We are, therefore, in full harmony, both by theory and temperament, with that fine passage on the eleventh page of his lecture, where Mr. Simmons speaks of the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, the unfathomable depths of devoutness, and the added grace or power, which secret prayer gives to the justice and discretion of the moralist. It is a fine strain, and indicates the direction of Mr. Simmons' influence. And, again, what wisdom there is, though accidentally overlooked here and there by the utterer, in this passage: "I have, I trust, learned the wisdom of being slow in assailing. My experience has taught me that in this, too, discretion is the better part of valor, and that it is more salutary as well as modest, to explain what we deem to be the truth, than to display with exaggerating emphasis, what we imagine to be the error." But we can imagine the fiery indignation that will surge in the breasts of some brethren in Boston, whom Mr. Simmons has dressed up in the borrowed plumes of his Trinity. What will the relict of Federal Street say upon the information that he is afflicted, internally, with this theological malady? We think we see his rather enthusiastic protestation and rebuff of the indignity. We can cordially sympathize with all the old fashioned Unitarians, to whom the very word Trinity is anathema, and who detest, above all things, this new dodge of the modal, philosophical and sentimental. When shall we give over flirting with that rather sour and ancient maiden? If we must have a Trinity, let us go back to its primitive simplicity, and have a good solid Hindoo specimen with three Avatars, and innumerable legs and arms. That is better than Mr. Simmons' shadowy Glendower, or Mr. Bushnell's pale ghost of Morven. On the whole, we doubt whether the six pious laymen of Boston, in whose pockets resides the magical test and standard of the theology at Cambridge, will endorse this lecture. Lucky it is, therefore, that Mr. Simmons is already settled. The New Gnosis, is a little tract upon the Trinity, which might serve as the ontological appendix to Mr. Simmons' lecture. The latter deprecates any attempt "to find a necessary cause and basis, in the being of the Self-subsistent, for that threefold character which He assumes to us." And again, Mr. Simmons exclaims, in a sort of horror, "the thought of mapping the Divine mind would fill any single breast with dismay; it could only be enterprised by coöperating generations." Yet Mr. Greene, undismayed, attempts that awful leap from the illur »M» Simmons to the dark" of the New Gnosis. If Gnosis be derived from the Greek verb "to know," this is certainly a new one. Mr. Greene has all the precision of thought, and acute analysis, the lack of which makes Mr. Simmons' lecture so indefinite and sentimental. But no angel, even if he had been a lawyer in the flesh, could render the impossible intelligible. Suppose it necessary to create a Trinity out of whole cloth, and we acknowledge that Mr. Greene's effort is sufficiently ingenious and amusing. Sir Christopher Wren asked the Royal Academy why a fish, being placed in a vessel with water, would not cause it to overflow. It was wonderful to notice the resources of the human mind: the savans narrowly escaped hatching Wren's bad egg into a callow chick, when Charles the Second doubted whether the proposition were a true one. So, numerous people have been asking, how does it happen that the Self-subsistent exists in Trinity? Mr. Simmons, not being metaphysical, generously disdains to examine the mystery, and trustfully makes it the pivot of his faith. Mr. Greene feels piqued at the idea that any thing can be proposed beyond the legitimating powers of logic, and, not being sentimental, sets about demonstrating this unspilled Trinity of water, fish and vessel in unity. It would be a great economy of brains if we said, once for all, it is a joke. We find the same objection to Mr. Greene's Trinity, that we find to all the previous statements of that doctrine: it is reducible. It is not the need of affirming the personality of God, but the need of simplicity and unity, which leads us to resolve this threefold result of analysis. Mr. Greene says: "the doctrine of the Trinity is an enumeration of the essential elements of the absolute Self-consciousness, and also an affirmation of the Personality of God." So far as the question of the Divine personality is concerned, it is plain that there is no intrinsic necessity for assuming three elements in God, in order to avoid collapsing into Pantheism. We might as well suppose three essential elements in the human Ego, for the sake of keeping it distinct from Nature and Deity. The mode of God's existence, then, may be considered, aloof from all questions, whether theological or philosophical. But why make out three essential elements? Let us examine Mr. Greene's analysis. The Supreme Intelligence is supremely intelligible to Himself. The Supremely Intelligible is the eternal and eternally generated Word. "And the eternal energy of the Supreme Intelligence, whereby to Himself the Supreme Intelligence becomes Supremely Intelligible, is the Supreme Spirit and Life." Thus, out of chaos is evoked the Fa ther, the Word and the Spirit. They are only elements within the limits of Absolute Consciousness. As if we should say, that the human Ego subsists in its undetermined consciousness, in its determining energy, and in the determinate objectiveness of its consciousness. But could we say this of the human Ego? Not at all: the first element in this Trinity is self-contradictory. If it is undetermined, it is not conscious, and if conscious, then it is determined. It is impossible to eliminate energy and objectiveness from the human subject, and leave