Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 354, April 1845

"Come! come! no more of this," pursued the other young soldier, with a cordiality of manner which Gerald had never before witnessed in his dark, stern aspect. "Let all be forgiven and forgotten. Come, pledge me in this one cup. These drinkings of toasts, as it is called, these pledgings over liquor are considered unseemly, and even ungodly by many; I know it well, but you cannot refuse to drink one cup with me, as earnest of our kindly feeling for the future."

For the first time Gerald now observed that Maywood bore under his arm a flagon of ale, and held in his left hand two cups of horn.

"I reject not your kindly feeling," answered Gerald; "but I am not wont to drink," – and he repelled the cup which Maywood now filled for him.

"Nay! nay!" said Mark, sitting down by the table on which Gerald leant. "You wrong me by refusing this first offer of reconciliation. Come, comrade, this one."

Gerald took the cup of ale unwillingly, and only raised it to his lips. But Maywood shook his head at him – and Gerald, in compliance with his newly made friend's request, at last swallowed the contents.

"I am not used to these strong drinks," said Gerald, setting down the horn with evident distaste. "I like them not; but I have done this to show my willingness to meet you on friendly ground."

Maywood raised, in turn, his cup, but at the same moment calling to a dog that had followed him into the room, he said, "Down, