BY REV.

PEABODY.

H

all

We read in classic fable of the Titans, who, that they might scale the heavens, heaped Ossa upon Pelion, and rolled leafy Olympus upon Ossa; and the earliest of authentic history tells us of certain rash and aspiring builders, who essayed to erect a tower of brick and mortar, whose top should reach the sky. What they attempted by their handiwork, fiction aims to accomplish for the mind. It is the vehicle by which men of ages have sought to scale the heavens, to attain a perfectness, harmony, and beauty, which they could not find on earth, to represent the ideal of the fancy, which had never embodied itself in actual life. The present state has always struck the minds of men, even in the rudest times, as imperfect and fragmentary. This has been the case with the outward world. Nature is indeed fair and glorious, yet not a perfect Paradise. Her scenes of beauty are often deformed and laid waste-the serpent lurks in the garden, the wasp in the flower-cup. There are frightful solitudes, arid deserts, blighting winds sweep over field and forest, the deadly thunderbolt destroys the hope of man. And then there is no scene, where the lines of beauty are so nicely rounded off, that the imagination cannot conceive of something more perfect; nor is there anything on the earth or in the visible heavens so grand but that man may imagine something more vast and sublime. Hence the fictions, that have always prevailed with regard to a past, a future, or a distant Paradise, where there is no blight or death, no deformity, cloud, or storm. It was in this striving after outward perfection, that classic fable produced the bowers of Calypso and the far off Isles of the Blessed, and clothed the vale of Tempe and the Arcadian groves in traits

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of ideal beauty.

Still more has mankind felt in all ages the seeming inequality and injustice of human fortunes. The race has not been to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. The pure of heart have

man affairs, cause and effect, conduct and its just consequences have seemed to be disjoined; retribution has marched with tardy steps; injustice has enjoyed long and signal triumphs. Yet there is native in man's heart an idea of justice, perfect and supreme. And the constant effort of the old pagan philosophy was to solve the enigma of life-to account for the seeming inequality of human fortunes. To this end theories without number were devised. This aim lay at the foundation of the oriental philosophy, which referred the prevalence of wrong and evil to a malignant principle, contending with the supreme God for the government of the universe. Fiction cuts the knot which philosophy thus sought to untie. Fiction shapes its own world after the eternal idea of justice in the heart, invents personages, whose fortunes coincide with their characters, and deserts, deals righteous retribution, crowns virtue in the sight of all men, and makes punishment follow close upon the heels of crime.

been trodden under foot, and the vile have been exalted. The cup of hemlock has been mingled for genius and piety; the world's homage has been laid at the feet of fools and ruffians. In hu

Then, again, there is the same signature of im perfection upon the virtues, the doings, and the darings of the brave and the good. The outlines of the purest individual character are marred by petty foibles and follies. Splendid virtues are often neutralized by gross faults. The brave are sometimes mean. Heroes show too plainly that they are mortal. Great enterprises are retarded, and great results shortened and weakened by the frailty or the mistakes of their agents. No series of efforts or events rolls on so smoothly or gloriously but there is some ripple or eddy in the current. But there is within man the native consciousness of capacity for the loftiest virtue and the noblest daring, of the power of controlling the course of events in the happiest direction and to the most glorious issues. This consciousness expresses itself through the medium of fiction, which gives us characters of godlike purity and power, enterprises undertaken and achieved in the freest and boldest spirit, obstacles fearlessly encountered and triumphantly subdued, a march of affairs stately and majestic throughout.

Fiction is not then, it would seem, a random form of literature, a mere vehicle of amusement.

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It has its root in universal nature. It grows out of that better, that ideal self, which is perpetually shooting above and beyond the actual, and which, in every department, carries our aims far beyond our power of execution, our conception far beyond aught that we can hope to realize. Fiction is no less the spontaneous language of nature, than are the wailings of infancy or the groans of the suffering. It is too, a universal language. With one exception, which we shall shortly notice, no nation, that has created for itself a literature, has failed to utter itself in this form. Nay, even savage nations, destitute of the use of letters, have embodied their ideas of perfection in traditional tales or in rude epics. This form of literature, thus universal, indicates the universality of the ideas which gave birth to it. There is, in every human heart, a dissatisfaction with the actual, the seen, and the felt, both as regards outward nature, the march of events, and human character and experience. There is, in every heart, the ideal world of more perfect forms, of more exquisite beauty, of higher purity. There is a tendency in every mind to conceive of these ideas as embodied in some past, future, or distant paradise. Faith in paradise is a branch of the universal faith of the human heart. Now, so far as we can analyze the nature of man, we find no innate idea without its corresponding object. Man's innate ideas are the inward ex. pression of great truths or facts in the divine gov. ernment. And this idea, so universal, of a more perfect order of things and state of being, points us for its realization to a past and a future paradise. Yes, the human heart in all ages bears testimony, and has engraven its testimony deep on the literature of the world, that all things were perfect once, and are to be again restored.

One nation only writes no fiction-the Jewish-a striking fact, and one which seems to evince that they had, in authentic revelations, that for which other nations strove through the medium of fiction. They, (except in their times of national apostacy) they alone, of all nations upon earth made no idols; for they had the true Jehovah, whose only image is that created by his indwelling in the soul of his worshipper. And it would seem as if they had extended to the golden past and to the golden future, the law which was given them against idolatry. They made no likeness of the Eden which was, or of the Eden which is to be. History and prophecy to them filled and transcended the highest sphere of fable. They could not equal that which was written by the unerring pen of inspiration, or heighten colors borrowed from the sky; and they wisely refrained from fiction, which must have fal

len so far short of the delineations in their truthful records. They had, in their sacred books, a Paradise, in which were soft streams and gentle dews, every tree pleasant to the sight and good for food, and in which, above all, the parents of our race heard the voice of the Lord God in the cool of the day, and talked with him as a man talks with his neighbor. They had also the promise of one who should restore lost Eden, under whose reign the wolf and the lamb should lie down together, the desert blossom as the garden, and men learn war no more. Their yearn. ings were satisfied, their ideas of perfectness met and filled by this past and this future, which their earnest faith brought so nigh together as to overlap the dull and doubtful present. These revelations solved for them the enigma of life, which perplexed the whole Gentile world. They saw, amidst all the confused and conflicting elements of nature and society, a sovereign arm, a guiding Providence. The voice of the Lord was upon the waters, the winds were his angels, and flames of fire his ministers. In his hand were the hearts of men. By him kings reigned, and princes decreed justice. It was his to bring low and to raise up, to wound and to make whole. The people might rage and nations take counsel; but he could make the wrath of man to praise him, and while his covenant race were found in the way of his testimonies, he would say to the winds and the waves of human passion, "Touch not mine anointed, and do my servants no harm." For the sins of their first parents, Eden had indeed been barred by the angel of the flaming sword. For their own sins and the sins of their fathers, had the hour of redemption been delayed. But the time was approaching, the feet of those who should bring the glad tidings, were already on the mountains. With such a faith, for them to have given birth to a fictitious literature would have been as unnatural as to light a candle at noonday; and the absence of this element in Hebrew literature bears conclusive testimony to the sufficiency of the Jewish revelation for its times and its purposes.

We believe that Christianity has done but little for the literature of fiction; and we believe that fiction will decline in exact proportion to the infusion of Christian ideas into popular literature. Christianity has, like the Jewish theology, an Eden in the past, of which it would make no copy, except in the cleansed affections of its disciples. It has too, in the future millennial glories in clear prospect,

"Scenes surpassing fables, and yet true,"

which he, who would portray, unless he dip his