SENTENCES OF JOUBERT. *

BY J. B. MARVIN.

THE mind has more thought than memory can retain: it forms more judgments than it knows how to allege motives for; it beholds more laws than it can reach ; and it knows more of truth than it can explain.

GOD is in the conscience, but not in our gropings; when we reason we go alone.

To do little things with the highest motives, and to see in the least objects the grandest relations, is the best means for perfecting one's self in wisdom.

CLEAR ideas are useful to the talker; but it is almost always by some undefined ideas, that the soul is served. It is these which direct the life.

Is there anything better than the judgment? Yes: the gift of right, the eye of the spirit, the instinct of penetration, the prompt decernment; finally, the natural sagacity for discerning all that is spiritual.

THERE is a sense in the soul which loves the right, as there is in the body an appetite which loves pleasure.

No one is wise who is not religious.

RELIGION is to the heart what poetry is to the imagination, and what a beautiful metaphysic is to the spirit. It exercises the whole compass of the sensibility.

THOSE who hope know most of providence, and they have a more trustworthy and decided sentiment, than they who fear.

DEVOTION embellishes the soul; especially the souls of the young.

I HAVE an ill opinion of the lion, since I have learned that his step is oblique.

I LOVE more those who render vice amiable, than those who degrade virtue.

RELIGION is the poetry of the heart.

RELIGION is to one his literature and his science; to another, it is his delight and his duty.

THE austere sects are at first most reverent; but tolerant sects have always had most durability.

*JOSEPH JOUBERT, born in Montignac, France, was one of the most beautiful spirits, and noblest thinkers of the last century. He was the pupil of Diderot and D'Alembert, and the intimate friend of Chateaubriand and Fontanes. Matthew Arnold gives a pleasant study of his character in his recent Essays. His works, consisting of Pensees Essaies, Maximes et Lettres, in two volumes, have not yet been translated.

I RESEMBLE in many things the butterfly-like him I love the light; like him I burn my wings at it; like him I need, in order to use my wings, that there shall be beauty around me in society, and that my spirit shall feel itself environed, and as it were, penetrated by a delicious atmosphere, that of indulgence; I need to have friendly aspects shining around me.

GOD is born of God, as the image is produced by the object in the mirror. It is proper to regret, but it is wrong to laugh at, the religion of others. CONCEALED perfumes and secret loves betray themselves.

GOD is God: the world a place: matter is an appearance: the body is the mould of the soul: life is a commencement.

TRUTH consists in conceiving or imagining persons and things as God sees them.

THE spirit is a fire of which thought is the flame. Like the flame it tends naturally to rise.

RELIGION prohibits all weakness, and religious weaknesses.

VIRTUE must be sought at any price and with earnestness; and prosperity modestly and with recognition. To ask is to receive, when we ask for real blessings.

If it were necessary to choose, I should prefer the mildness which allowed men time to reform, than the severity which rendered them worse, or the haste which would not wait for repentance.

INSTEAD of complaining because the rose has thorns, I felicitate myself because the thorn is surrounded by roses.

WHEN my friends are one-eyed, I look at their profiles.

MEN are accountable for their actions; but I shall have to render account for my thoughts. They are not only the foundations of my work, but of my life.

THE reason can warn us of that which should be avoided; the heart only tells us what should be done.

To see the world, is to judge the judges.

ONE is spared from being a tool in society when he is a model there.

How many things one says in good faith in conversation, upon a subject which he would not have thought of, had he limited himself to investigating it without speaking of it! The mind warms itself, and its heat produces that which it would not have produced by its light. Conversation is a source of errors, but also of some truths. Conversation has wings; it bears one where he would not have gone.

ONE should pride himself upon being reasonable, but not upon having a reason; he should pride himself upon sincerity, though not upon infallibility. How can one enter a mind which is full of itself.

JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE ON AUTHORITY.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE RADICAL:

MY DEAR SIR: The criticisms of Dr. Clarke in the Radical for December, on my Discourse entitled "Bond or Free," seem to betray a very careless or at best superficial reading, not only of its statements, but of the general subject. Allow me to make such use of them as may help to a better understanding.

My critic objects to regarding Outward Authority and Inward Freedom as mutually exclusive, and the question between them as the great religious question of the Ages. Defining faith in Authority as merely "a receptive and deferential attitude," essentially similar to that of a truth-seeker towards Comte or Herbert Spencer, and observing that every one has teachers to whom he defers in this way to a greater or less extent, he is right in pronouncing the whole question between this Authority and Freedom, to be merely one of 'more and less.' But what then? I may leave Dr. Clarke to settle with the Evangelical world whether this is a fair statement of its faith in the Divine Authority of its Christ. I am concerned only to discover what possible bearing the argument can have against a Discourse, in which Authority and Freedom are considered as opposite principles. It is of course possible for an unreflecting person to be incapable of perceiving principles at all; but surely no thinker needs to be told that opposite principles are and must be mutually exclusive, whether in matters political or theological.

The question in Bond or Free' concerned the structure of human nature, considered in relation to certain well known and confessedly antagonistic starting points of belief. It was, as I distinctly defined it, "whether we are so made that we must have supernatural or infallible teachers, or whether we are so made that we cannot have them;" whether such teachers can or cannot come in from without to supplant by their authority the limitations of the natural faculties and the light of individual reason. This is neither a mere question of more or less,' nor 'mostly a question of words.' It is no subject for sliding scales or compromises, but demands a categorical Yes or No. And it becomes every one to make distinct answer, and so far as his public influence goes, to present a consistent attitude thereon. 'Must not every one,' asks Dr. Clarke, 'from the Roman Catholic to the extremest Radical, ultimately judge by his own reason?' Unquestionably : and here in order to refute me, he puts his finger just where I would have it, on the very fact to which I was pointing, and which proves what I affirmed. Here Authority and Freedom are taken in accordance with my definition, and found to differ not as more or less, but as mutually exclusive. The one is according to human nature, the other is against it. Why, with this Law of Mind upon his lips, he should object to a Discourse which was but another form of stating it, is to me inexplicable, except upon the supposition that he failed to comprehend both the one and the other.

