[Sidenote: FLOWERS AND LIGHT April 18, 1826]
Spring flowers, I have observed, look best in the day, and by sunshine: but summer and autumnal flower-pots by lamp or candle-light. I have now before me a flower-pot of cherry-blossoms, polyanthuses, double violets, periwinkles, wall-flowers, but how dim and dusky they look! The scarlet anemone is an exception, and three or four of them with all the rest of the flower-glass sprays of white blossoms, and one or two periwinkles for the sake of the dark green leaves, green stems, and flexible elegant form, make a lovely group both by sun and by candle-light.
[Sidenote: THE BREATH OF SPRING Feb. 28, 1827]
What an interval! Heard the singing birds this morning in our garden for the first time this year, though it rained and blew fiercely; but the long frost has broken up, and the wind, though fierce, was warm and westerly.
To the right understanding of the most awfully _concerning_ declaration of Holy Writ there has been no greater obstacle than the want of insight into the nature of Life--what it is and what it is not. But in order to this, the mind must have been raised to the contemplation of the _Idea_--the life celestial, to wit--or the distinctive essence and character of the Holy Spirit. Here Life is _Love_--communicative, outpouring love. _Ergo_, the terrestrial or the Life of Nature ever the shadow and opposite of the Divine is appropriative, absorbing _appetence_. But the great mistake is, that the soul cannot continue without life; for, if so, with what propriety can the portion of the reprobate soul be called Death? What if the natural life have two possible terminations--true Being and the falling back into the dark Will?
The painter-parson, Rev. Mr. Judkin, is about to show off a Romish priest converted to the Protestant belief, on Sunday next at his church, and asked of me (this day, at Mr. Gray's, Friday, 27th July, 1827) whether I knew of any form of recantation but that of Archbishop Tenison. I knew nothing of Tenison's or any other, but expressed my opinion that no other recantation ought to be required than a declaration that he admitted no outward authority superior to, or co-ordinate with, the canonical Scriptures, and no interpreter that superseded or stood in the place of the Holy Spirit, enlightening the mind of each true believer, according to his individual needs. I can conceive a person holding all the articles that distinguish the Romish from the Protestant conception, with this one exception; and, yet, if he did make this exception, and professed to believe them, because he thought they were contained in, or to be fairly inferred from, right reason and the Scriptures, I should consider him as true a Protestant as Luther, Knox, or Calvin, and a far better than Laud and his compeers, however meanly I might think of him as a philosopher and theologian. The laying so great a stress on transubstantiation I have long regarded as the great calamity or error of the Reformation--if not constrained by circumstances, the great _error_--or, if constrained, the great _calamity_.