consciousness under such a process, the human subject would collapse, and become a negative quantity; not a quantity capable of producing some correlative effect, but a void negation, helpless and immovable. If, to save the consciousness, you make it determining, you immediately include, in that single participle, enough to establish a vital Unity, and to forestall the necessity and possibility of a threefold analysis. The human Ego is a determining consciousness; make three terms of it in trying to define its elements, and you destroy the thing itself, because your first term will be a void formula, and not a power, containing and legitimating the other two terms. Now the result is the same in attempting to map out the Absolute Consciousness. The "Supreme Intelligence" of Mr. Greene's Trinity, is nothing in his analysis, but every thing without it. He says it is a cause without its correlative effect, when this correlative effect is that necessary quality, without which it cannot be a cause. An undetermined Supreme Consciousness could never become supremely intelligible to Himself. To eke out his Trinity, Mr. Greene has abolished the Divine substance itself. His anatomy has exsanguinated his subject. The Supreme cannot be Intelligence, without being contemporaneously intelligible to Himself. Neither can the order be reversed; the Supremely Intelligible, which is the Word, cannot be put in the place of the Supreme Intelligence, which passes for the Father. Nor does it help the matter, to say that the Word is eternal, and eternally generated. That does not save the determining power of the Supreme Intelligence, it simply makes the Word and the Intelligence identical; and that is the very result which renders this Trinity superfluous. Its elements must be reduced, to secure the existence of its primordial one; and when you have done that, the primordial element becomes the irresolvable thing itself, which you have analyzed into a Trinity. And further than this: the reduction of its elements to secure the existence of the first, has plainly removed the need of that mediating energy whereby the Supreme Intelligence becomes Supremely Intelligible to Himself. The Spirit can no longer exist as a separate essential element, since it could never make God Supremely Intelligible, if He were not so already, by being the Supreme Intelligence. And if God has really been, from all eternity, a determining consciousness, a Supreme Intelligence, He has been something as stubbornly irresolvable as an undecompounded empyreal substance, whose simplicity baffles chemistry. If He has not been, from all eternity, a determining consciousness, a cause realized, then He has not been at all. We object, therefore, to Mr. Greene's theory of Creation, so far as his logic makes it essentially dependent upon the Deity, as thus analyzed by him. But there are a few sentences which, removed from their sequence, are striking and elevating. He says: "This Universe is a Divine process of thought, the development of an infinite and eternal Poem. The Supreme thinks the Universe, and that thought is its existence." It would extend this notice too much, to show in what respects our cosmogony differs from Mr. Greene's, and is independent of his absolutely conditioning Trinity; but we can receive many of his fine sayings without feeling compromised to his premise. In a note he has the following magnificent passage, in illustration of the cosmic separation of individuals by the out-speaking of the Word, and the resultant order: "At the word, Inspection of Arms! I have seen innumerable rammers, revolving in the hand, reflect at the same moment the rays of the morning sun. In the beginning of time, the Almighty assumed the command of His army in person; He uttered His voice before His host; He gave the word of command IHI AOR! and immediately there rolled from the infinite abyss under darkness, this immeasurable universe of revolving worlds, dilating itself like an avalanche of visible glory, through inexhaustible spheres. There was the ringing crash of the jubilant creation, and afterwards fixed order, and a silence that might be felt; for, in this crash, the relations of time and space had thundered into being." Ponder the diction in which Mr. Greene has clothed the above exalted conception; it will appear turgid and affected until you have reproduced the image. Ever since an army officer saw the sun go down, "with his battle-stained eye," we have doubted whether lieutenants were capable of any po- THE WRITINGS OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 1.-Nature, &c. Boston. 1836. 1 vol. 1 vol. 12mo. 12mo. Boston. 1841. 3.-Essays. Second Series. By R. W. EMERSON. Ibid. 1844. 1 vol. 12mo. 4.-Poems. By R. W. EMERSON. Ibid. 1847. 1 vol. 12mo. 5.-Nature, Addresses and Orations. By R. W. EмERSON. Ibid. 1849. 1 vol. 12mo. 6.-Representative Men: Seven Lectures. By R. W. EMERSON. Ibid. 1850. 1 vol. 12mo. WHEN a hen lays an egg in the farmer's mow, she cackles quite loud and long. "See," says the complacent bird, "see what an egg I have laid!" all the other hens cackle in sympathy, and seem to say, "what a nice egg has got laid! was there ever such a family of hens as our family?" But the cackling is heard only a short distance, in the neighboring barnyards; a few yards above, the blue sky is silent. By and by the rest will drop their daily burthen, and she will cackle with them in sympathy-but ere long the cackling is still; the egg has done its service, been addled, or eaten, or perhaps proved fertile of a chick, and it is forgotten, as well as the cackler who laid the ephemeral thing. But when an acorn in June first uncloses its shell, and the young oak puts out its earliest shoot, there is no noise; none attending its growth, |