CHAPTER XXIII.

CLAUDE ON THE SUBLIMITY OF THE SCRIPTURAL IDEAS OF DEATH AND THE

NOTHINGNESS OF MAN.-FOURTEENTH CHAPTER OF ISAIAH.

SURPRISED, in the first place, that no one came to meet him, he had been still more so to find his place occupied, and that by Claude. However, either from curiosity or politeness, he approached softly. Nothing had been heard, save the light tread of steps upon the smooth sand of the avenue; no one had turned around, and Claude, who alone could have seen him, at this moment had his eyes somewhere else. So he had stopped outside of the circle, and was completely hidden by those before him.

The attention was profound. There was no need any longer that it should be excited by the mystery which still hung around Claude's person; known or unknown, he had few equals in the art of captivating whatever audience was before him, and the sketch which we have given of his discourse, would doubtless have appeared in the highest degree feeble and lifeless to those who had just heard it. They no longer dreamed of inquiringwho he was, to be talking of the Bible with so much enthusiasm and assurance; his right was written in his words. Bossuet was carried away like the rest; he no longer remembered that he had been master in this same spot where he now found himself for the moment confounded among the disciples; and it had been necessary for Claude to perceive him and cease, in order to with

draw him from this inferior position, which he dreamed not of

leaving.

Flattered by the compliment, he declined; and in the midst of the general astonishment, for no one could imagine how or when he was come, he said;

"No, no, you tening to you-"”

shall go on.

I have too much pleasure in lis

They know each other then! thought all the assembly; and those nearest to Bossuet did not delay asking him in a low voice the name of this mysterious personage. He smiled and made no reply.

"You wish it?" said Claude; " well, I will continue. And I shall be more at my ease than Monsieur Bossuet would have been in what I am going to say, for he would not have ventured to quote his own works, and yet it is there that we find the most beautiful things which the Bible has inspired in this century, in the regions of lofty poesy. I am told that you conversed yesterday, and that it is again to be your theme to-day, on the fourteenth chapter of Isaiah. It is precisely the chapter which I was about to quote just now. But since you are good enough to bestow on me a little more attention, permit me to go back a little. "The poetical compositions of the Old Testament can be divided into four or five classes, and thus exercise a diverse influence upon the imagination and style of the sacred orator.

"There are those, in the first place, which are purely descriptive. The subject of these is ordinarily God's greatness, manifested in his works. Job and the Psalms abound in passages of this sort; in the Prophecies, also, we find them most beauful. These, whatever their fitness to elevate the soul, to extend the thoughts, the preacher should be careful not to imitate too unrestrictedly. It degenerates too easily into declamation and bombast; he fancies himself attaining the highest regions of elo

quence, while, after all, it is nothing but rhetoric. These amplifications also generally produce very little effect; it is a noisy music in which there is much for the ear and little for the soul. In a prayer, particularly, all the lofty titles by which God is addressed, and all the displaying of his glory, is not of so much value as simple 'Lord' a simple 'my God!' which comes from the heart, accompanied by a look of supplication !

"It is always a great evil to embroider and amplify the Bible. Leave it its vigorous beauty;* none but an ignorant or degenerate people have ever had the idea of dressing their gods in fine clothes. It is also a somewhat injudicious respect which fancies it must manifest itself by a great display of expressions of admiration. Those who in the pulpit go into the greatest ecstacies about the beauties of the Bible, are not always those who have the truest and deepest feeling for these beauties. So much the more, because it is so easy to be carried away too far, and in praising more common-place passages extravagantly, one is deprived of the means of making those which are truly admirable properly appreciated.

"But to return," continued Claude. "There is a second class of compositions in the reproduction and imitation of which also much caution should be used; I mean those eloquent threats, so frequent in the mouths of the prophets, whether they pronounced them in the name of their Head, or whether they were

*Advice to translators of the Bible. It has been, by very pious translators, disfigured by dint of great care and love. It is true that in the midst of all his subtleties, the perfume, as it were, of a simple piety is perceiyed. "Sacy has curled the Bible," said some writer, "but not rouged it."

Or their saints either, Claude probably thought, but he could not have said this without betraying himself.

"Xenophon does not say once in his whole Cyropaideia, that Cyrus was great; but he causes admiration of him to be felt throughout."-FENELON.

supposed to come from God himself. They are quick and energetic; images are crowded into them; it is truly the language of the strong and jealous God; but if I may dare say so, it is not altogether that of the God of the Gospel; and as it is scarcely possible to imitate without exaggerating, it might easily happen, that in taking the style of a prophet, that of an apostle would be lost sight of. Undoubtedly there are under the Gospel as well as under the ancient dispensation, judgments to be pronounced and chastisements to be threatened, and woe to that preacher who grows weak in this part of his task! But he should not forget that he speaks more in the name of a father than of a master. The prophet's task was to make God feared; his above all is to make him loved.

"Not that even in the Old Testament there are not many places where God is already the God of the Gospel. The preacher need not fear to draw from these sources. Mingled with the more explicit instructions of the New Testament, these patriarchal figures will only contribute to make them more popular, more touching, more penetrating; without altering the lessons of truth, you will join with them, in some sort, all the charms of fiction.

"There is yet another class of these writings, thanks to which the happy and holy mingling of the two portions of the Bible takes place without the slightest effort. I mean those cries and emotions of a tortured soul, those songs of anguish or of deliverance, which in the Prophecies and Psalms succeed each other, are woven together and identified, in so pathetic a manner. In these, we are in the midst of the very purest Christianity. No Christian ever wept for his sins with truer repentance than Daid for his; never has a soul, alarmed to feel itself under the lominion of evil, thrown itself with more earnestness at the foot of the throne of grace. And even in the places where the question s more particularly of earthly dangers and deliverances, there

is in the author's words something so convincing, so feeling, that the Christian not only can apply them without trouble to the situation of his soul, but he cannot help doing so. The twentysecond Psalm, for instance,—you cannot read it without a mingling of Christian feelings; you cannot paraphrase it without giving it a Christian character. And this, in my opinion, is the highest praise one can give them. Let the preacher, then, use them frequently, since it is so easy either for him to transform them into a Christian signification, or to find a striking and original form for Christian ideas.

"I come at length to that class where the prominent idea is that of the nothingness of man. Here we may boldly assert that ancient poetry had nothing, absolutely nothing to compare with it. It is a new world, into which you enter with the Bible alone; the highest geniuses have scarcely reached the threshold. And yet, if there is one thought which every man might be supposed to have, it is that of his own misery; if there is one where we may quickly sink into a frightful abyss, it is this.-Well, the books of the ancients seem to prove the contrary. Nothing can be colder, more sententious, than what they have said of death. It seems as if their sole end speaking of it, were to find a somewhat original manner of saying that we must all die. We might quote forty or fifty of these modes of expressing the idea, all ingenious but without grandeur, without life, without any of that indescribable something which strikes and overwhelms us, when an Isaiah, a David, a Solomon, or a Jeremiah even cursorily touches upon this formidable subject.* Death, with both the philosophers and the poets of the ancients, is always more or less Charon's bark; what have those who spoke the best of immor

* "Profane orators have often run after eloquence; but eloquence has attached itself to the steps of the sacred writers."-AUGUSTINE, De doctr: Christ.