MARTHA'S GARDEN. MARGARET and FAUST. MARGARET. Promise me, Henry. FAUST. Whatsoe'er I can. MARGARET. Tell me what thy religious feelings are. Thou art in thy heart's heart a kind, good man; And yet, I believe, for it dost little care. FAUST. Enough, my child. Thou feelest how dear thou art MARGARET. That is not right; one must believe indeed. Must one? FAUST. MARGARET. Ah, thee could I but influence. The sacrament, too, thou dost not reverence. FAUST. I reverence it. MARGARET. But still unlovingly. Hast not confessed, nor been to mass for ages! FAUST. My love, who dares reply I believe in God? Ask it of priests or sages, But mocks the asker. MARGARET. Then thou dost not believe? FAUST. Thou angel aspect, do not misconceive My words. Who is there dares to name his name? And who proclaim I believe? Who feel, Yet nerve himself To say I believe him not? He that encompasses the universe,* The all sustainer, Sustains he not Thee--me-Himself? Doth not the heaven vault itself above us? And rise not with their friendly gleam Gaze we not into one another's eyes? Conviction on thy head, thy heart, * "Apart from considerations of space and time, we know this fact, that we are in the midst of Being, whose amoun perhaps, we cannot estimate, but which is yet all so exquisitely related, that the perfection of its parts has no dependance upon their magnitude-of Being, within whose august bosom the little ant has its home, secure as the path of the most splendid star, and whose mightiest intervals-if Infinite Power has built up its framework-Infinite Mercy and Infinite Love glowingly fill and give all things warmth, and lustre, and life-the sense of the presence of God."-Nicholls' Architecture of the Heavens. And interweave within thy soul, Shrouded in mystery eternal, Through what is visible, the invisible ?* Fill thence thine heart, how big soe'er it be ; Call it Bliss!-Heart!-Love!-God! Feeling is all in all. Name is but sound and smoke,† These are thy glorious works, Parent of Good, Thus wondrous fair-Thyself how wondrous then, To us invisible, or dimly seen In these thy lowest works; yet these declare Effulgence of my glory, Son beloved, Paradise Lost. Son, in whose face invisible is beheld Visibly what by Deity I am. Paradise Lost. "There can only be one substance, God. Whatever is, is God, and without God nothing can be conceived; for he is the sole substance, and modes cannot be conceived without sub MARGARET. All that is very good and fair. Much the same thing doth the priest declare, stance; but besides modes and substance nothing exists. God is not corporeal, but body is a mode of God, and therefore uncreated. God is the cause of all things, and that immanently, but not transiently. He is the efficient cause of their essence as well as their existence, since otherwise their essence might be conceived without God, which is absurd. Thus all particular and concrete things are only the accidents or affections of God's attributes, or modes in which they are determinately expressed. God's power is the same as his essence, for he is the necessary cause both of himself and all things, and it is as impossible for us to conceive him not to act, as not to exist. God, viewed in the attributes of his infinite substance, is the same as Nature, that is, to use his fine and subtle expression, ' Natura naturans ;' but in another sense, Nature, or natura naturata,' expresses only the modes under which the divine attributes appear. "The universe is taken as the manifestation of the Deity, not, as many suppose, as the Deity himself, but, to use the words of Cousin, the Deity passing into activity, but not exhausted by the act. * "God then, according to Spinoza, is the idea immanens,' the fundamental fact and reality of all existence, the only power, the only eternity. What we name the universe, is only the visible aspect, the realised form of his existence."-Spinoza. |