And this is obviously the fact. For his inference from this irrefragable law of mind is that the whole question of Authority, as between the radical

and the orthodox believer, is merely 'verbal, not rational,' and does not deserve to be discussed at all!

I must request my critic to look at this matter a little more carefully. It is by no means a mere question of words, but, as I have endeavored to show in a Discourse in the same number of the Radical in which his letter appeared, a question between Verity and Illusion, between the Real and the Imaginary; a very serious matter indeed. For Dr. Clarke cannot have failed to observe that while each man must in fact judge by his own reason, most men are under the illusion, and a very positive one, that they can shift this perilous function upon some "infallible Outward Authority": that it is, indeed, the main business of their religious teachers to confirm this illusion, and provide some such imaginary Outward Authority for its satisfaction. And we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that this illusion is no mere verbal profession, or airy nothing on the lips, but a tremendous power in the life; that it stultifies and perverts this very ultimate judge within, whom we cannot avoid; that it frames creeds which Dr. Clarke himself regards as harmful, and governs churches which he considers antichristian in spirit; that it enslaves and persecutes, and leads to no end either of foolish imagination or inhuman conduct. In his eagerness to smooth away differences whose importance he does not appreciate, he entirely overlooks all this, and presents the law of mind in question in a very inaccurate way. From the fact that the reason must be the final interpreter and judge, he infers that the Brotestant and Catholic really assert this, and admit that the infallibility of Bible and Church is really lost in that of the aforesaid private interpreter and judge. "They do not differ" he says, "from the radical, as to the criterion of truth." Who does not know that the fact is otherwise? Both Catholic and Protestant imagine that they have, somehow, put the infallible Source of Truth in place of their own fallible reason, which they openly surrender and denounce. They imagine that their private limitations are lost in this outward infallibility. They differ in toto from the radical as to the criterion of truth. With them it is the Bible and the Church, with him it is the soul. Though both classes follow the same law, the one class are under the illusion that they have escaped it. It is no part of the mental law aforesaid that everybody should understand it, or wisely use it.

To overlook this is, however unintentionally, to make one's self the advocate of moral indifference. It is a difference of false and true principles of belief which we are here told is not worth considering. Are we then to concede that false principles must not be confuted, and that errors do no harm?

If I went too far in calling such a question as the above the great Religious Question of the Ages, I prefer to err on this side of overestimating, rather than on that of treating it with indifference and contempt.

But Dr. Clarke's confusion goes deeper still. He wishes to prove that there is no essential difference of belief between men on this subject of Authority. And here is the argument. The Catholic it is true regards the Bible and the Church as infallible Sources.' And the Protestant has the

same notion of the Bible alone. But does not the radical admit that "Christ is a Source"? Does he not necessarily "stand in a receptive attitude" while in his presence, "keeping the critical faculty still, while the apprehending faculty is acting, &c."? All the difference then is that "Orthodoxy regards Christ and the Bible as Sources in a higher sense apparently than they are regarded by the radical." In what this "apparently higher sense" consists, Dr. Clarke does not appear to know, and considers it the defect of Bond or Free' that it does not supply his lack of knowledge. I would suggest that the difficulty lies entirely in the fact that he is trying to find a "boundary line" of degree, where the difference is really one of principle. He may come at the squarer of the circle and the inventor of perpetual motion; but who shall show him the boundary line, where fallible authority passes into infallible, and a Source into the Source? Dr. Clarke, however, is persuaded that it is but a question of more and less; if somebody would only inform him how much of the fallibility of a Source is to be chipped off to turn it into an infallible one! For myself, I must abide in the conviction that he will only waste valuable time on such questions, and that the sooner the real difference of principle is recognised, "the better for the interests of knowledge."

The true Catholic or Evangelical will be somewhat surprised to hear that the authority of his infallible "Christ" stands in his mind for only a larger amount of that sort of confidence which Dr. Clarke puts in Murray's Guide Book; and that when he renounces the right to question this authority, he is but "holding the critical judgment still, while the apprehending power is acting," only a little more so than the unbeliever! He knows it is a totally different kind of confidence, an absolute and implicit, as the other is a conditional and provisional kind. He does not realize that his own reason is all he has to judge by; but he does know that the attitude of his reason is essentially different from that of Dr. Clarke towards his human and therefore fallible, Christ; being determined by the principle that human reason can and must be supplanted by infallible teaching from a supernatural Source, while the other, if it means anything, means the precise negative of this. The individual who goes to Emerson and Thoreau with the same kind of confidence with which the Orthodox believer goes to his Christ, exists in an undiscriminating imagination only. There is no sane Theist who does not know that these men are fallible. There is no sane Evangelical who does not believe that his Christ is infallible. Dr. Clarke may act on the postulate that the words of Jesus are to be treated like the words of Plato where they seem to contradict each other. But his Orthodox neighbors act on a postulate which absolutely excludes this. Their 'analogy of faith' requires that Jesus, being infallible, should be somehow found never to contradict himself. His 'analogy of faith' requires that Plato, being fallible, should be judged in particular passages as one liable to all the incidents of fallibility. The pleasing words 'analogy of faith' may confuse the simple, but do not touch the root of the matter. These principles of belief are mutually exclusive. The radical who goes to the Bible as a Source of Truth, "only not so much as to others," and the Orthodox who goes to