Frances Power Cobbe

“ I do not think there is any precept too high to be accepted by the mass of mankind: nay, I think that the higher, nobler, more self-sacrificing the lesson, the warmer response it will draw forth from the heart of humanity. But this is the moral excellence of the precept, the loftiness of the purity, the nobleness of the generosity, the courageousness of the self-devotion, which are demanded. It is quite another thing to choose to present, as the proper motive of daily virtue, an idea requiring a trained intellect to take it in and a vivid imagination to realize it. ”

“ The real nursery of religion is one of these old English homes, where every duty is natural, easy, beautiful; where the pleasures are so calm, so innocent, so interwoven with the duties that the one need scarcely be defined from the other; and where the spectacle of Nature’s loveliness is forever suggesting the thought of Him who built the blue dome of heaven, and scattered over all the ground his love-tokens of flowers. ”

“ To live in companionship, almost unbroken by separation and never marred by a doubt or a rough word, with a mind in whose workings my own found inexhaustible interest, and my heart its rest; a friend who knew me better than any one beside could ever know me, and yet,—strange to think!—could love me better than any other,—this was happiness for which, even now that it is over, I thank God from the depths of my soul. ”

“ But I hunger, Dives! I hunger for the bread of life! I hunger for human love, of which I had only begun to taste, when it was snatched away. I hunger for justice, of which such scant measure has been dealt me, and to millions like me. I hunger for truth, I hunger for beauty, I hunger for righteousness, I hunger for a love holy, divine, and perfect, which alone can satisfy my soul. I hunger, Dives! I hunger, and you tell me there is not a crumb left of the rich feast of existence, and bid me be content. ”

“ Will any one contend that it is not the vilest, the most odious treachery to betray and mock such faith of the dumb creature, and torture him to death for our purposes, while he—poor brute, whom we despise!—would die freely to save us from fire or the waves, or perchance expire of grief upon our graves? ”

“ Human love urges an appeal to Faith which has been to millions of hearts the most conclusive of all.
“To think of the one whose innermost self is to us the world’s chief treasure, the most beautiful and blessed thing God ever made, and believe that at any moment that mind and heart may cease to be, and become only a memory, every noble gift and grace extinct, and all the fond love for ourselves forgotten for ever,—this is such agony, that having once known it we should never dare again to open our hearts to affection, unless some ray of hope should dawn for us beyond the grave. ”

“ Our discoveries, whereby we have become the lords of creation and wielded the great forces of Nature, will be useless and forgotten. The virtues which have been perfected, the genius which has glorified, the love which has blessed the human race, will all perish along with it. Our libraries of books, our galleries of pictures, our fleets, our railroads, our vast and busy cities, will be desolate and useless forevermore. No intelligent eye will ever behold them, and no eye in the universe will know or remember that there ever existed such a being as man. ”

“ It is very well to boast of the ‘perfection’ and ‘finish’ of London life, but the ‘perfection’ fails to supply the first want of nature,—fresh air; and the ‘finish’ yet waits for a commencement in cheerful sunlight unobscured by smoke and fog, and a silence which shall not be marred all day and night by hideous, jarring, and distracting sounds. ”

“ We have seen that the moral law itself is to be represented to them as merely an hereditary set of the brain; that they are not to dream there is any Holy Eye looking at them, any strong Hand ready to aid their feeble steps, any Infinite Love drawing them to itself, any Life beyond the grave where the imperfect virtue of earth shall grow and blossom in eternal beauty. ”

“ In this healthful, delightful nursery, and in walks with my nurse about the lawns and shrubberies, the first years of my happy childhood went by; fed in body with the freshest milk and eggs and fruit, everything best for a child; and in mind supplied only with the simple, sweet lessons of my gentle mother. No unwholesome food, physical or moral, was ever allowed to come in my way till body and soul had almost grown to their full stature. ”

“ Almost every form of knowledge is some such trial of faith. Look at zoölogy and palæontology. What revelations of pain and death in each hideous artifice of jagged tooth, and ravening beak, and cruel claw! What mysterious laws of insect and fungus life developed within higher organisms, to whom their presence is torture! What savage scenes of pitiless strife in the whole vast struggle for existence of every beast and bird, every fish and reptile! ”

“ Are not we too, O Wolfgang, made for other things than these? Are we not fitted for some other element than that in which now we have our being, some other existence than that which yet we lead? If we were intended only to live our few years of animal life on earth and then perish, why were we given minds to plough the seas of thought, and aspirations to point to heaven, and love to swell beneath the breath of affection, and conscience to guide us on our way as the pilot lays on it his mighty hand? ”

“ Slowly and securely, though with many an apparent retrogression, does each world-family become better, wiser, nobler, happier. Slowly and securely, though with many a grievous backsliding, each living soul grows up to Virtue. Nor pauses that awful march for a moment, even in the death of the being or the cataclysm of the world. Over all Death and Change reigns that Almighty changeless will which has decreed the holiness and happiness of every spirit He hath made. ”

