John Stuart Blackie

“ Nothing strikes a man so much in the reading of the New Testament as the little respect which it pays to riches and the pomp and pride of life, and worldly honours and dignities of all kinds. “How can ye believe who receive honour one from another?” is a sentence that cuts very deep into the connection between the Church and State, which might readily mean the alliance of a secular institution, delighting in pomp and parade and glittering show, with a religion of which, like the philosophy of the porch, the most prominent feature was unworldliness, humility, and spirituality. ”

“ I must shew to the satisfaction of my fellow-teachers and of my students, that I am not seeking after an ephemeral notoriety by the public galvanisation of a dead crotchet; that any innovations which I may propose are in reality, as so often happens in the political world also, and in the ecclesiastical, a mere recurrence to the ancient and established practice of centuries, and that whatever opinions I may entertain on points confessedly open to debate, I entertain not for myself alone, but in company with some of the ripest scholars and profoundest philologists of modern times. ”

“ For what I do day after day treading your streets is simply this, that, speaking to both young and old, I exhort them not to seek in the first place money or anything material, but to stretch every nerve that their soul may be as excellent as possible; for that virtue and all excellence grow not from gold, but rather that gold and all things truly good, both in private and public life, grow to men from the possession of virtue as the root of all good. ”

“ It requires only a superficial acquaintance with the most patent facts of Greek literature to know that some of the most popular and the most profound teachers of Greek wisdom—Plato, Aristophanes and Xenophon—use the conversational style. The Greeks, in fact, were, as they are still, a lively and a talking people, and Socrates, their greatest name, cannot be better described than as a talking street preacher of reason and common sense. Well, then, on this double basis that Greek is a living language, and that the colloquial style is that in which its highest and best thoughts are expressed ”

“ By making love its chief motive power, it supplied both the steam and the oil of the social machine with a continuity of moral force never dreamt of in any of the ancient societies—a force which no mere socialistic schemes for organising labour, no boards of health, no political economy, no mathematical abstractions, no curiosities of physical science, no democratic suffrages, and no school inspectorships, though multiplied a thousand times, apart from this divine agency, can ever hope to achieve. ”

“ What perplexes you, my young friend, said Socrates, seems to be that you have frequently seen even the best men, and of the most noble quality, quarrelling with one another, and fanning themselves into hostility, even more fierce than that which divides the most worthless members of society. Just so, said Critobulus, and not only this, but the best-ordered societies, and those States which seem to possess the most delicate sense of public honour, are often found to plunge into the most unjustifiable wars. Where, then, shall we find a place for social sympathy and true friendship? ”

“ Language is the outward body and form of which thought and reason and knowledge and ideas are the inward soul and force; and hence the wise Greeks, unlike our modern scientists, who delight in confounding man with the monkey, expressed language and reason with one word λόγος, while what we dignify with the name of language in birds and other animals was simply φωνή, or significant voice. If, therefore, there is any thing most human that history has to teach, it must be about religion. All the great nations whose names mark the march of human fates have been religious nations. ”

“ Let anything very good be done by his tribe, or nation, or church, if he is a complete man he instantly flames up into a noble enthusiasm, and becomes ambitious of attempting like deeds; let anything very bad be done, he fumes, in grim indignation, or blushes with shame, and is ready to reproach and to condemn, and even to trample his proper self under foot. This is the most natural thing in the world; the necessary result of applying reason to action at all; for a man cannot act without motive power, that is, without passions, which may be either noble or base. ”

“ In both the discarding of the kings was the work of the aristocracy; but, while the germ of the democratic element was equally strong in both, in Athens, partly from the genius of the people, partly from peculiar circumstances, this germ blossomed into an earlier, a more marked, and a more characteristic manhood; whereas in Rome, in the most brilliant period of its political action, the form of government might rather be defined as a strong aristocracy limited by a strong democracy than a pure democracy, to which category Athens undoubtedly belongs. ”

“ If, indeed, all men went about the streets, like Socrates, in search of nothing but truth, and thanking everybody most fervidly for any contribution to his stock of it, even in the most disagreeable shape, truthfulness would be an easy virtue; as easy for a human being, one might imagine, as for a quick fountain to spout water, and for an eager fire to spit flame. ”

“ Your conscience tells you that you are rebels against God; as rebels you can only live under a curse; the whole sense-besotted Greek and Roman world is evidently lying under a curse; repent and be converted; return to God and be saved; to man there can be no safety anywhere except in God, who is the source of all good, and in Christ, who gave himself a living sacrifice that we might be redeemed from all evil. This is the whole style of the greatest moral Evangel the world has ever heard; absolutely and simply an act of religion; all immorality is departure from God, all morality return to God. ”

