Like Many Of These Fanciful Profiles, I Was Some Time In
Learning To See It; And After That It Became To Me So Plain That I
Wondered I Had Not Seen It Before.
I called it not Napoleon, however,
but as it gained on my imagination, lying there so motionless, cold,
and still, I thought of Prometheus on Mount Caucasus; it seemed as if,
his sorrows ended, he had sunk at last to a dreamless sleep on that
snowy summit.
This sketch may, perhaps, give you some faint idea of
how such an outline might be formed in one's imagination.
[Illustration: _of Mont Blanc in the distance._]
We walked out the other evening, with M. Fazy, to a beautiful place,
where Servetus was burned. Soft, new-mown meadow grass carpets it, and
a solemn amphitheatre of mountains, glowing in the evening sky, looked
down - Mont Blanc, the blue-black Mole, the Saleve! Never was deed done
in a more august presence chamber! Ere this these two may have
conferred together of the tragedy, with far other thoughts than then.
The world is always unjust to its progressive men. If one fragment of
past absurdity cleaves to them, they celebrate the absurdity as a
personal peculiarity. Hence we hear so much of Luther's controversial
harshness, of Calvin's burning Servetus, and of the witch persecutions
of New England.
Luther was the poet of the reformation, and Calvin its philosopher.
Luther fused the mass, Calvin crystallized. He who fuses makes the
most sensation in his day; he who crystallizes has a longer and wider
power. Calvinism, in its essential features, never will cease from the
earth, because the great fundamental facts of nature are Calvinistic,
and men with strong minds and wills always discover it. The
predestination of a sovereign will is written over all things. The old
Greek tragedians read it, and expressed it. So did Mahomet, Napoleon,
Cromwell. Why? They found it so by their own experience; they tried
the forces of nature enough to find their strength. The strong swimmer
who breasts the Rhone is certain of its current. But Ranke well said,
that in those days when the whole earth was in arms against these
reformers, they had no refuge except in exalting God's sovereignty
above all other causes. To him who strives in vain with the giant
forces of evil, what calm in the thought of an overpowering will, so
that will be crowned by goodness! However grim, to the distrusting,
looks this fortress of sovereignty in times of flowery ease, yet in
times when "the waters roar and are troubled, and the mountains shake
with the swelling thereof," it has been always the refuge of God's
people. All this I say, while I fully sympathize with the causes which
incline many fine and beautiful minds against the system.
The wife of De Wette has twice called upon me - a good, plain,
motherly, pious old lady as any in Andover. She wanted me to visit her
daughter, who, being recently deprived of her only little girl, has
since been wholly lost to life.
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