XIX. SANGREAL. N the "Morte d'Arthur we see the knights gath kings. We find portrayed the splendour of the court, the tournaments, luxuries, gallantries of the knights and dames. But one day, while they sit at the table, there is a voice of thunder, then a sunbeam; as the stricken knights gaze the Sangreal floats in shrouded in white, and, when it has floated out again, each feels that he has tasted that which he most desires in this world. Then rose up all those knights and vowed that they would no more rest until they had found the Sangreal and seen it unveiled. King Arthur pleaded against their resolution, but they must leave him. Then they go about the world, wandering in many a wild place, righting wrongs, delivering imprisoned maidens, sitting at the feet of wise hermits, fighting down fiends, until at length Sir Galahad, just after he has casually helped a cripple, finds the unveiled Sangreal and ascends to heaven with it. The great British myth is repeated at intervals in history. There arrives a period in the progress of the people when their best heads discover the fictitious character of the rites to which they are sacramented, and when the best hearts learn their secret, and then the thunder and the sunbeam lead on the true thing above the sham; the sang real shames the sang unreal, and the Round Table of conventions is broken up. Amid traditional chalices and fonts, and flameless lamps, unable even to borrow oil from other ages, appears the burning glory appealing to every brave heart to win for itself— to leave the dead symbol and possess the reality. Then are true souls revealed. They make their vow of knighthood; no bribe or persuasion of church or court can detain them; they are compelled by a noble discontent; they are drawn by a pure vision; they have tasted that which turns detaining dainties to poison; they must seek a truth and honour as living and real as was ever known by saint or saviour. Of such a period we are the children. The sanctities, sacraments, symbols, of an exhausted revelation no longer satisfy any heart or intellect. We have seen in our own time what the life-blood of great hearts, freely shed like the blood of Christ, can accomplish, and the Round Table of Jerusalem breaks up. The great men of our time, by whose fresh graves we stand Darwin, Emerson, Carlyle, Lincoln, Garibaldi-were men whose lives are traced in transformations; millions of slaves have been liberated, nations set free, science advanced, torpid intelligence awakened; they have been on earth as the Sangreal, or its prototype the cornucopia, from which all have been nourished, and have risen to be a constellation beneath which their words and works shall ripen to the new earth that follows the new heaven. The quest of the Sangreal is a bosom experience to all who share the development of their generation. Every youth, whose soul suffers no arrest, is certain to arrive at a period of perception when the old symbols no longer satisfy him, when he turns from the conventional chalice however cunningly mixed, and is seized with a longing to make every drop of his blood real, and held in the cup of a flawless heart. When our virginal Sir Galahad in America, our Emerson, refused any longer to touch the chalice of his Boston church, the knights around him did not at once catch his vision of the radiant cup floating above it. They thought him mad. The thunder and the sunbeam came to them later, when they had gathered to the Round Table of their old university. There each knightly soul found that he had tasted that which he most loved of all on earth. They could no more rest in that to which they had been sacramented. Among those who listened to that oration, one preacher, before wont to discourse on such themes as the duties and trials of milkmen, went home to enter in his journal: "My soul is roused, and this week I shall write the long-meditated sermons on the state of the Church and the duties of these times." So under the electric touch of Emerson rose Theodore Parker. John Weiss an effective leader of the new religion -has well said of Emerson's oration, "The liberal gesture itself was worth a whole body of divinity." The agitation reached the form of a coherent controversy in the following year, when the chief professor of the Divinity College, Andrews Norton, delivered in the same place an answer to it, afterwards published under the title, "The Latest Form of Infidelity." This was replied to by George Ripley and Theodore Parker. Ripley maintained that Christianity was sufficiently proved by intuition. Parker supported him, and maintained that miracles are true, being signs of all great religious teachers (Buddha, Zoroaster, as well as Jesus), but not proofs of their doctrine! Norton replied to them, and the controversy filled America with excitement. It also set the youth to reading the works of the great German, French, and English philosophers whose views were discussed by the Harvard disputants. By far the most important figure in this controversy (from which Emerson was conspicuously absent) was that of Andrews Norton, Professor of Sacred Literature in Harvard University. His great learning and his admirable force and clearness as a writer were still of less importance than his intellectual character and his severity towards every kind of sham, whether conscious of itself or not. The young men who undertook to controvert the statements of Andrews Norton concerning the anti-christian nature and tendency of Emerson's views - George Ripley and Theodore Parker -wrote well, and were defeated. They were trying to base the Christian ontology on intuition in order to cast discredit on supernatural evidences and authorfty. "Consciousness or intuition," said Norton, can inform us of nothing but what exists in our own minds, including the relations of our own ideas. It is therefore not an intelligible error, but a mere absurdity, to maintain that we are conscious or have an intuitive knowledge of the being of God, of our own immortality, of the revelation of God through Christ, or of 66 any other fact of religion." "Christianity claims to reveal facts, a knowledge of which is essential to the moral regeneration of men, and to offer in attestation of those facts the only satisfactory proof-the authority of God evidenced by miraculous displays of His power." "The latest form of infidelity is distinguished by assuming the Christian name while it strikes at the root of faith in Christianity, and indirectly at all reli gion, by denying the miracles attesting the divine mis sion of Christ." These affirmations, buttressed by impregnable logic, were never shaken. Thirty years ago this aged scholar, surrounded by his beautiful daughters, to describe whom we used to borrow the title of his book, "The Evidences of Christianity," was the ideal of an Arthur. In the depths of that grove behind Divinity College, an Avilion to those who remember the home it embowered, the old man sat, his grand face haloed with whitest locks and on it written the perfect peace that follows victory over all that can harm the spirit of man. In early life he had suffered pain, long and keen, by failure in all his attempts to preach, after carefully preparing himself. He had to abandon the pulpit. Then he wrote the beautiful hymn so widely sung in America, "My God, I thank Thee!" The last verse is Thy various messengers employ, May kneeling faith adore thy will!" With such piety had he looked forth over the desolation beyond which he was to find this earthly para |