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Church Clothes have gone sorrowfully out at elbows; nay, far worse, many of them have become mere hollow shapes, or masks, under which no living figure or spirit any longer dwells; but only spiders and unclean beetles, in horrid accumulation, drive their trade; and the mask still glares on you with its glasseyes, in ghastly affectation of life, -some generation and half after religion has quite withdrawn from it, and in unnoticed nooks is weaving for herself new vestures, wherewith to reäppear, and bless us, or our sons, or grandsons. As a priest, or interpreter of the Holy, is the noblest and highest of all men, so is a sham-priest (Scheinpriester) the falsest and basest. Neither is it doubtful that his canonicals, were they popes' tiaras, will one day be torn from him, to make bandages for the wounds of mankind; or even to burn into tinder, for general scientific or culinary purposes.

"All which, as out of place here, falls to be handled in my second volume, On the Palingenesia, or New Birth of Society; which volume, as treating practically of the wear, destruction, and re-texture of spiritual tissues, or garments, forms, properly speaking, the transcendental or ultimate portion of this my work on Clothes, and is already in a state of forward

ness."

And herewith, no farther exposition, note, or commentary being added, does Teufelsdröckh, and must his Editor now, terminate the singular chapter on Church Clothes!

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CHAPTER III.

SYMBOLS.

PROBABLY it will elucidate the drift of these foregoing obscure utterances, if we here insert somewhat of our Professor's speculations on Symbols. To state his whole doctrine, indeed, were beyond our compass. Nowhere is he more mysterious, impalpable, than in this of "Fantasy being the organ of the Godlike;" and how "Man thereby, though based, to all seeming, on the small Visible, does novertheless extend down into the infinite d'eeps of the Invisible, of which Invisible, indeed, his life is properly the bodying forth." Let us, omitting these high transcendental aspects of the matter, study to glean (whether from the paper-bags or the printed volume) what little seems logical and practical, and cunningly arrange it into such degree of coherence as it will assume. By way of proem, take the following not injudicious remarks:

"The benignant efficacies of concealment," cries our Professor, "who shall speak or sing? SILENCE and SECRECY! Altars might still be raised to them (were this an altar-building time) for universal worship. Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of life, which they are thenceforth to rule. Not William the Silent only, but all the considerable men I have known, and the most undiplomatic and unstrategic of these, forbore to babble of what they were creating and projecting. Nay, in thy own mean perplexities, do

thou thyself but hold thy tongue for one day; on the morrow, how much clearer are thy purposes and duties; what wreck and rubbish have those mute workmen within thee swept away, when intrusive noises were shut out! Speech is too often not, as the Frenchman defined it, the art of concealing thought; but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal. Speech, too, is great, but not the greatest. As the Swiss Inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden (Speech is silvern, Silence is golden); or, as I might rather express it: Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.

"Bees will not work except in darkness; thought will not work except in silence; neither will virtue work except in secrecy. Let not thy right hand know what thy left hand doeth! Neither shalt thou prate even to thy own heart of those secrets known to all.' Is not shame the soil of all virtue, of all good manners, and good morals? Like other plants, virtue will not grow unless its root be hidden, buried from the eye of the sun. Let the sun shine on it, nay, do but look at it privily thyself, the root withers, and no flower will glad thee. O my friends, when we view the fair clustering flowers that over-wreathe, for example, the marriage-bower, and encircle man's life with the fragrance and hues of heaven, what hand will not smite the foul plunderer that grubs them up by the roots, and, with grinning, grunting satisfaction, shows us the dung they flourish in Men speak much of the printing-press with its newspapers; du Himmel! what are these to Clothes and the tailor's goose?"

!

"Of kin to the so incalculable influences of concealment, and connected with still greater things, is the

wondrous agency of Symbols. In a symbol there is concealment, and yet revelation; here, therefore, by silence and by speech acting together, comes a doubled significance. And if both the speech be itself high, and the silence fit and noble, how expressive will their union be! Thus in many a painted device, or simple seal-emblem, the commonest truth stands out to us proclaimed with quite new emphasis.

"For it is here that Fantasy, with her mystic wonder-land, plays into the small prose domain of Sense, and becomes incorporated therewith. In the symbol proper, what we can call a symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodyment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were attainable, there. By symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched. He everywhere finds himself encompassed with symbols, recognised as such or not recognised. The universe is but one vast symbol of God; nay, if thou wilt have it, what is man himself but a symbol of God; is not all that he does symbolical; a revelation to sense of the mystic God-given force that is in him; a Gospel of Freedom,' which he, the Messias of Nature,' preaches, as he can, by act and word? Not a hut he builds, but is the visible embodyment of a thought; but bears visible record of invisible things; but is, in the transcendental sense, symbolical as well as real."

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"Man," says the Professor elsewhere, in quite antipodal contrast with these high-soaring delineations, which we have here cut short on the verge of the Inane," man is by birth somewhat of an owl.

Perhaps, too, of all the owleries that ever possessed him the most owlish, if we consider it, is that of your actually existing motive-millwrights. Fantastic tricks enough has man played in his time; has fancied himself to be most things, down even to an animated heap of glass; but to fancy himself a dead ironbalance for weighing pains and pleasures on was reserved for this his latter era. There stands he, his universe one huge manger, filled with hay and thistles to be weighed against each other; and looks longeared enough. Alas, poor devil! spectres are appointed to haunt him. One age, he is hag-ridden, bewitched; the next, priestridden, befooled; in all ages, bedevilled. And now the Genius of Mechanism smothers him worse than any nightmare did; till the soul is nigh choked out of him, and only a kind of digestive, mechanic life remains. In earth and in heaven he can see nothing but mechanism; has fear for nothing else, hope in nothing else. The world would, indeed, grind him to pieces; but cannot he fathom the Doctrine of Motives, and cunningly compute these, and mechanize them to grind the other way?

6

"Were he not, as has been said, purblinded by enchantment, you had but to bid him open his eyes and look. In which country, in which time, was it hitherto that man's history, or the history of any man, went on by calculated or calculable Motives?' What make ye of your Christianities, and Chivalries, and Reformations, and Marseillese Hymns, and Reigns of Terror? Nay, has not, perhaps, the Motive-grinder himself been in love? Did he never stand so much as

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