Iconoclasm.

      Every man has his key-note, which when touched draws forth the finest music of his nature. To the keener sense each word is a torch, flashing its ray of light far back into the darkness of his being. Whence this mystery? Why does the astronomer always dream of planets, and comets, and stars? the geometer of sines and angles? Why is the poet an incarnate poem, so that his very sins bear with them a strange refinement and fascination, that reveal the glory of the inner man as clouds, veiling the sun, with silver fringes tell us there's something beautiful beyond?

      All men are by nature different. So externals are seen by them as it were from different points, and each receives a different idea of things, as of the general term "a house" no two make mentally the same picture. Therefore, men are qualified to investigate various kinds of truth as they see clearer different points by looking through different media or from separate positions. Each sees clearest in his special province. Thus every man has images of truth peculiar to himself. They mould his mind to a particular course of thought, which is the province of his nature. The destruction of this natural course of thought, by the destruction or violation of these peculiar images or ideas, making the man artificial and thereby weakening or failing to develop his true powers, is the Iconoclasm of which we speak.

      We set up idols in ourselves that claim our worship and direct our thoughts. What though I do not bow to brazen Jupiter or walk through paths of fire to Moloch in the graven image! I worship fame — reason — power. We have not ceased as yet from worshipping gross matter. The vulgar lackey crouching before the rich man because he is so does he not worship a golden calf? We blend the real and ideal when we worship woman. First, the lover dreams a fairy form encircled in clear æther by a myriad of angels, airy-winged, and concludes,

"Such is woman, They are neither brute nor human; They are goals."

      But when the goal is reached the ideal changes to the actual, and fortunate is he if the fairy form become not to him a fretful imp, the little angels howling brats, and the ætherial halo misty darkness, where he sits transfixed as by the "quills of bloody porcupine." But we look upon the actual only by mind — by ideas; and here it is blended with the ideal, ideas becoming our sole moving principles. They guide our outward actions. — how do ten thousand noble thoughts come pulsing up in the human bosom, shadowy outlines of beautiful deeds, that give the name of "great men" to those who mould them into fact. Dreams of republicanism had floated for ages in the brains of enthusiasts, but our ancestors were the potent spirits to coin them into real life, and for this have earned the plaudits of the world. The steamship is but an idea permeating and vivifying a mass of matter.

      The idiot is one who, mentally speaking, forms these images at an infinite distance. To illustrate:— Every piece of glass or diamond forms an image somewhere with its rays of light, but a plane plate only at infinity. Compare man to a diamond; the one forms images by sunlight, the other by an inherent fountain — a particle of God's light crystallized — the living soul from the hands of Deity. Turn either in the right direction and you get a flash of sublime beauty. The iconoclastic principles will be seen in a comparison. Man, like the lens, should be convex, so as to make a clear image of truth in easy reach. Some men magnify; a gnat to one is a horse to another. Some magnify only in one direction — the egotist only himself. Some turn everything serious into ridicule, as a lens with a blotch in it does everything into caricature; turn it towards language, and it twists words into vile puns. Poets are prisms that separate all rays into gorgeous colors. They seldom get an accurate idea, because they suffer constantly from chromatic aberration, coloring all things with fancy. Metaphysicians, by tracing images so abstruse, lines of light so lengthy, produce paradoxes by double refraction. Discipline is the cutting which the lens receives. If proper, it is beneficial; if bad, conoclastic. If the student, for instance, is compelled to crowd in a vast mass of heterogeneous matter without digestion, similar ideas blend and cross each other, and the image is confused; he is, as he says, "mixed up;" he suffers from spherical aberration. If, as sometimes valedictorians do, he gives his whole mind up to subjects of study, they become a second nature to him, till he looks at all things in two lights; first, of his original nature, then in the light of the dead languages, or some other acquirement, and thus, by a kind of double polarity, the different sides of each ray are unlike and inconsistent, and of little use in practical application. We find a corroboration of this comparison in the use of language, which is, as metaphysicians say, conclusive proof. When a man has failed to accomplish his ideal, people say, "He has flatted out," meaning that by some means he has become a plane plate, and thus throws his images to infinity, beyond his reach. Another class of students acquires a kind of double prolixity (a term not in use in Optics), by the use of high-sounding school-phrases, as "Subjective influences, reflex tendencies, objective relations, transcendental spontaneity." Some men become self-styled conservative, really bigoted. They think only in one direction. They contract their nature. Like dark lanterns, they are bound all round with the straight-jacket of discipline and prejudice, and can give no light unless you turn a certain screw, and then only a feeble ray in one direction. Perhaps their souls are bound up in a single science, like the crystallographer, who, when he finds his father frozen in the snow, cries out in ecstacy, "How beautifully the frost has crystallized on his whiskers!" Such men forget the bearings of external things on their pursuits. Their ideas may be natural in some degree, but they cast off all such as do not arise from one particular phase of nature. As we descend a well, if deep enough, one by one the stars come out on the little spot in sight above; so if we shut off external things from our object, the unseen points of truth shine out; but after all, the complete and natural image of the heavens is not that pitiful inch of sky. Such men are good in a division of labor. Two men witness a meteoric shower. The astronomer begins — "May 31, in lat. 49°ree; 53' 24"46, long. 80°ree; 16′ 24″1, at 19h. 24m. 21s. 345, met. sh. began very near 61 Cygni," &c.

      The poet says —

"The gleaming arch with purple fire,  The flaming crucible of Heaven,  Distils the dropping stars," &c.

By a blending of the two accounts the world can get a vision of the fact.

      Enough of special instance. Iconoclastic principles are chiefly five — Malculture, Passions, Adoption, Materialism, Conservatism.

      Malculture — as when man is trained to form images contrary to nature. In the infant volume a thousand pages are left blank for the impressions of future truth, which at length become the standard book of action. What a variety of hand-writings are there from the first rude scrawl of the Irish nursery-maid to the delicate "promise to pay" traced by a fairy hand a few years later! If the discipline is mischosen the mind is dwarfed. The Creator designed Napoleon for an emperor; had his mind been led to music by false culture, he might have been only an itinerant organ-grinder, instead of playing tunes for kings to dance by.

      The Passions — chemical forces, roused by their special objects, in their fierce reactions generating falsehood, bigotry, superstition, prejudice, and ever with blind power moulding the character.

      Materialism — the effect of matter on mind, leading to sensation instead of thought.

      Adoption — when the ideas of others displace the original ones, destroying mental independence. There are two modes of receiving another's thoughts; one applies them to correct his own, they become a part of him and do not change his nature; another accepts them without digestion, dethrones his own and guides his life by foreign light. It was this principle that forced Galileo to the confessional to forswear his nature. It declares an uninquiring assent a mark of commendable faith. To combat this the batteries of the Reformation were piling red-hot shot into the Church and its iniquities.

      Conservatism — binding to old ideas, which differs from adoption in that it grants no change. Conservatism, that while we are surrounded by a dark, untried sea of uncertainty, which God has filled with untold gems for us if we will only search, and of which each new flash of light reveals a myriad, insolently tells us, "Blow out your torches — the human destiny is accomplished — there are no more treasures in the reach of man."

      Each takes a thousand varying forms. The true aim of life is to eliminate the false — to live and act the true. Each age corrects its faults by new ideas. But the finite can only approximate. As God is perfect his words are truth, and so when this finite touches the Infinite then only can we find the perfect image — the faultless system of truth. And so we have it in religion. So Death, the grand Iconoclast, will break all false idols.

(THE END)