CHAP. XIII. Self-Love. "THE idol self," says an excellent old divine, * “ has made more desolation among men than ever was made in those places where idols were served by human sacrifices. It has preyed more fiercely on human lives, than Moloch, or the Minotaur." To worship images is a more obvious, but it is scarcely a more degrading idolatry, than to set up self in opposition to God. To devote ourselves to this service is as perfect slavery as the service of God is perfect freedom. If we cannot imitate the sacrifice of Christ in his death, we are called upon to imitate the sacrifice of himself in his will. Even the Son of God declared, "I came not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. This was his grand lesson, this was his distinguishing character. Self-will is the ever flowing fountain of all the evil tempers which deform our hearts, of all the boiling passions which inflame and disorder society; the root of bitterness on which all its corrupt fruits grow. We set up our own understanding against the wisdom of God, and our own passions against the will of God. If we could ascertain the precise period when sensuality ceased to govern in the animal part of our nature, and pride in the intellectual, that period would form the most memorable æra of the Christian life; from that moment he begins a new date of liberty and happiness; from that stage he sets out on a new career of peace, liberty, and virtue. Self-love is a Proteus of all shapes, shades, and complexions. It has the power of dilatation and contraction, as best serves the occasion. There is no crevice so small through which its subtle essence cannot force its way, no space so ample that it cannot stretch itself to fill. It is of all degrees of refinement; so coarse and hungry as to gorge itself with the grossest adulation, so fastidious as to require a homage as refined as itself; so artful as to elude the detection of ordinary observers, so specious as to escape the observation of the very heart in which it reigns paramount: yet, though so extravagant in its appetites, it can adopt a * Howe. moderation which imposes, a delicacy which veils its deformity, an artificial character which keeps its real one out of sight. We are apt to speak of self-love as if it were only a symptom, whereas it is the distemper itself; a malignant distemper which has possession of the moral constitution, of which malady every part of the system participates. In direct opposition to the effect produced by the touch of the fabled king, which converted the basest materials into gold, this corrupting principle pollutes, by coming in contact with it, whatever is in itself great and noble. Self-love is the centre of the unrenewed heart. This stirring principle, as has been observed, serves indeed the virtuous mind to wake; but it disturbs it from its slumber to ends and purposes directly opposite to those assigned to it by our incomparable bard. * Self-love is by no means "the small pebble which stirs the peaceful lake." It is rather the pent-up wind within, which causes the earthquake; it is the tempest which agitates the sleeping ocean. Had the image been as just as its clothing is beautiful; or, rather, had Mr. Pope been as sound a theologian as he was an exquisite poet, the allusion in his hands might have conveyed a sounder meaning, without losing a particle of its elegance. This might have been effected, by only substituting the effect for the cause; that is, by making benevolence the principle instead of the consequence, and by discarding self-love from its central situation in the construction of the metaphor. But by arraying a beggarly idea in princely robes, he knew that his own splendid powers could at any time transform meanness into majesty, and deformity into beauty. After all, however, le vrai est le seul beau. Had he not blindly adopted the misleading system of the noble sceptic, "his guide, philosopher and friend," he might have transferred the shining attributes of the base-born thing which he has dressed out with so many graces, to the legitimate claimant, benevolence; of which self-love is so far from being, as he represents, the moving spring, that they are both working in a course of incessant counteraction, the spirit striving against the flesh, and the flesh against the spirit. To Christian benevolence all the happy effects attributed Essay on Man, 1. 362. * to self-love might have been fairly traced. It was only to dislodge the idol, and make the love of God the centre, and the poet's delightful, numbers might have conveyed truths worthy of so perfect a vehicle. "This centre moved," does indeed extend its pervading influence in the very manner ascribed to the opposite principle; does indeed spread from its throne in the individual breast, to all those successive circles, "wide and more wide," of which the poet makes self-love the first mover. * The apostle James appears to have been of a different opinion from the ethic bard; he speaks as if he suspected that the pebble stirred the lake a little too roughly. He traces this mischievous principle, from its birth to the largest extent of its malign influence. The question, "whence come wars and fightings among you?" he answers by another question-" come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?" The same pervading spirit which creates hostility between nations, creates animosity among neighbors, and discord in families. It is the same principle which, having in the beginning made "Cain the first male child," a murderer in his father's house, has been ever since in perpetual operation; has been transmitted in one unbroken line of succession, through that long chain of crimes of which history is composed, to the present triumphant spoiler of Europe. In cultivated societies, laws repress, by punishing, the overt act in private individuals, but no one thing but the Christian religion has ever been devised to cleanse the spring. "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it?" This proposition, this interrogation, we read with complacency, and both the aphorism and the question being a portion of scripture, we think it would not be decent to controvert it. We read it however * Self-love thus pushed to social, to divine, The Author hopes to be forgiven for these remarks: she has hazarded them for the sake of her more youthful readers.