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    tain that this would have been denounced as the Sabellian heresy by Athanasius and his contemporaries . I did not wish to rundown Sabellians , much less to excommunicate them , if they would give me equality ; but I felt it intensely unjust , when my adherence to the Nicene Creed was my real offence , that I should be treated as setting up some novel wickedness against all Christendom , and slandered by vague imputations which reached far and far beyond my power of answering or explaining . Mysterious aspersions were made even against my moral * character , and were alleged to me as additional reasons for refusing communion with me ; and when I demanded a tribunal , and that my accuser would meet me face to face , all inquiry was refused * on the plea that it was needless and undesirable . I had much reason to

    believe that a very small number of persons had constituted themselves my judges , and used against me all the airs of the Universal Church ; the many lending themselves easily to swell the cry of heresy , when they have little personal acquaintance with the party atacked . Moreover , when I was being condemned as in error , I in vain asked to be told what was the truth . ' I accept the Scripture : that is not enough . I accept the Nicene Creed : that is not enough . Give me , then , your formula : where , what is it ? ' But , no ! those who thought it their duty to condemn me , disclaimed the intention of * making a Creed' when I asked for one . They reprobated my interpretation of Scripture as against that of the whole Church , but would not undertake to expound that of the Church . "

    He also arrived at the conviction" That spirituality is no adequate security for sound moral discernment . These alienated friends did not know they were acting unjustly , cruelly , crookedly , or they would have hated themselves for it : they thought they were doing God service . The fervour of their love towards him was probably greater than mine ; yet this did not make them superior to prejudice , or sharpen their logical faculties to see that they were idolizing words to which they attached no ideas . On several occasions I had distinctly perceived how serious alarm I gave by resolutely refusing to admit any shiftings and shufflings of language . I felt convinced that if I would but have conadded

    tradicted myself two or three times , and then have , ' That is the mystery of it , ' I could have passed as orthodox with many . I had been charged with a proud and vain determination to pry into divine mysteries , barely because I would not confess to propositions the meaning of which was to me doubtful , or say and unsay in consecutive breaths . It was too clear that a doctrine which muddles the understanding perverts also the power of moral discernment . If I had committed some flagrant sin they would have given me a fair and honourable trial ; but where they could not give me a public hearing , nor yet leave me unimpeached , without danger of ( what they called ) my infecting the Church , there was nothing left but to hunt me out unscrupulously . ' desire

    " That I may not infect the rest they , my nonexistence ; by fair means , if fair will succeed ; if not , then by foul . And whence comes this monstrosity into such bosoms ? Weakness of common sense , dread of the common understanding , an insufficient faith in common morality , are surely the disease ; and evidently nothing so exasperates this disease as consecrating religious tenets which forbid the exercise of common sense . " The history of religious persecutions taught him how it was peculiarly for unintelligible doctrines like Transubstantiation and the Trinity that the fiercest persecutions were instituted . He became conscious also that he had despised mere " moral men ; " they were " sinners , " because they were not " spiritual . " His own experience modified this feeling : —

    " Then at last I saw that the deficiency of ' mere moral men ' is that their morality is apt to be too external or merely negative and therefore incomplete : that the man who worships a fiend for a God may be in some sense spiritual , but his spirituality will be a devilish fanaticism , having nothing in it to admire or approve : that the moral man deserves approval or love for all the absolute good that he has attained , though there be a higher good to which he aspires not ; and that the truly and rightly spiritual is he who aims at an indefinitely high moral excellence , of which God is the embodiment ro his heart and soul . If the absolute excellence of morality be denied there is nothing for spirituality to

    aspire after , and nothing in God to worship . Years before I saw this as clearly as here stated the general train of thought was very wholesome , in giving me increased kindliness of judgment towards the common world of men , who do not show any religious development It was pleasant to me to look on an ordinary face and see it light up into a smile , and think with myself : — ' there is one heart that will judge of me by what I am , and not by a Procrustean dogma . ' Nor only so , but I saw that the saints , without the world , would make a very bad world of it : and that as ballast is wanted to a ship , so the common and rather low interests , and the homely principles , rules , and ways of feeling , keep the ti . urch from foundering by the intensity of her own gusU .

    Never having sheltered ourselves within the gloomy caverns of Calvinism we cannot realize to our imaginations by what evasions and sophistications the Calvinist really does contrive to reconcile his conscience with his doctrine . Mr . Newman , it appears , even when a Culvinist , was unable to admit the *• I afterwards learned that some of those trentlemon estoimi'd l » olilin ; ss of thought ' a lust of the mind , ' a :. d , us such , an immorality . Tlii . s enables them to permudo themselves that they do not reject a ' heretic ' for a matter of opinion , but lor that which they have a rLht to call immoral . What immoraliiy avus imputed to me I was not distinctly informed .

    doctrine of " reprobation ' as taught in the ninth chapter of Paul ' s Epistle to the Romans—that * ' God hardens in wickedness whomsoever He pleases , in order that he may show his long-suffering . " In fact the idea of eternal torment was so repugnant to his nature , that , having once stealthily and with compunctions dipped into an Unitarian book wherein he found that the Greek word translated by eternal means more truly '' secular , " he carried away with him a germ of doubt as to the whole doctrine . The moral difficulties then rose up before him : — " First , that every sin is infinite in ill-desert and in result , because it is committed against an infinite Being . Thus the fretfulness of a child is an infinite evil ! I was aghast that I could have believed it . Now , that it was no longer laid upon me as a duty to uphold the infinitude of God ' s retaliation on sin , I saw that it was an immorality to teach that sin was measured by anything else than the heart and will of the agent . That a finite being should deserve infinite punishment now , was manifestly as incredible as that he should deserve infinite reward , which I had never dreamed . —Again , I saw that the current orthodoxy made Satan eternal conqueror over Christ . In vain does the Son of God come from heaven and take human flesh and die on the cross . In spite of him the devil carries off to hell the vast majority of mankind , in whom not misery only , but sin is triumphant for ever and ever . Thus Christ not only does not succeed in destroying the works of the devil , but even aggravates them . —Again : what sort of gospel or glad tidings had I been holding ? Without this revelation no future state at all ( I presumed ) could be known . How much better no futurity for any than that a few should be eternally in bliss , and the great majority kept alive for eternal sin as well as eternal misery ? My gospel , then , was bad tidings , nay , the worst of tidings ! In a farther progress of thought I asked : would it not have been better that the whole race of man had never come into existence ? Clearly ! And thus God was made out to be unwise in creating them . No use in the punishment was imaginable , without setting up Fear , instead of Love , as the ruling principle in the blessed . And what was the moral tendency of the doctrine ? I had never borne to dwell upon it ; but I before long suspected that v . promoted malignity and selfishness , and was the real clue to the cruelties perpetrated under the name of religion . For he who does dwell on it must comfort himself under the prospect of his brethren ' s eternal misery , by the selfish expectation of personal blessedness . " Once resolutely testing Calvinism by moral standards the end may be foreseen : — " Lastly I saw , that the Calvinistic doctrine of human degeneracy teaches , that God disowns my nature ( the only nature I ever had ) as not his work , but the devil ' s work . He hereby tells me that he is not my Creator , and he disclaims his rights over me , as a father who disowns a child . To teach this , is to teach that I owe him no obedience , no worship , no trust ; to sever the cords that bind the creature to the Creator , and to make all religion gratuitous and vain . " As his Unitarian friend justly observed , Eternal punishment darkens the moral character of God , and produces malignity in man . With this same Unitarian Mr . Newman freely discussed , and " From the collision with him I gained a fresh insight into a part of my own mind . I had always regarded the Gospels ( at least the three first ) to be to the Epistles nearly as law to gospel ; that is , the three gospels dealt cniefly in precept , the epistles in motives which act on the affections . This did not appear to me dishonourable to the teaching of Christ ; for I supposed it to be a pre-determined development , and that he could not with advantage have preached himself as Paul and John preached him . But I now discovered that there was a deeper distaste in me for the details of the human life of Christ than I w is previously conscious ; a distaste which I found out by a reaction from the minute interest felt in such details by my new friend . For several years more I did not fully understand how and why this was ; viz ., that my religion had always been Pauline . Christ was to me the ideal of glorified human nature : but I needed some dimness in the portrait to give play to my imagination : if drawn too sharply historical it sank in to commonplace and caused a revulsion of feeling . As all pain tings of the miraculous used to displease and even disgust rne from a boy by the unbelief which they inspired ; so if any one dwelt on the special proofs of tenderness and love exhibited in certain words or actions of Jesus , it was apt to call out in me a sense that from day to day equal kindness might often be met . The imbecility of preachers , who would dwell on such words as 4 Weep not , ' as if nobody else ever uttered such , had always annoyed me . I felt it impossible to obtain a worthy idea of Christ from studying any of the details reported concerning him . If I dwelt , too much on these I got a finite object ; but I yearru d for an infinite one : hence my preference for John ' s mysterious Jesus . Thus iny Christ was not the figure accurately painted in the narrative , but one kindled in my imagination by the allusions and ( as it were ) poetry of the New Testament . I did not wish for vivid historical realization : relics I could never have valued ; pilgrimages to Jerusalem had always excited in me more of scorn than of sympathy . ' In our next we shall follow him in his examination of the Iteligion of the Letter .

