CHAPTER I. PLEASURE AND PAIN. WHENEVER one thinks or speaks of the darker side of human things, he should carefully guard against the error which has generally connected itself with this order of views. In contrast with the Persian conception of the two great principles regarded ethically and naturally as good and evil, symbolically as light and darkness, the Hebrew prophet introduces the one absolute Being claiming to himself the origin of both : "I form the light and create darkness; I make peace and create evil; I the Lord do all these things." According to this same idea of unity diffusing itself from the Jews into the Christian Church, the Manichæan doctrine was early repelled as heresy neither a genuine Judaism nor a pure Christianity could accept any doctrine or element seen to contradict the primeval and perpetual idea of one all-creating God. At the same time, we can hardly conceal from ourselves the fact, that what, as put into words, the Church rejected and denounced, has continually existed as an active power both within it and without. Cicero wrote a book concerning contempt of death. As if they had borrowed his very phrase, Christian devotees, precisely like myriads of devout men not aware that Christianity exists, have sought to acquire in themselves, as they have earnestly commended to others, contempt of the world; meaning by the world the whole aggregate of things bounded by space and time. Obviously this method of thinking rests on the tacit assumption, that the world is contemptible, that what in man pertains to the nature and order of the world deserves contempt; or, in other words, that there is in the world and in man, not only an intrinsic, but an essential evil. Now to fulfil the grand idea of monotheism, to carry out the principles embosomed in the Church which always repelled as a foreign element and a dogmatic heresy the notion of two independent powers, substantial and creative, we must come sooner or later to the distinct acknowledgment, that existence in all its normal developments is purely, wholly, only good; that, as God and his creations include whatever exists from eternity to eternity, so the whole must represent and correspond to his essential and infinite goodness. Thus our first and most outward experiences, those of pleasure and pain, force us at the outset on a question which has always divided mankind, and which is in fact among the most difficult and profound ever approached by human thought. We may simply refer to it now for the purpose of distinctly announcing our position, of identifying ourselves, so far as such confession can identify us, with the spirit which makes and pronounces all things good, and which in Hebrew prophets and the Christian Church has signified evermore the same great idea, in referring all existence to this single cause, the creative power of love. Through the darker depths than those which lie just now before us, as well as in the brighter heights which shall look down upon us in our course, we would strive to walk steadily by the same light with which we come to contemplate those lower forms of real good and seeming evil, pleasure and pain. SECTION I. PLEASURE. OUR whole nature is a capacity for enjoyment. Every member of the body, every organ of sensation, every power of the soul, every passion and every appetite, are so many several |