Thought and attention are very different things. I never expected the former, (viz., _selbst-thätige Erzeugung dessen, wovon meine Rede war_) from the readers of _The Friend_. I did expect the latter, and was disappointed. Jan. 3, 1810.
This is a most important distinction, and in the new light afforded by it to my mind, I see more plainly why mathematics cannot be a substitute for logic, much less for metaphysics, that is, transcendental logic, and why, therefore, Cambridge has produced so few men of genius and original power since the time of Newton. Not only it does not call forth the balancing and discriminating power [_that_ I saw long ago] but it requires only _attention,_ not _thought_ or self-production.
"The man who squares his conscience by the law" was, formerly, a phrase for a prudent villain, an unprincipled coward. At present the law takes in everything--the things most incongruous with its nature, as the moral motive, and even the feelings of sensibility resulting from accidents of cultivation, novel-reading for instance. If, therefore, _at all_ times, the law would be found to have a much greater influence on the actions of men than men generally suppose, or the agents were themselves conscious of, this influence we must expect to find augmented at the present time in proportion to the encroachments of the law on religion, the moral sense, and the sympathies engendered by artificial rank. Examine this and begin, for instance, with reviews, and so on through the common legal immoralities of life, in the pursuits and pleasures of the higher half of the middle classes of society in Great Britain.
"Hence (_i.e._, from servile and thrall-like fear) men came to scan the Scriptures by the letter and in the covenant of our redemption magnified the external signs more than the quickening power of the Spirit."--MILTON'S _Review of Church Government_, vol. i. p. 2.
It were not an unpleasing fancy, nor one wholly unworthy of a serious and charitable Christianity, to derive a shadow of hope for the conversion and purification of the Roman Apostasy from the conduct and character of St. Peter as shadowing out the history of the Latin Church, whose ruling pastor calls himself the successor of that saint. Thus, by proud _humility_, he hazarded the loss of his heavenly portion in objecting to Christ's taking upon himself a lowly office and character of a servant (hence the pomps and vanities with which Rome has tricked out her bishops, &c.), the eager drawing of the fleshly sword in defence of Christ; the denying of Christ at the cross (in the apostasy); but, finally, his bitter repentance at the third crowing of the cock (perhaps Wickliffe and Huss the first, Luther the second, and the third yet to come-or, perhaps Wickliffe and Luther the first, the second may be the present state of humiliation, and the third yet to come). After this her eyes will be opened to the heavenly vision of the universal acceptance of Christ of all good men of all sects, that is, that faith is a moral, not an intellectual act.