Archaism

“ If there be an Archetype of eloquence in nature, ‘one should be apt enough, as the Bishop says, to conclude, that when the Author of nature condescended to inspire one of these plastic performances of human art, he would make it by the exactest pattern of the Archetype [161] .’ Or, whatever you and I and the Bishop might conclude, assure yourself that the objectors to inspired scripture will infallibly draw that conclusion. ”

“ And hence a distinguished writer has said that "these steps, like all the Masonic symbols, are illustrative of discipline and doctrine, as well as of natural, mathematical, and metaphysical science, and open to us an extensive range of moral and speculative inquiry."
The candidate, incited by the love of virtue and the desire of Knowledge, and withal eager for the reward of truth which is set before him, begins at once the toilsome ascent. At each division he pauses to gather instruction from the symbolism which these divisions present to his attention. ”

“ Straightway our Pedler, being Common-sense, misjudges us—as, indeed, would every other common-sense individual the world over; for Arcadia, being of itself abstract and immaterial, is opposed to, and incapable of being understood by concrete common-sense, and always will be—and there's the rub! ”

“ Firm in my faith, I shall have force to withstand my evil counsellors, my scepticism, which leads me to doubt of the people, my restless spirit which, after truth has been brought to light, impels me to go on searching for it, and my fancy which cannot be still even when Reason has pronounced her judgment. O Archegetes, ideal which the man of genius embodies in his masterpieces, I would rather be last in thy house than first in any other. ”

“ Of austere and commanding virtue, irreproachable in his self-denying life, trained in all the learning of the schools, and gifted with rare persuasive eloquence, he became the terror of the hierarchy, and found the laity ready enough to listen and to act upon doctrines which satisfied their worldly aspirations as well as their spiritual longings. ”

“ For, when once the alchymist shall have attained the object of his toils; when the sublime secret shall be revealed to his gaze, how glorious will be the change in his condition! How will he emerge from his solitary retreat, like the sun breaking forth from the darksome chamber of the night, and darting his beams throughout the earth! Gifted with perpetual youth and boundless riches, to what heights of wisdom may he attain! ”

“ The science of will, the beginning of all wisdom and source of all power, is contained in twenty-two Arcana, or symbolical hieroglyphs, of which each attribute veils a sense, and of which the whole composes an absolute Doctrine, which is summed up in the memory by its correspondence with the letters of the sacred language and with the numbers which appertain to those letters. ”

“ But the new state of society should contain an aristocratic element, not the aristocracy of birth or of the money-chest, not even the aristocracy of intellect, but the aristocracy of character, of the will and of the soul. ”

“ The aristocracy of muscle has brought misery and distress and cursed the world with cruelty and oppression; the aristocracies of blood and wealth have often brought sorrow to their possessors, and proved a rope of sand, a broken reed, a Jonas' gourd that faded in a night. But the aristocracy of love and goodness is God's aristocracy, and belongs to the society of heaven. It is a part of the family of Deity, and possesses the wealth of the universe. ”

“ A man is in general, and in particular, an organizd justice or injustice, selfishness or gratitude. And the cause of this harmony he assigned in the Arcana: “The reason why all and single things, in the heavens and on earth, are representative, is because they exist from an influx of the Lord, through heaven.” This design of exhibiting such correspondences, which, if adequately executed, would be the poem of the world, in which all history and science would play an essential part, was narrowed and defeated by the exclusively theologic direction which his inquiries took. ”

“ Some centuries ago, the system of ideas known to history as Alchemy held universal sway over the minds of men; now there are none, among the cultivated at least, who dare to defend its assertions. And yet we may inquire what there was in these ideas that so commended them to men's minds, that at a time their authority was almost beyond dispute. ”

“ Is it, then, the fate of the human spirit, like human institutions, to fall away immediately on attaining a degree of perfection? or rather, is not this evidence of powers which shall hereafter expand, grow, and unfold their activities,—here on earth chilled, and cramped, and broken? ”

“ I see daily such warped morality, such crooked ways in the most urgent and important concerns of life, as to convince me that the axe should be laid to the root of the tree. Mainly I am disgusted—no more tolerant word will do—with the prevalent tone of thought in religious matters, and the resulting tortuous courses in daily work and worship. ”

“ There a man mysteriously draped in a long mantle cried out to them:—“Know ye that the arcanum of our great art is the government of mankind, and that the one means to rule them is never to tell them the truth. ”

“ You have no oracle to utter, and your fellow-men have learned that you cannot help them; for, oracles speak. Doth not wisdom cry, and understanding put forth her voice?
Dreadful limits are set in nature to the powers of dissimulation. Truth tyrannizes over the unwilling members of the body. ”

“ Before their time, alchymy was but a grovelling delusion; and theirs is the merit of having spiritualised and refined it. They also enlarged its sphere, and supposed the possession of the philosopher's stone to be, not only the means of wealth, but of health and happiness, and the instrument by which man could command the services of superior beings, control the elements to his will, defy the obstructions of time and space, and acquire the most intimate knowledge of all the secrets of the universe. ”

“ Every material agency, potential on the earth and under, has been developed, harnessed, and applied; every hampering stumbling-block of an old righteousness, an old religion, an old philosophy is removed ”

“ In modern, as in ancient and all societies, the Aristocracy, they that assume the functions of an Aristocracy, doing them or not, have taken the post of honour; which is the post of difficulty, the post of danger,—of death, if the difficulty be not overcome. ”

“ Could blind chance constitute order and decorum, and consequently a providence? That wisdom, order, and design should be the production of nonentity, or of chaos, confusion, and old night, is too absurd to deserve a serious confutation, for it supposeth that there may be effects without a cause, viz.: produced by nonentity, or that chaos and confusion could produce the effects of power, wisdom, and goodness. Such absurdities as these we must assent to, or subscribe to the doctrine of a self-existent and providential being. ”

