \nheart full heart sick  \nthere outside my self  \nmy self was standing\n\na sweater of let us say pink  \nwhere breasts like birds  \nin nests entered my nervous  \nsystem and I was a goner\n\nhalf in love with loss\n\n3. music in the veins\n\nmusic in the veins  \nfeet a life of their own  \nit was nina simone  \noh flo flo flo me la and on  \nthe move till dawn  \nthe partner at arm's length  \nor close enough to trade  \nbody parts all the way down  \nthe mind on half pay  \nwaiting for nina to say  \nit was time to flo me la  \nin our juice-laden bodies\n\nand who among us in the tall cafe  \nhas swallowed a ghost today\n\n4. the nameless heart\n\nthe nameless heart  \nnamed heart drowns under  \nthe flood and reaches for dry  \nland receding faster than grasp\n\nthe heart in deep water  \npumping for all it's worth  \nits aorta and its long  \ntentacles like a winter  \nelm tree is desperate  \nfor the sign  \nfor the saving grace  \nfor the word from you oh lady  \nday to save this nameless  \nheart of mine\n\n5. love can be\n\nlove can be  \nso muted a solo  \nso sweet a duet  \ndaily the jazz trio  \nin the late-night lounge  \nthe talking going on  \nat the low tables  \nround as wafers  \nat odd times the bar  \ngone quiet the piano  \nso fluent in the night  \nor driving for miles  \non the ease of the wide  \nfour-lane highway joining  \nthe rv park on full hookup  \nfor the night\n\n### **mall**\n\nin the mall the family of man  \nhas gone forth and multiplied  \nand the cars of the family of man  \nhave gone forth and multiplied  \nbusy days in the  \nfabricated world\n\nenough of waiting, yes,  \nthe buying, selling, the walking  \nand waiting, cars in their carspots,  \nthe endless lines of desires,  \nthe feet dying, the sulking,  \nthe slow fire of anger,  \ntrying to stay sane,  \nthe sun on high and where  \nis a stranger to start  \nthe whole stupid bloody thing  \nall over again\n\n### **body poems II, the black poet**\n\n1. narcissus\n\ntranslation is hard  \nwalking is easy\n\nlove is a long line  \nand kissing is shorthand\n\nit's a sweet thing to say  \nI wrote poetry in Spain  \nI wish I could say that\n\nblack is the colour  \nof my true love's heart\n\nin the magic room  \nwe slept well  \nyou went bloody wild,  \nNarcissus,  \nbloody wild,  \nyou said  \nproud as hell\n\n2. kill speak\n\nkill speak, she said,  \nkill speak and take me to bed  \noh I'm too timid, I said,  \ntoo timid to take you to bed\n\nlife, she said, is so bloody bad  \nI had a devil for a dad  \nI'm too timid I said,  \ntoo timid to take you to bed\n\nI've a body a devil can love  \na body ripe for that guy up above  \nI've a mind that believes in God  \nand a body that tries to be good\n\nI've two breasts and a hungry cunt  \ncome aboard and join in the hunt  \nsweet Lord protect me I ask you please  \nsweet Lord before I fall to my knees\n\nkill speak me baby, she said,  \nkill speak and take me to bed  \nI never learned kill speak, he said,  \nshall I kill self to enter your bed?\n\nyes, she said, yes  \nwell, he said, hmm\n\n3. love is the knife\n\nlove is the knife  \nthat cuts to the bone  \noh a fine knife  \nan old lacerator  \nplunged into ugly love,  \nshe said, as if saying it  \nmade it more\n\n4. fantasies\n\nthe fantasies  \ngorge themselves on the barren  \nbed fantasy populates\n\nevery which way\n\nwhile plain day is a\n\nwindy blue\n\nthe first red finger of tulip  \nin the smelly mulch reborning  \nin the wrinkled leaves\n\nfirst splash\n\n5. the ease of wit\n\nremember the days  \nof the ease of wit  \nthe flowing in and out  \nfocus the faux pas,  \nsurface in lieu  \nof the dead serious,  \nthe art of the interrupt  \ndeath to