III. GROTESQUE RENAISSANCE 165

thankfulness on the unfolding of the flower, and the falling of the dew, and the sleep of the green fields in the sunshine; but the blasted trunk, the barren rock, the moaning of the bleak winds, the roar of the black, perilous, merciless whirlpools of the mountain streams, the solemn solitudes of moors and seas, the continual fading of all beauty into darkness, and of all strength into dust, have these no language for us? We may seek to escape their teaching by reasonings touching the good which is wrought out of all evil; but it is vain sophistry. The good succeeds to the evil as day succeeds the night, but so also the evil to the good. Gerizim and Ebal,¹ birth and death, light and darkness, heaven and hell, divide the existence of man, and his Futurity.*

§ 43. And because the thoughts of the choice we have to make between these two ought to rule us continually, not so much in our own actions (for these should, for the most part, be governed by settled habit and principle) as in our manner of regarding the lives of other men, and our own responsibilities with respect to them; therefore, it seems to me that the healthiest state into which the human mind can be brought is that which is capable of the greatest love and the greatest awe: and this we are taught even in our times of rest; for when our minds are rightly in tone, the merely pleasurable excitement which they seek with most avidity is that which rises out of the contemplation of beauty or of terribleness. We thirst for both, and according to the height and tone of our feeling desire to see them in noble or inferior forms. Thus there is a Divine beauty, and a terribleness of sublimity coequal with it in rank,

* The Love of God is, however, always shown by the predominance, or greater sum, of good in the end; but never by the annihilation of evil. The modern doubts of eternal punishment are not so much the consequence of benevolence as of feeble powers of reasoning. Every one admits that God brings finite good out of finite evil. Why not, therefore, infinite good out of infinite evil?²

¹ [Deuteronomy xi. 29.]

² [On the subjects touched on in this note see Time and Tide, §§ 49, 50, 58, and Ethics of the Dust, §§ 80, 81.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]