" LIGHT AFTER DARKNESS."

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 390, 1 October 1880, Page 3

" LIGHT AFTER DARKNESS."

». LECTURE BY JIB. A. W. BATHUBST. (From the Lyttelton Times.) The following is a necessarily greatly condensed precis of the lecture :—: — Of old, it had often been said that the most distinctive feature of humanity, in connection with earth's other races, was not reason, but religion ; and, with certain rare and unimportant exceptions, there was, in the principle enunciated, a weighty significance that was historically manifest. The instinct of inferior life bore a faint relation to the majesty of man's intelligence, much as did the tremulok3 grey of early dawn to the golden sunlight of the day's meridian ; but the grandeur of our moral nature had not the faintest counterpart within the sphere of brute existence, and to the human soul alone was it permitted to realise the idea of Divinity — the sublime necessity of worship. Once, in the innocence of Eden, the earth was a mighty temple, wherein man was the high priest. But the golden chain which — as poets dreamed — linked earth to heaven, was snapped asunder. The glory waned, and after it swept the dread sin shadow. f The haze of moral gloom, and the swelling tide of sorrow which 1 swept tuinultuously through the hearts of care-worn mortals, almost i wholly blotted out the memory of the happy past — of the glory that ' had been. The true aspect of mart's present condition was obscured, just as the landward-rolling sea mist causes the grey crags to appear [ dark and undefined. Still, there was the perception of a departed glory, for even the earth retained a pensive beauty which the spoiler had not been able to efface ; and man strove wearily to solve the ! enigma of existence to find a clue that might guide him up to truth. ( as man looked for " the light which never was on land or sea," the [ while a cry went out from every heart for light, and a voice kept whispering of a great First Cause, whose power produced existence, whose vengeance wrought all the evil, and who must be sought out and appeased, that rest and happiness might return — in all this troublous time the darkness need not have been hopeless. The light of an ancient revelation remained, but men shrank from it, appalled by its searching power. As our eyesight, dazzled by the intensity of the moonbeams, is mocked by many hueel spectres, so they, unable to endure the pure white light of truth, were drawn away to follow a thousand phantoms. The earliest form of heathenism seemed to have been a slavish reverence for the great material powers, especially sach as contributed to the genial reproductive influence pervading nature. The ascending flame seemed ever to assert a heavenly origin ; and the " relentless