tirade but  \nall honour to the solo  \nas for love give cole  \nporter the last aper\u00e7u\n\n## **JOURNEY MAN**\n### **a fearful carnality**\n\ntoday the clouds are aesthetic  \nwhite & thin, elegant &  \noptimistic yet dissolve  \ninto sun in a fearful  \ncarnality you walking or  \ndriving under them as if you  \nwere important your eyes  \ngorged the sun in that high-lit  \nscam dressing you down  \nlashing you to the day  \nsun-lashed back forty lashes  \nif you please to bring the  \ndead to light  \nbilly & anne kitty & cam  \nthe light so thick  \nby midday death  \nwas in decay\n\n### **lost and found**\n\nlost on this road  \nwe know like the back of our hand  \nunder clouds that cannot hold still  \ncan hold no shape at all  \nof course we are expected  \nthe scotch waiting in the cupboard hall  \nbut nobody knows where we are  \non the highway like any other  \nin the car that's any car  \non some wave or other on our way  \nto the old port of call\n\n### **my road**\n\nthis is my road  \nno one else wants it  \nthe clouds over my road  \nare first-rate clouds  \nthe fields by my road  \nare Olympic-sized fields  \nand I'm on the old way  \nto discover the exact feeling  \nof driving in the sweet spring  \non the great plains  \nthe road free of language  \nthe signs sparse  \nlife thin  \ncars fast\n\nthe high sun  \nin passing gear  \non my road\n\nthat runs and  \nruns\n\n### **the first day**\n\nIn the beginning there was delay  \nIn the beginning rain was already falling  \nIn the beginning the cell phone worked overtime  \nIn the beginning the last wash was done  \nthe last flowers planted  \nIn the beginning the travelling bags  \noverflowed with anticipation  \nand the dog left home in the company of a girl  \nworth wagging her tail over  \nIn the beginning the house resumed its silence  \nIn the beginning the van groaned  \nthe baby pushed all the buttons  \nand the clock quit  \nIn the beginning the rain clouds came in layers  \nalready in the coastal weather  \nwe were travelling to  \nIn the beginning the fields stretched forever  \nand the kids played pick-a-number  \nIn the beginning the black highway  \ndrew us onward  \nIn the beginning we were our destination  \nIn the middle a patch of blue sky appeared  \nWe were all reassured  \nIn the middle he saw the past  \nthe Scamp the Dart the Rambler the Chevrolet  \nHis eyes were the same  \nThey saw what was there  \nThe highways were wider smoother  \nIn the middle the van  \ndoes not break down  \nin the rubber-tire world  \nIn the middle he thought  \nof whiskey at the terminus  \nHe thought no further ahead than that  \nIn the middle the kids  \nran round the park in Vegreville  \nand invented happiness  \nIn the middle the sun came out  \nHe was sunloving and mindnumb  \nnow time the only time  \njust like last time  \nIn the middle the sun  \nrambled all over the place  \nand they sang Blue Skies  \nIn the middle the baby yelled \"cows cows\"  \nand became the cowboy  \nIn the middle he wanted that other time  \nHe wanted that other time  \nthe blue Chevrolet just before  \ndeath entered the world  \nOh he wanted that other time  \nToday he wanted today  \nalready lonely for today  \nand our vanguard group of seven  \nin the beginning the middle and the end\n\nIn the end they made four correct turns  \nIn the end they sat on the deck  \nin the full sun  \nNow only the earth moved  \nIn the end the barbecue worked on their behalf  \nIn the end they drove for more beer  \nThe evening was long at the end of June  \nIn the end the clouds massed, ran, thinned,  \ngrew ramparts, washboards, were white,  \nwere grey, were yellow with sundown,  \nstreaked with lightning, poured rain  \nIn the end the cards appeared  \nIn the end the television captured the children  \nIn the end our eyes collapsed and we dreamt  \ntravelling invisible roads  \nAt the end of the first day\n\n### **where are we going next year?