Guide The Genesis Brotherhood: Florian Leaves No Doubt

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Now, at a period when the saints were in the ascendant, dissimulation would unavoidably take a religious form, and when most deceiving men, or most faithfully addressing them, he would still colour all his language with the same hue of piety. As, in an age of chivalry, the dissembler would have the boast of honour and the parade of knightly courtesy for ever on his lips, so in these times of saintship he would lull the suspicions of men by a gross emblazonry of religion.

It might well happen, therefore, that such a man as Cromwell, working his way upward to the highest post of authority, would deal in much insincerity of phrase, and yet have "the root of the matter" in him. Indeed, nothing is more common in the world than this combination of genuine feelings of piety with a great abundance of cant, habitual or designed.

It would betray a very slender knowledge of mankind, and none at all of what is called the religious world, to conclude that a man is destitute of sincere piety because he sometimes makes use of the language of religion for ulterior purposes not peculiarly pious. It is to be observed, moreover, that to readers unfamiliar with the peculiarities of professing Christians, whether Puritans or of other denomination, the expressions of humility and self-abasement which Cromwell frequently makes use of have appeared to be plain symptoms of hypocrisy.

They are nothing but the habits of the sect. Such expressions are supposed to have been employed to blind men to his ambitious projects, to shelter him from the jealous scrutiny of rivals and superiors. Such a purpose they may have sometimes answered, and been intended to answer; but in the main they are nothing more nor less than the dialect of the tribe.

MARCEL PROUST

Because is a Christian virtue, certain religious people have thought fit to indulge in a false vituperation of themselves. Striving avariciously after all virtues, however incompatible the one with the other, they counterfeit vice and meanness, that, good men as they are, they may have abundance of contrition.

How far there can be Christianity or piety in an abuse and degradation of ourselves, when that abuse and degradation must be felt all along to be untrue—if any reflection whatever accompanies such language—we leave such people to settle amongst themselves. Certain it is that the Puritans excelled in this as in every other kindred extravagance.

The elect of the Lord were fond of describing themselves as the most contemptible of sinners; the salt of the earth as being rottenness and corruption. It is to this habit of unmeaning self-disparagement that we are to attribute many of those phrases which have been thought in Cromwell to be studied artifices to cloak ambitious designs. They are rife on all occasions, and their frequency and energy bear no relation to the supposed exigencies of his political career.

Take the following instance. No man surely knew better than he, that at the conclusion of the civil war the army had become paramount. He could sometimes speak of this army with the natural pride of a soldier, with the full consciousness of the power it possessed, and had conferred on him; and yet, at other times, he would talk of this terrible force in the puling strain, in more than the drawl and drivel of the conventicle.

As Lord High Protector, addressing his first parliament, he says:—"I had the approbation of the officers of the army, in the three nations of England, Scotland, and Ireland. I say of the officers: I had that by their express remonstrances, and under signature. But there went along with that express consent of theirs, an implied consent also of a body of persons who had had somewhat [Pg ] to do in the world; who had been instrumental, by God, to fight down the enemies of God, and his people, in the three nations.

And truly, until my hands were bound, and I was limited, to my own great satisfaction, as many can bear me witness, while I had in my hands so great a power and arbitrariness—the soldiery were a very considerable part of these nations, especially all government being dissolved. I say, when all government was thus dissolved, and nothing to keep things in order but the sword! But the Lord High Protector, in a speech he makes to his second parliament, referring to the very same period, narrating the very same events, can talk of this army as "a company of poor men," "your poor army," "those poor contemptible men.

Notre-Dame de Paris, by Victor Hugo

In his letters to the parliament, giving an account of his successes in the war, he generally concludes with some expression of this strained evangelical modesty, and seems very much afraid lest Speaker Lenthall and other honourable members should attribute the victories he announces, in any measure to the army and the general who won them.

He might be very sure, however, that, notwithstanding these self-renunciations, the parliament knew very well who was fighting their battles. Such a mode of speech would not endanger his reputation, nor diminish from his claims; might perhaps—though we will not say this was present to his thoughts—induce the parliament to presume that he would not insist on any very egregious reward for services he was so anxious to disclaim.