“ For there cannot be the slightest doubt that, whatever may have been the starting-point, there lay in the popular theology a tendency to multiply and to reproduce itself in kindred but not always easily recognisable forms, like the children of a family or the cousinship of a clan. But, taking Polytheism as the type under which history presents the objects of religious faith in the earliest times, we have to remark that under this common name, as in the case of Christianity, the greatest contrasts, both in speculative idea and in social efficiency, stare us everywhere in the face. ”

“ From this equality of personal dignity before God two remarkable phenomena have flowed, both specially characteristic of modern society—the abolition of slavery and the rivalry of religious sects. Slavery, of course, must appear an intolerable anomaly to a man who believes that all men are brethren and all sons of God; to call a man brother and to sell him as a chattel is a lie too gross to be tolerated even by a world accustomed to cheat itself with the authority of all sorts of mere names. ”

“ What requires to be represented in a reasonable representative system is not so much individuals as qualities, capacities, interests, and types. Every class should be represented, rather than every man in a class. Besides, the equality of votes which democracy demands, on the principle that I am as good as you and perhaps a little better, is utterly false, and tends to nourish conceit and impertinence, to banish all reverence, and to ignore all distinctions in society. ”

“ Like many a {141} modern man of science, he had cultivated acuteness at the expense of wonder; and, while indulging in the omnivorous lust of knowledge, had starved veneration, and stunted the growth of some of the most delicate emotions of the soul. For devotion is of the very finest fragrance of the emotional life; and as there are some flowers without smell, so there are some souls without piety. In point of religious feeling, beyond all question, both Socrates and Plato were infinitely superior to Aristotle. ”

“ Here we have the stout, self-reliant, sober-minded Anglo-Saxon stock, well trained in the process of the ages to the difficult art of self-government; here we have a constitution framed with the most cautious consideration, and with the most effective checks against the dangers of an over-riding democracy; here also a people as free from any imminent external danger as they have unlimited scope for internal progress. Under no circumstances could the experiment of self-government, on a great scale, have been made with a more promising start. ”

“ Now, there is nothing more nobly characteristic of Christianity than this, that piety is identical {186} with morality; that faith and works—not ritual, or ceremonial, or externally imposed works at all, of course, but genuine works of moral fervour and moral firmness—are one; stand to one another, at least, as the root does to the flower, or the fruit of a wholesome plant, of which not the root but the fruit is the valuable part. That this is the only true and philosophical relation of the two great moral potencies no thinker will deny. ”

“ The fact that the family is the great social monad, as it is undoubtedly one of the oldest and most accredited facts in human tradition, so it presents to us perhaps the most important of all the lessons that history teaches—a lesson as necessary to be inculcated at the present hour as at the earliest stages of social advance; and Aristotle certainly was never more in the right than when he emphasised this truth strongly in traversing Plato’s fancy of making the state the universal family, to the utter absorption of all subordinated family monads. ”

“ Least of all, certainly, is it consistent with the character of a great-minded man to droop his crest at the face of danger and run away, or to do any act of injustice; for why should a man do anything dishonourable, {175} to whom even the greatest things in the world are small measured by the estimate that he entertains of his own worth? And, indeed, it is quite ridiculous to imagine a man of genuine great-mindedness who is not at the same time a virtuous man. For, if he is bad he is certainly not worthy of honour, honour which is the reward of virtue, and is given only to the good. ”

“ How much of our daily judgments, spoken and printed, seems leavened in any degree by the genuine humanity and manifest justice of this divine ideal? “Speaking the truth in love” is the acknowledged law of Christian intercourse; speaking lies in hatred were often a more appropriate text for certain large sections of British practice. We ought to pass judgment against our brother on our knees, fearful to offend; we do it rather, not seldom with pride and insolence and impertinence, mounted on the triumphal car of our own conceit, riding rough-shod over the real or imagined faults of our brother. ”

“ To explain such a perverse phenomenon we must bear in mind that the love of singularity in some minds is greater than the love of truth; that some men of great intellectual capacity are deficient in some of the finer instincts that stir heroic breasts, and fail to recognise in others what they have no experience of in themselves; that in the common characters whom one meets in daily life an essentially selfish motive can often be traced beneath the gracious surface, where to the public eye only benevolence, philanthropy, humility, and self-denial shine out with genial radiance ”