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    j u * j 3 l , 1850 . ] mt > * fLexiiet . 233

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    ST . JOHN'S LIFE IN THE LEVANT . Two Fears' Residence in a Levantim Family . By Bayle St .

    John , author of " Adventures in the L . ybian Desert , # c . Chapman and Hall . We find this to be a genuine book : it realizes what it proposes , and affords one of the completest and most interesting pictures of Oriental life that has hitherto fallen in our way . Numerous as are the travels in the East , sketches of the East , and the longwinded narratives of commonplace adventures which of late have issued from the press , not one of them has , in any substantial respect , forestalled this volume . The peculiarity which distinguishes it is ,

    that herein a young man thoroughly domiciled in a Levantine family , speaking their language , adopted as a son by the hostess , living their life , and slowly forming his conclusions , gives us in a condensed view the sum total of his observations . Very justly does he remark that a great deal of the eftipiency of an observer depends on the moral atmosphere in which he lives , and " in spite of myself I found that whilst I constantly associated with Europeans , I adopted

    their indifferent and sceptical tone , and cpuld not bring myself to look upon a native in any serious way . " A 1 J . who have resided abroad , ip contradistinction to those who have travelled , will appreciate the force of the remark . The trash daily uttered respecting France and Germany by those who have " seen a great deal" of both , yet never lived otherwise than as Englishmen , will give the measure of the competency of travellers in the East .

    One strong proof of the genuineness of this book we gather from the insipidity and commonplace of the early chapters compared with the freshness and fulness of the subsequent pages . As a traveller , reporting his first impressions , we cannot eompliment Mr . St . John . His observations are trivial , and the style is worthy of the matter . But let no reader ( becoming impatient over the first fifty pages ) throw down the book ! As Mr . St . John ' s experience deepens the interest of the work rises . You begin with a yawn , but your blood gallops before you end . We draw this conclusion therefore : Mr . St . John not

    being an adroit litterateur , capable of concocting a fluent and effective chapter out of the slenderest materials , nor willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of an effecf , when we find his pages animated with glowing pictures , small yet full of detail , graphic yet free from ? ' fine writing , " we are naturally led to believe that it is the richness and variety of his material which causes the difference . In the early chapters he relies upon his journal , which . furnishes him only the slight impressions of a novice ; but in tho later chapters he is drawing from the stores of accumulated experience .

    As may be supposed , the volume is rich in extractable master ; the only puzzle is what to choose . Here is an account of LEVANTINE MOURNING . " The period of strict mourning among the Levantines , in the case of a husband ' s death , lasts a whole year , and a few days are generally added for fear the public might think the widow in a hurry . During this time the house presents a remarkable aspect . All the pillows of the divans are turned wrong side uppermost , pipes are ptesented to visitors without mouth-pieces ; and , during tho first forty days , the mirrors , always very numerous , nro covered over with black , whilst pictures are turned with

    their faces towards the wall . Throughout the whole period , when female friends come on a visit , no sherbet is offered them , nor a kind of spiced coffee which is commonly drunk in the winter . The sound of music is never allowed to be heard in the house ; and I remember once , when Franefr , the fat dandy whom I have mentioned , picked up a Savoyard with a hurdy-gurdy , and brought him into the court , how the poor Sitt nearly went into fits with indignation . The widow never visits anybody except her near relations , or people in the same position with herself , or ladies near their confinement . After a birth has taken place , houses are too full of noisy signs of enjoyment to allow of their presence .

    " On the fortieth day after the death—I anticipate , m order to finish with this Bubject—a number of womi-u friends , and one hired screamer , came and sat from morning until evening in the great saloon , and kept up a noisy wailing . The shrieking was dreadful ; and , in order to enable the performers to support the fatigue , a constant supply of smoke and coffee was kept up . Whrn they were gone , Iskender ' s mother explained to me , us well as 1 could understand , that she complied with the

    custom of the country , but condemned the practice , as not all the crying in the woild would wake the dead . 1 We might as well try to make this stone hear us , * said she , striking the wall . Other ladies , though , perhaps , less philosophical , go out while the mourners are there , in order to spare their nerves ; but she courageously stopped at home , and cried with the rest . Accordingly , her eyes were red ; she had a dreadful headache , and had worked herself up to a state of great excitement . "

    Our readers will smile at this glimpse of a SYIilAN CHRISTIAN . " When supper was brought in , Amu Lyaa , or Unqle

• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), June 1, 1850, page 233, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1841/page/15/