“ As time goes by, and one after another of those who made youth blessed have dropped away, and we begin to count the years of those who remain, and watch gray hairs thickening on heads we remember golden, and talk of the hopes and ambitions of early days as things of the past,—things which might have been, but now, we know, will never be on earth,—when all this comes to pass, then the sense of the tragedy of life becomes too strong for us. ”

“ God is over us, and Heaven is waiting for us all the same, even though all the men of science in Europe unite to tell us there is only Matter in the universe, and only corruption in the grave. Atheism may prevail for a night, but faith cometh in the morning. Theism is ‘bound to win’ at last; not necessarily that special type of Theism which our poor thoughts in this generation have striven to define; but that great fundamental faith,—the needful substructure of every other possible religious faith—the faith in a Righteous and loving God, and in a life for man beyond the tomb. ”

“ The power of Books to awaken the most vivid feelings is a phenomenon at which savages may well wonder. The magic which enables both the living and the long departed to move us to the depths of our being by the aid only of a few marks on sheets of paper is a never-ending miracle. It were vain to attempt to do any justice to the subject, or show how the contagion of piety, patriotism, enthusiasm for justice and truth, and sympathy with other nations and other classes than our own, is borne to us in the pages of the poets and historians and novelists of the world. ”

“ But, whatever may be its results as a system of moral training, Atheism, in its ultimate aspect, must be, to every religious man and woman who is driven to adopt it in later life, the setting of the sun which has warmed and brightened existence. We may live in the twilight; but that which gave to prosperity its joy, to grief its comfort, to duty its delight, to love its sweetness, to solitude its charm, to all life its meaning and purpose, and to death its perfect consolation and support, is lost forever. ”

“ We are quite enamoured, when we first turn our steps from the smoky city, with the trees and fields; and we enjoy indescribably our rides and drives and walks, the varied aspects of nature, and the beasts and birds wherewith we are surrounded. But one thing we have not bargained for, and that is—country Society. Of course we love our friends and relations in whose homes we are received with kindness and affection, whom we know to be the salt of the earth for goodness, and who love us enough to feel an interest even in our towniest gossip. ”

“ In the abyss of the past eternity we see the Creator for ever designing and for ever accomplishing the supremest end at which infinite Justice and Goodness could aim, and absolute Wisdom and Power bring to pass. For this end, for the Virtue of all finite Intelligences, we behold Him building up millions of starry abodes and peopling them with immortal spirits clothed in the garbs of flesh, and endowed with that moral freedom whose bestowal was the highest boon of Omnipotence. As ages of millenniums roll away, we see a double progress working through all the realms of space ”

“ As saints learn humility by gazing up at infinite holiness above them, so sages acquire modesty by looking out on the boundless ocean of truth, beside which their greatest discoveries appear but as the pebbles which the child gathers by the shore. But the philosophers who are so good as to enlighten us in these days scarcely belong to the antiquated type of either a Socrates or a Newton. The pride and conceit of Arthur Schopenhauer, at all events, commenced in boyhood, and seems to have grown like a snowball till he died of old age. ”

“ Why are we not to wish and strive to be allowed to place our hands on that vast machinery whereby, in a constitutional realm, the great work of the world is carried on, and which achieves by its enormous power, ten-fold either the good or the harm which any individual can reach; which may be turned to good or turned to harm according to the hands which touch it? In almost every case it is only by legislation that the roots of great evils can be reached at all, and that the social diseases of pauperism, vice and crime can be brought within hope of cure. ”

“ The faculty of taking enjoyment, of finding sweetness in the rose, grandeur in the mountain, refreshment in food and rest, interest in books, and happiness in loving and being loved, is—as we must perceive the moment we consider it—indefinitely more precious than any gratification which can be offered to the senses, the intellect, or the affections, just as eyesight is more valuable than the finest landscape, and the power of loving better than the homage of a world. ”

“ What master of a household is told, by the only man who dare tell him, that his tyranny, his harshness, perhaps his cruelty, exercised hourly on wife or child or any luckless dependant, make up a sum total of misery to them and of offence on his part, worse than the results of many a sudden crime, and certainly involving no less guilt? What wife and mother is told that her selfishness, her bickerings, her discontent, her spitefulnesses, are sins for which no prate of high religious feeling or incessant fussing about church-going can possibly atone? ”

“ My lungs are not clogged with smoke, my brain not addled by eternal hurry and interruption, my eyes not dimmed by fog and gaslight into premature blindness. While his limbs are stiffening year by year till he can only pace along his monotonous pavement, I retain till the verge of old age much of the agility and vigor wherewith I walked the moors and climbed the mountains in my youth. ”