destroyer" of the race was symbolised by consuming fire. With it, light was interwoven, and men beheld it radiant in the stars, blazing in the thunderbolt. They beheld how the glorious sun chased night away, and caused the earth to smile till the flowers awoke in beauty and the woodlands rang with melody. What wonder that, in the l_ snnny East, grand temples were reared to the Sun-god. Ou the * Chaldean plains fire worship assumed the aspect of astrology, and many a weary vigil did the hoary seeker after wisdom spend, gazing upward from the watch-towers of sleeping Babylon ; but " their works," gone out to the ends of the earth, were not heard. Fireworship, at first siniply symbolical, and preserving in its allegories many features of primeval revelation, was soon overlaid with error. The struggle between light and darkness afforded grounds for the Dualism of Persia, and the doctrine of human accountability became the pretext for yet darker rites. The venturous mariners of Phoenicia found, in Britain, shrines and rites akin to their own ; echoes of their Orient hymns stirred the dark oak branches, and a foul, fierce mystery brooded like a shadow over the cromlechs of Stonehenge. The merry-makings which still linger in our Fatherland — the rustic greetings which the May receives— owed, most of them, their origin to heathen ceremonial, in celebration of the sun-god's return from the Bouth. To the Druids, the higher intellectual efforts of the parent creed were not unknown. They recited doctrines of the soul's immorrality, of transmigrations, and of the agency of a universal essence, which was the centre of all existence. All, however, was shrouded in mystery, the masses being held in check by superstitious awe. Under the influence of that materialistic spirit which arose from the selfish tendency to stop short at secondary causes, the Pagan world drifted into Pantheism — a system which has formed common standing ground even for such apparently opposite opinions as those of the Atheist and Polytheist. Throughout the world the murky pestilence of superstition was more and more diffused, and — as in ancient Egypt — there was darkness that might be felt. Yet there was a great central light amidst the moral darkness, aud that light was in the dwellings of Israel. It had been enkindled in earliest days at the shrine of truth, and kept, alive in a line of Patriarchs It shed its lustre, from the tents of Jacob, upon the besotted Paganism that reigned around the Pyramid, till its mission of warning ther* 1 , as elsewhere, had been accomplished. The light whs renewed at Sinai, and was finally established in the Land of Promise, there to beam, a star of hope to the nations, ''until Shiloh come." The humblest Hebrew lad that tended his bleating flocks on the breezy slopes of Hermon, the simple maiden gleaning in the harvest fields of Bethlehem, had a pure conception of the good and true — so elevated that the colossal intellect of Plato had achieved immortality in soaring to such level — so noble, that Tacitus, with all his intelligent pride, could never comprehend it. The records of Israel were emblazoned with many a story of deliverance and triumph ; and while they abode by their allegiance, the growth and progress of the nation were remarkable. They wandered from the pure light into the darkness of the evil shadow. Judgment followed judgment, until a ruthless invader trampled their power into the dust, and bore them into mournful exile by the waters of Babylon. It was when the spiritualistic ideal of humanity was observed by the decline of the Jewish kingdom, that the human intellect awoke to fuller activity, and reached its culmination in the halls and academic groves of Greece. The exquisite imagination of Greece caused her mythology to seem rather a new creation than what it really was — a higher effort after the ideal, made upon the topmost reach of those former structures. That imaginative religion, luxurious in its sensuously subtle perception of the beautiful, inspired arts, literature, and even games. Thales and his disciples in the lonian school arrayed and amplified all the dogmas of the ancient Pantheism, and assigned the cause of all existence lo a material essence in the form of water. Then, differing from the purely physical system, were the Pythagoreans, who maintained the soul's immortality, and its inheritance of rewards and punishments. Other sections of the philosophic method were the Eleatic, with aspiration throbbing underneath its vigour ; the Sophist, specious and slippery ; and, above all, the mighty palace of intellectual truth upreared by Plato. A moral Columbus, he gave mankind a new world ; and it roused up all the lite about one's heart to think of this " gray spirit, yearning in desire to follow knowledge," moving onward through the profound unknown, till he reached the attainable limit of unaided reason. After him philosophy only flickered in the schools of Scepticism, in the chilling porticos of Stoicism, and in the corrupt haunts of Epicureanism. Such had been the chief struggles of the ancient race to pierce the darkness. The night was at its darkest, but little ere the day was bom. Rome alone, of all the nations, sat in the splendour of unrivalled power. But her strength was more seeming than substantial, and the borrowed Asiatic splendour which she wore was but the hectic flush of decline. Amidst the Bullen apathy that followed on the failure of systems, men heard more distinctly the undercurrent of the promise of deliverance. They cried, " What of the night ?" and, after a space, a voice was heard, " Thy light is come." There was morning in the world. Over the hills of Palestine Christianity poured its conquering rays into the evil shadows, and many a brooding terror disappeared before the rising day. In the course of a necessarily imperfect sketch, little but a brief allusion could be made to the progress of the Christian system, as it went forth conquering and to conquer. It abashed the philosophic pride of Greece, it scorned the proffered place in the Roman Pantheon. The opposition of ancient heathenism, even in the subtle form of later Platoni9m, was as helpless as " the dreamy struggles of the stars with light." The Christian Gladiator stood unmoved in the arena. The conquerors of Rome were themselves conquered by the cross. But not without interruption did Christianity progress, and it had ' ] its seasons of seeming reflux. In these later days there had been the 1 opposition of the pubtle and intellectual, but false and bigoted pride, i of those who called themselves Freethinkers. These things were 1 merely the ebbings of Christianity's steadily advancing billows. ] What was its position now? Its widening circle had a dark < circumference, which but served to intensify the light. Freedom <

and progress were identified with its cause, art and ssience were its handmaids. It had asserted the divine Tight of manhood, and proclaimed freedom to the slave. It had triumphantly recognised the propher sphere of womanhood ; it had given expansion to the intellect, and opposed a barrier to moral wrong. Under its fostering guidance there had been achieved a liberty unknown to Greece in her palmiest days, and which made Rome's high majesty show dimly beside the grandeur and the glory of the great name of England. But, in a sister-isle there had been yet greater triumph — a moral victory gloriously won ; sublimer than the conquest of a universe ; nobler than the heaping up of riches. This people had sent forth countless bands of true-hearted sons, to plant their faith in distant countries, and to found churches destined to become illustrious. Christianity was now triumphant. Divine philosophy, and enemies who frequented such schools as those of German pantheism and rationalism, felt more and more bewildered by the intellectual maze wherein they strayed. The cry from the lips of the great German master, " more light," is also theirs. If the phantasms of error, gigantic with the growth of centuries, are gathering all their force to grapple with the advancing power of truth, their efforts are but the convulsive agonies which precede the powerlessness of death. Farther yet must the discomfited shadows flee, and farther the light pursue them, till they spread their dark wings and disappear from our horizon. As the waters cover the sea, truth's effulgence shall pour in upon the earth, and humanity, delivered into light eternal, shall realise its full ideal. A celestial splendour, brighter than the light of countless suns, shall rise upon us, and night shall be no more.