-She has not forgotten the time when, in the admiration of youthful enthusiasm, she never suspected that the principle of these finished verses was less excellent than the poetry. with a secret reservation, that it is only the heart of all the rest of the world that is meant, and we rarely make the application which the Scripture intended. Each hopes that there is one heart which may escape the charge, and he makes the single exception in favor of his own. But if the exception which every one makes were true, there would not be a deceitful or wicked heart in the world. As a theory we are ready enough to admire self-knowledge, yet when the practice comes in question, we are as blindfold as if our happiness depended on our ignorance. To lay hold on a religious truth, and to maintain our hold, is no easy matter. Our understandings are not more ready to receive than our affections to lose it. We like to have an intellectual knowledge of divine things, but to cultivate a spiritual acquaintance with them cannot be effected at so cheap a rate. We can even more readily force ourselves to believe that which has no affinity with our understanding, than we can bring ourselves to choose that which has no interest in our will, no correspondence with our passions. One of the first duties of a Christian is to endeavor to conquer this antipathy to the self denying doctrines against which the human heart so sturdily holds out. The learned take incredible pains for the acquisition of knowledge. The philosopher cheerfully consumes the midnight oil in his laborious pursuits; he willingly sacrifices food and rest to conquer a difficulty in science. Here the labor is pleasant, the fatigue is grateful, the very difficulty is not without its charms. Why do we feel so differently in our religious pursuits? Because in the most operose human studies, there is no contradiction of self, there is no opposition to the will, there is no combat of the affections. If the passions are at all implicated, if self-love is at all concerned, it is rather in the way of gratification than of opposition. There is such a thing as a mechanical Christianity. There are good imitations of religion, so well executed and so resembling as not only to deceive the spectator but the artist. Self-love in its various artifices to deceive us to our ruin, sometimes makes use of a means, which if properly used, is one of the most beneficial that can be devised to preserve us from its influence, the perusal of pious books. But these very books in the hands of the ignorant, the indolent, and the self-satisfied, produce an effect directly contrary to that which they were intended to produce and which they actually do produce on minds prepared for the perusal. They inflate where they were intended to humble. As some hypocondriacs, who amuse their melancholy hours with consulting indiscriminately every medical book which falls in their way, fancy they find their own case in every page, their own ailment in the ailment of every patient, till they believe they actually feel every pain of which they read, though the work, treats of cases diametrically opposite to their own-so the religious valetudinarian, as unreasonably elated as the others are depressed, reads books descriptive of a highly religious state, with the same unhappy self application. He feels his spiritual pulse by a watch, that has no movements in common with it, yet he fancies that they go exactly alike. He dwells with delight on symptoms, not one of which belongs to him, and flatters himself with their supposed agreement. He observes in those books what are the signs of grace, and he observes them with complete self application; he traces what are the evidences of being in God's favor, and those evidences he finds in himself. Self-ignorance appropriates truths faithfully stated but wholly inapplicable. The presumption of the novice arrogates to itself the experience of the advanced Christian. He is persuaded that it is his own case, and seizes on the consolations which belong only to the most elevated piety. Self-knowledge would correct the judgment. It would teach us to use the pattern held out as an original to copy, instead of leading us to fancy that we are already wrought into the assimilation. It would teach us when we read the history of an established Christian, to labor after a confor mity to it, instead of mistaking it for the delineation of our own character. Human prudence, daily experience, self-love, all teach us to distrust others, but all motives combined do not teach us to distrust ourselves; we confide unreservedly in our own heart, though as a guide it misleads, as a counsellor it betrays. It is both party and judge. As the one, it blinds through ignorance, as the other, it acquits through partiality. Though we value ourselves upon our discretion in not confiding too implicitly in others, yet it would be difficult to find any friend, any neighbor, or even any enemy who has deceived us so often as we have deceived ourselves. If an acquaintance betray us, we take warning, are on the watch, and are careful not to trust him again. But how |