**\n\nbad highway out of Richdale  \nmakes Saskatchewan drivers  \nfeel right at home\n\nthe Hanna escarpment says  \nthe days of the prairie  \nare numbered  \nthe valley of the Red Deer  \nis at hand  \nclouds in our heaven cool  \nwith mountain air  \nwe surround our old friend  \non two sides  \nand we are where we  \nwere meant to be\n\nGraham, give me my pillow.  \nIt's a chicken.  \nGive me my chicken.  \nIt's a turkey.  \nGraham!  \nYou have to pay fifteen, thirty,  \neighty thousand dollars.  \nBooger brain.  \nYou're a barney.  \nYou're a guinea pig.  \nI'm hungry.  \nWhere are we going next year?\n\n### **to the tax man**\n\nrolling down the railroad line  \na mile-long container train  \nsaving all that gasoline  \nspent on the four-lane highway  \nby trucks, cars, and us today  \nif I write enough to mean  \nwe'll deduct the gasoline  \ndon't need a regular metre  \nto deduct another litre  \nbut hell if I write enough  \nI'll take the motel cost off  \nhey, hey, this land is our land  \ntravelling on the tax man\n\n### **Journey man**\n\nI am a journey man  \non the low road high road  \nthe flags of the clouds  \nblowing upstream all a-flutter  \nmy heart the journey man  \non the known roads  \nfresh this morning as  \nnew-baked sun\n\n### **you dream the poem**\n\naround the corner the perfect  \nvalley  \nthe farmhouse with a silver roof  \nburning  \nthe easy highway the sun  \non your leg\n\nthe highway is the narrative cutting through  \nthe chaos of trees  \nfive days on the road in your own  \nhome  \neach highway a number each curve  \nnameless  \nto Kamloops or Cache Creek or the legendary  \nYakk  \ngoing the speed limit plus  \nfive  \nin a meeting in a basement room one window only  \nyou dream the poem of car  \nand road\n\n### **tough terrain**\n\nin the new town  \non the wrong road  \nthe women shopping  \nthe sky lowering a woman  \nwith white breasts drives  \noff in a four-wheel the day  \nwaiting for her on the edge  \nof age let the story begin  \nthe story of giving up  \nsmoking or beating cancer  \nor the story of love which  \ncarries her away like  \na ferocious four-wheel  \nin tough terrain\n\n### **mind riding**\n\nin the room and travelling too  \nyou look me in the eye and  \nsee nothing at all  \nthis random mind riding  \non highways of no man's devising  \nno man can map mind  \nwhich has itself forgotten  \nwhere it is so wandering it is  \nso absent as if all walls  \nwere open road the eye  \nclosed shall go  \nwhere it will\n\n### **Blue River**\n\n\"You're so old  \nyou'll forget  \nwhere you come from.\"  \nNope.  \nI come from youth.  \n\"You're so old  \nyou'll forget  \nwhere you're going to.\"  \nI'm going to Blue River  \nby brown cows and green trees  \nrock face and fast river.\n\n## **WE ARE THE ECHO**\n### **kelly 's alley**\n\nhe walked into the wrong alley  \nthat was kelly's alley  \ndaydreaming into danger  \nfor the day of the bully  \nwas at hand by the broken  \ngarage that smelled of poop  \neyes opening legs like jelly  \n\"you come back I'll break yr fuckin'  \nhead\" backing out in terror  \nend of the alley in sight tremor  \nof hope\n\n### **hunting rabbits**\n\nhunting rabbits with a .22  \npulling the barbed wire apart  \nto crawl through  \ninto the hilly bush  \nno crop no cow no farmhouse  \neyes alive watching for  \nmovement in the brush  \nbang, bang, got him!  \ngot him! said Ted,  \ndead rabbit brown  \ndark blood stain  \nlying in the spiky grass  \nour eyes alive watching again  \nfor movement in the low bush\n\n### **on the line**\n\nto work the line  \nis to live in the mind  \nthe body repeating itself  \nhand over hand over hand  \nthe mind on weekend\n\nto work the line  \nis to become the machine  \nfeed it with bottles at one end  \npack them out the other  \nat night grease the nipples  \nthe bottle-washing machine  \non general drone the labelling  \nmachine on steady clunk clank  \nwe the most quiet part of  \nthe machine each in his own  \nreverie of lawn or lake or love  \nall bodies equal  \non the line\n\n### **summer south**\n\npicking cherries in the Okanagan  \ntall pointed ladders lift you  \nto the long view, lake, hills,  \nroadway flowing with cars,  \na kind of power to be so tall  \nin the cave of a tree, clouds  \nstreaming over the brown hills,  \nyou pause, for the moment, the work  \non hold, of course it's summer,  \nsummer south, obstreperously  \nsummer, in a place you are  \nand aren't and you think  \nhave I given god the slip  \nperched high in the tree  \nthe purple cherries  \nbursting in the mouth\n\n### **Cousin Lynda**\n\nin Vernon Cousin Lynda was on the hunt  \nfor a hundred pounds of cucumbers  \na hundred pounds of tomatoes  \nfor dill pickles for relish  \npick them herself at 45\u00a2 a pound  \nto lay away the preserves  \npreserving herself publishing  \npickles I said, you're  \nyour mother and she said  \nyes\n\n### **water boy**\n\nthe body of the boy leaps  \ninto deep water dives  \nunder the body of water  \nfrog boy water boy  \ndanger boy no fears mother  \na blur way up there sound  \nechoes in the sweet  \ndeep water\n\n### **we are the echo**\n\nfaces echo  \nskip a father or so  \nthe nose of the clan ringrose  \nis on the rampage  \nor the black black hair  \nof the kerrs from god knows  \nwhere all the old photos  \nunnamed stiff with time  \nor I see in the bar  \nan echo of doug  \ndead a dozen years ago  \nbecause they were after him  \nthe gamblers paranoia awful  \nas dog piss in the snow  \nthe collie like the collie  \nwho whelped her all in the face  \nthe tail markings high and low  \nof the dead we are the echo\n\n### **this is the day nothing happens**\n\nthis is the day nothing happens  \na meeting to say we've come to the end  \nof the agenda for today soccer on tv  \nand hotspur won this is the day  \nnothing happens listening  \nfor the first time to a cd  \nby mark this is the day  \nnothing happens a son says  \nhow his interview went  \nexcellent a sister-in-law  \nhad half a lung removed  \nand is under morphine  \nthis is the day nothing happens  \nthis is the day nothing happens  \nto you\n\n### **body idling over**\n\nI bike to the coffee shop  \nsun stepping in the window  \nbody idling over  \nart on the wall  \nmusic on the sound system  \n\"Oh my, oh my, why must I explain?\"  \nthe dark tenor sings girl  \nin a ball cap walks past  \nthe coffee oasis  \nand there's that blue sky  \nburning and pine trees  \ntall as the school  \nnewspapers to tell of the  \nparent trap Cuba's secrets  \npoverty in Manila and then  \nI dream body idling over  \nto be on the road at Hope  \nwith all its intersections\n\n## **TO ESCAPE ONTO PAPER**\n### **into the woods**\n\ninto the woods walked the man  \ndedicated to ecology, and he walked in  \nwithout a pen, I said, without a pen!  \nincredulous that joy should have no record,  \nas if the self would boil and bubble  \nunrecorded, all of life clammering  \nto escape onto paper\n\n### **word off**\n\nshe walks in and desolates  \nthe day, a particular flavour  \nof face, a blonde face, greyish  \nhair, loose blue shirt,  \npressed jeans, wordless,  \nslender as a knife, eyes  \nlike weapons me  \nworking hard to word  \nher off\n\n### **victim of story**\n\nPhiloctetes remains true  \nto his pain, the festering  \nleg, for years abandoned  \non the rocky island, and no  \nwords of Odysseus the political,  \nno promise of fame, of victory,  \nthey are but words to the pain  \nwhich is his, which is  \nwho he has become, but myth  \nmore strong than self  \nand the god from the machine  \ndrove Philoctetes to Troy,  \nanother victim of story\n\n### **at the end of his fifth whiskey**\n\nat the end of his fifth whiskey  \nhe became certain he was certain  \nand those who spoke of the price  \nof gold of shares in Nortel of the  \nCayman Islands as grand tax haven were  \nhe was certain in his brilliant head  \ndead wrong and dead dead\n\n### **the dead tired poem**\n\non the day of the hangover  \non the day of the hollow chest  \non the day of the body in charge  \non the day of the rapid cloud  \non the day of the tossed trees  \nin full bloom  \non the day of the dead eye  \nbody working to hold its head up  \neveryone else exuding health  \nlike a plague of grin  \na day on which the first beer  \nlay on the horizon  \non the dead day of  \nthe dead tired poem\n\n### **the anonymous clouds**\n\nthere is no centre on  \na glum day the anonymous clouds  \nover the river whose cross-hatched  \nwaves cannot be named  \none from another  \nor the weeds the bush the trees\n\nsit on my bench for a minute  \nor by some other method  \nof measure shadows moving  \nin the short-hair grass\n\n### **never start from here**\n\nin the metropole  \nthe weight of opinion\n\nwe live in a thin country  \npoets slip out sideways\n\ntraffic is heavy and art  \nbrief poem inert  \nlives in an unmarked  \ngrave never start  \nfrom here\n\n### **Samuel Beckett**\n\nI sat next to Samuel Beckett  \nHe didn't say a word  \nI didn't say a word  \nHe said nothing  \nI said nothing  \nHe had a pint of Guinness  \nI had a gill of whiskey  \nHe read nothing  \nI read a script  \nI looked up  \nHe lifted his glass to his lips  \nI think it was Beckett  \nHis face looked like  \nan Ordinance Survey map  \nHe cleared his throat once  \nI drank  \nHe drank  \nshifted in his chair once  \nand it creaked  \nHe didn't say a word  \nIt must have been Beckett\n**\u00b6** This book is set in the Thesis Sans family,  \na typeface designed by Luc(as) de Groot in 1994.\n\n## **acknowledgement [s]**\n\nI would like to thank the third cloud  \non the left of the elm closest to the van,  \nthe cloud that is unravelling, the elm  \nthat twists in its own way.\n\nThanks also to the coffee house and bar  \nthat provide tables for a small fee,  \nand to the ideological drugs I've  \ntaken and the slow recovery from same.\n\nThanks to everyone who looks like  \nthey do, and to the labyrinth of  \nthe hawthorn, the garden, the  \nliving room and the bedroom.\n\nThanks for my friends, who read  \nearlier drafts, though  \nthe last draft is always best.\n\n[ PS. I thank all those who helped with these words:  \nfrom a Saskatoon Writer's Group, Anne Szumigalski,  \nJohn Clarke, David Carpenter, Dwayne Brenna; from  \nAU Press, Walter Hildebrandt, who asked for the  \nmanuscript, and Pamela MacFarland Holway,  \nwho fine tuned it. Ta. ]\n\n## **about the author**\n\nMax Frith is an author without  \na single publication, no novel, no  \nbook of poems, no play, but he has read  \nmany books and attends movies  \nregularly. He has entered  \nmany contests and writes at  \nodd moments in a school  \nscribbler. He won an eight-  \nminute poetry contest, and  \npursues women at a  \nrespectful distance.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}