We will quote one instance of this self-denying style; and perhaps the following passage contains altogether as much of a certain fanatical mode of reasoning as could be well found in so short a compass. Prince Rupert, then at Worcester, had sent two thousand men across the country, to his majesty at Oxford, to convoy his majesty's person and the artillery over to him at Worcester. Cromwell attacked and routed this convoy; he also took Bletchington House. After giving an account of the transaction, he continues:—"This was the mercy of God; and nothing is more due than a real acknowledgment.

And though I have had greater mercies, yet none clearer: because, in the first place, God brought them to our hands when we looked not for them; and delivered them out of our hands, when we laid a reasonable design to surprise them, and which we carefully endeavoured. His mercy appears in this also, that I did much doubt the storming of the house, it being strong and well manned, and I having few dragoons, and this being not my business; and yet we got it.

I hope you will pardon me if I say, God is not enough owned. We look too much to men and visible helps : this hath much hindered our success. Cant or not, it is sad stuff. But, Puritan as he was, we can admire Cromwell. Every great man, in whatever times, or in whatever part of the world he has made his appearance, has earned his title to fame and distinction, not by qualities peculiar to the sect or religion to which he may have belonged, but qualities which, though connected with his own especial faith or tenets, are recognised as the common property of mankind; he has been great not as Catholic, as Puritan, as Pagan, as Mahometan, but as man ; he has been great, because he was pious, brave, patriotic, sagacious, resolute, and has achieved great enterprises on the theatre of life.

The greatness of Cromwell was indeed allied to Puritanism, inasmuch as his mind grew up under this peculiar form of religion; but what we, and all posterity must admire in Cromwell, is by no means the puritan. His steadiness of purpose, his unshaken resolution, his military prowess, his eminent talent to govern and command, and his religious sense of duty to the Supreme, [Pg ] might all have existed under other modes of religion. In our admiration we entirely separate these qualities from that least gainly and least wholesome of the forms of Christian piety with which they are here found connected.

History gives us examples of every kind of virtue, and every kind of talent, united with every species of fanaticism that has afflicted civilised life. It follows not that we applaud the fanaticism.


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The early caliphs were several of them distinguished by exalted virtues, temperance, self-denial, justice, patriotism: we praise these virtues, we acknowledge, too, that they are here linked with the profession of the faith of Islam; but for all this we do not admire the religion of Mahomet, nor that fanaticism which writ its texts upon the sword.

We insist upon this obvious distinction, because, whilst agreeing— to a certain extent —in Mr Carlyle's view of the character of Cromwell, we beg not to be implicated in that esteem and reverence which he professes to entertain for Puritanism, or the Puritans as a body. And this brings us to the extraordinary part of Mr Carlyle's performance—his ardent sympathy, nay his acquiescence with, and adherence to the Puritans, to that point that he adopts their convictions, their feelings, and even some of their most grotesque reasonings.

Their violence and ferocity, we were prepared to see Mr Carlyle, in his own sardonic fashion, abet and encourage; his sympathy is always with the party who strikes ; but that he should identify himself with their mumming thoughts, their "plentiful reasons," their gloomiest superstitions, was what no one could have anticipated. On this subject we must quote his own words; our own would not be credited; they would seem to any one who had not read his work to be scandalous misrepresentations.

The extravagance runs through the whole book, but we have it perhaps more concentrated in the Introduction. This Introduction, which we sat down to with keen expectations, disappointed us extremely, at least in those parts where any general views are taken. We feel, and have elsewhere ungrudgingly expressed, a certain admiration for the talents of Mr Carlyle. We shall never forget the surprise and pleasure with which we read the "Sartor Resartus," as it one day burst suddenly and accidentally upon us; and no one who has once read his graphic and passionate history of the French Revolution, can ever forget the vivid pictures that were there presented to him.

We opened this book, therefore, with a sort of anticipatory relish. But we found very little of his genius, and very much of his extravagance; less of the one and more of the other, than we thought could possibly have been brought together. Metaphors and allusions, already worn thread-bare, are introduced as stock phrases, as if he had inserted them in his dictionary of the English language. All his vices of manner are exaggerated, while the freshness of thought, which half excused them, is departed.

