THE PRESBYTERIAN MAGAZINE. NOVEMBER, 1851. Miscellaneous Articles. THE OLD WAR. The THERE is a certain war which has been raging among mankind for thousands of years. The parties do not use javelins, nor bows and arrows, nor fire arms. They do not use carnal weapons, but spiritual weapons. They fight each other with doctrines, principles, speeches, books, tracts, lives. The one party is God and godliness among men. The other party is corrupt human nature. grand maxim of the one party is faith in God. The grand maxim of the other party is faith in man. The watchword of the one party is, Trust in God. The watchword of the other party is, Trust thyself. This is the old war, the revolutionary war of all ages; and it must and will go on in this age also. This war began in the happy garden of Eden, when man and woman refused, at the suggestion of the serpent, to trust God for the future exaltation and glory of their souls, and desired to be, that very day, as gods, knowing good and evil. God then even hinted a promise of pardon to the rebels. His divine Son was then by him in heaven, as one brought up with him. He was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him. Rejoicing, too, in the habitable parts of the earth; and his delights were with the sons of men. He rejoiced to think that the mountains and plains, that the hills and valleys of the new made earth might be peopled with a race of beings who would reflect some of the eternal rays of God's glory. He came forward and offered an interceding prayer for man. Deliver him from going down to the pit, said he, I have found a ransom. And he offered himself to be born of woman, and to undertake to bruise the serpent's head. God accepted his proposition, and spoke comfortably to man, hinting the covenant just VOL. I.-No. 11. 62 made. Man could never have found out such a scheme of mercy. He had trusted himself, and was ruined. After that, Abel and Enoch, and all the righteous, constantly cried out, Trust God. Noah's watchword was Trust God, and in his time the thing was fairly tried. The rest of the world cried out Trust thyself; and they were destroyed, while Noah was saved. That strange wild manRalph Waldo Emerson-who, we believe, calls himself a Pantheist, cried out but yesterday in Massachusetts, Trust thyself; and probably supposed that he had invented something new when he said so. But instead of being something new, it is something as old as Osymandias king of kings; something as old as Belshazzar king of Babylon; as old as the builders of Babel; as old as Nimrod the mighty hunter: as old as the serpent who spoke to the woman in Eden. And if Mr. Emerson had not made that great achievement on which he so felicitates himself-got rid of the testimony of God's word and the "Calvinistic judgment-day," as he says, still some one else would have revived the old maxim, Trust thyself. That maxim will always exist on earth, reviving from time to time, until God and man are fully reconciled. There can be no Emerson on earth after that. And until that, the fight must go on, blazing through the spiritual world, like the old fight of the Persian fable between Ormusel and Ahriman. While it lasts there must always be Emersons in the world. There is a fine old legend, in which one particular tone of sound is represented as having a peculiar power over the soul of a dreamy boy. Sometimes he could hear that particular tone in the whistling of the wind; sometimes he could hear it in the songs of the birds, and sometimes in the mazy multitude of sounds on a clear morning in the country. He had gotten hold of old Plato's idea that the planets send forth sounds of music as they roll in the sky; and he called that particular tone which had such a mysterious influence over him, the music of the spheres. He said there was a tone in his nature, somehow, which accorded with that tone. One night he lay alone upon a sick bed. At a dead hour of the night, he screamed aloud in a wild ecstacy, and said that he could hear, even then, that strange key note come ringing down from the stars, reverberating round the roof of the house and the ceiling of the room in which he lay, as the last stroke of the hammer sings its silvery reverberations round the bell of the clock. On the bringing of lights into the room he was found to be dead. His spirit had passed away in that strange ecstacy. It had fled away on the wings of that kindred music. Whether this singular and beautiful legend of the Alleghanies has any foundation in fact or not, we do not know. We give it as we have heard it. But the principle of faith in God is like that. It descends from heaven; yet it may be recognized every where. And there is a tone within the soul of every righteous man, of every age, which more or less clearly accords with that sound from heaven. "My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt-offering," said old Abraham, when just about to lift his knife against the son of his love. "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him," said Job, seated on the ground among the ashes, scraping himself with a potsherd. "I trust in the mercy of God for ever and ever" said David when he arose and fled that day for fear of Saul, and went to Achish, the King of Gath. "In the Lord put I my trust:" "In God I have put my trust, I will not fear what flesh can do unto me," said David on other occasions. "Nevertheless I am not ashamed; for I know in whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day," said Paul from his prison in Rome, after he had been brought a second time before the emperor Nero. When anything disturbed Martin Luther more than usual, he would say, "Come, let us sing the 46th Psalm." The German version of the first two stanzas is very powerful. Dr. Watts' is perhaps hardly less so. "God is the refuge of his saints, When storms of sharp distress invade; Let mountains from their seats be hurled Our faith shall never yield to fear." Such were the sentiments on which the German Reformer rallied in his times of trouble. "The crafty serpent has endeavoured to persuade me, that I have merited heaven and eternal blessedness by the faithful discharge of my ministry. But, blessed be God, who has enabled me to quench the fiery dart, by suggesting, 'what hast thou that thou hast not received? By the grace of God I am what I am.' 'Not I, but the grace of God in me. "Wherefore I give thanks to God through Jesus Christ, that he hath strengthened me and given me the victory,' said John Knox as he lay dying. Richard Hooker expresses himself on the subject of faith in Christ in these words: "Howsoever men, when they sit at ease, do vainly tickle their own hearts with the wanton conceit of I know not what proportionable correspondence between their merits and their rewards, which, in the trance of their high speculation, they dream that God hath measured, weighed, and laid up, as it were, in bundles for them; notwithstanding we see by daily experience in a number even of them, that when the hour of death approacheth, when they secretly hear themselves summoned forthwith to appear, and stand at the bar of that Judge, whose brightness causeth the eyes of angels themselves to dazzle, all those idle imaginations do then begin to hide their faces; to name merits then, is to lay their souls upon the rack, the memory of their own deeds is loathsome unto them, they forsake all things wherein they have put any trust and confidence; no staff to lean upon, no ease, no rest, no comfort then, but only in Christ Jesus." So wrote the great and eloquent |