“ For if it has been found—as it has been too often found—that minds, otherwise highly gifted, but destitute of religious principles, when long accustomed to demonstration, are apt to underrate the value of moral proof; and when long familiar with natural causes, sometimes forget the great Architect, who formed and put in motion our globe ”

“ Yet the difference between the earlier and the later works is more a difference of tone than of substance. In the one he attacks those who make reason the standard of faith, in the other he attacks those who rely exclusively upon authority. ”

“ Art and Religion both signify effort to comply with an ideal standard—indeed, the height of the standard is the test of each—and what makes for innocence or for faultiness in the one, makes for innocence or faultiness in the other. ”

“ In the æsthetic and ethical realms they conflict with its order—the early Christian with his kingdom of heaven, and the contemporary anarchist with his abstract dream of justice, will tell you that the existing order must perish, root and branch, ere the true order can come. ”

“ Any human creature, I say. Little freedom, either of body or soul, had the poor architect who drew this our first model line for us; and yet and yet, simple as his life and labours may be, it will take our best wits to understand them. ”

“ If the aristocracy cannot, by their own experience, get to know all that life is,—though they are born, love, marry, suffer, enjoy, and die, let some idea be given them of it by true images held up in the mirror of their studies. ”

“ The restoration of man from a state of estrangement, anarchy, or moral death, we are taught in [Pg 263] the sacred writings to refer to a power from without the mind,—an influence directly from God. We have seen the various considerations derived from the phenomena of the mind, and our impressions of the divine character, giving to this great doctrine a probability which claims the assent of every correct understanding. ”

“ If, in opposition to these arguments, and in defiance, at once, of right reason and general authority, the elliptical arch should at last be chosen, what will the world believe, than that some other motive than reason influenced the determination? ”

“ When the aristocratic morality goes astray and commits sacrilege on reality, this is limited to that particular sphere with which it is not sufficiently acquainted—a sphere, in fact, from the real knowledge of which it disdainfully defends itself. ”

“ Some beings, though possessed of free-will, never lapsed: they form the order of angels. Some lapsed but slightly, and form in their varying degrees the orders of ‘thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers.’ Some lapsed lower, but not irrecoverably, and form the race of men. ”

“ But true aristocracy knows its own place, and holds firm to it; and various are the effects it has on the mind which cannot be analysed by language. It has a tendency to create a lofty sort of sentiment, rather than a low and selfish gratification, as the guide of the thoughts and the conduct. It would find a thousand ideal comforts in adversity and obscurity, which new families, thrown back into poverty, cannot command. ”

“ Little things that pass as mere ordinary common-places,—things in significant, and wholly beneath notice in the every day world, become fraught with such in finite meaning, and may hold such sublime, such undreamed of possibilities—here in Arcadia. ”

“ Out of the attempts that are made to realise both these conceptions and to keep them on friendly terms with one another, there is emerging a state of chaos—political, social, moral, spiritual,—a weltering chaos of new and old ideals, new and old theories of life, new and old standards of values, new and old centres of authority, new and old ambitions and dreams. ”

“ In tracing the career of the erring philosophers, or the wilful cheats, who have encouraged or preyed upon the credulity of mankind, it will simplify and elucidate the subject, if we divide it into three classes: the first comprising alchymists, or those in general who have devoted themselves to the discovering of the philosopher's stone and the water of life ”

“ Theories, opinions, men, and things, are examined into and sifted until all can understand their truth and error. The argument of antiquity or authority is exploded and ridiculed, and the men who seek to sustain antiquated error on the foundation of effete tradition are compelled to prove it by scripture or reason. ”

“ Nor can the philosophic moralist encompass our venerable walls without having his mind, comparing the splendid and gigantic works of antiquity with their present condition, strongly impressed with the mutations produced by the lapse of ages, and the perishing nature of all mundane greatness. ”

“ Now, without applying ourselves seriously to the Study of Man, his natural Faculties and their successive Developments, it is impossible we should ever be able to make these Distinctions, and to separate, in the actual Constitution of Things, the Operations of the Divine Will from the pretended Improvements of Human Art. ”

“ Indeed this motive of power (and we must here again depend upon previous studies of the æsthetic motives and other aspects of ecstasy) , appears to be fundamental in art, in religion, and in history. It is a concept that gives us a vantage ground for the interpretation of some of the most significant parts of life. The idea of power and the craving for power as a general motive, but also containing and exploiting specific purposes and desires, runs through all the history of art and religion and also through history itself. ”

“ Whether man be the successor or predecessor of his inferiors in nature, is to be determined by exploring faithfully the realms of matter and of spirit alike, and complementing the former in the latter. Whether surveyed in order descending or ascending, in genesis or [207] process, from the side of the idealist or of the naturalist, the keystone of the arch in either case is an ideal, underpropped by matter or upheld by mind. ”

“ But whenever conduct becomes enigmatical, and principles are avowed contradictory to human reason, passion and interests, an ordinary knowledge of the craft of ambition is apt to suggest a suspicion, that these singular abnegations have not sprung from a sanctity that has elevated the avowers above human nature, but from the injustice of their designs and the profundity of their dissimulation. ”

“ If the problems be vast, indeterminate, confused, and derived rather from the hopes, fears, love, hatred, astonishment, etc., of men, than from any genuine desire of knowledge,—so also does the received belief supply invisible agents in unlimited number, and with every variety of power and inclination. ”

“ We must have an aristocracy—not of privilege, but of understanding and purpose—or mankind will fail. I find this dawning more and more clearly when I look through my various writings of the years between 1903 and 1910. ”