These strange metaphors, these glaring colours, which are ready spread out upon his palette, he transfers with hasty profusion to his canvass, till— as it has been said of Mr Turner's, pictures —the canvass and the palette-plate very nearly resemble. But were it otherwise, were there all and more than the wit, and humour, and sarcasm, and pungent phrase, and graphic power, which may be found scattered through Mr Carlyle's best performances, there is here a substratum of sheer and violent absurdity, which all these together would fail to disguise or compensate.

Certainly there are pages of writing in this Introduction which contain such an amount of extravagant assertion, uttered in such fantastic jargon, as we think could nowhere be paralleled. Dulness could never have attained to any thing so extraordinary; and surely genius never before condescended to such workmanship. We have wandered far away from the ideas which guided us in that century, [Pg ] and indeed which had guided us in all preceding centuries, but of which that century was the ultimate manifestation.

We have wandered very far, and must endeavour to return and connect ourselves therewith again! It is with other feelings than those of poor peddling dilettantism, other aims than the writing of successful or unsuccessful publications, that an earnest man occupies himself in those dreary provinces of the dead and buried. The last glimpse of the godlike vanishing from this England; conviction and veracity giving place to hollow cant and formalism—antique 'Reign of God,' which all true men in their several dialects and modes have always striven for, giving place to the modern reign of the No-God, whom men name devil; this, in its multitudinous meanings and results, is a sight to create reflections in the earnest man!

One wishes there were a history of English Puritanism, the last of all our heroisms , but sees small prospect of such a thing at present. Then, beginning to quote himself, as his manner is, changing his voice and adopting another key, as if by this thin disguise to obtain somewhat more license for the wildness and vehemence of his speech—an artifice surely not necessary here—he thus continues:—.

Intrinsically and extrinsically it may be considered inaccessible to these generations. Intrinsically, the spiritual purport of it has become inconceivable, incredible to the modern mind. Extrinsically, the documents and records of it, scattered waste as a shoreless chaos, are not legible. They lie there printed, written, to the extent of tons of square miles, as shot-rubbish; unedited, unsorted, not so much as indexed; full of every conceivable confusion; yielding light to very few; yielding darkness, in several sorts, to very many.


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    Confusion piled on confusion to your utmost horizon's edge; obscure in lurid twilight as of the shadow of death; trackless, without index, without finger-post, or mark of any human foregoer; where your human footstep, if you are still human, echoes bodeful through the gaunt solitude, peopled only by somnambulant pedants, dilettants, and doleful creatures, by phantasms, errors, inconceivabilities, by nightmares, pasteboard norroys, griffins, wiverns, and chimeras dire!

    There, all vanquished, overwhelmed under such waste lumber mountains, the wreck and dead ashes of some six unbelieving generations, does the age of Cromwell and his Puritans lie hidden from us. This is what we, for our share, have been able to accomplish towards keeping our heroic ones in memory. After some further diatribe against all preceding historians, collectors, and editors, he drops his ventriloquism, and, resuming a somewhat more natural voice, he proceeds:—. The Christian doctrines, which then dwelt alive in every heart, have now in a manner died out of all hearts —very mournful to behold—and are not the guidance of this world any more.

    Nay, worse still, the cant of them does yet dwell alive with us, little doubting that it is cant, in which fatal intermediate state the eternal sacredness of this universe itself, of this human life itself, has fallen dark to the most of us, and we think that, too, a cant and a creed.

    Much more than documents.

    We have withdrawn it seems, from the path of light ever since the reign of the army and its godly officers established a. We must return and connect ourselves therewith; it is our only salvation; [Pg ] though, indeed, if Puritanism was the manifestation of the ideas of all preceding centuries—if the same current of thought can be traced from William the Conqueror to Oliver the conqueror—a very little ingenuity would suffice to trace the same ideas, the same current of thought, somewhat farther still. But this reign of the puritanical army was really "the last glimpse of the godlike!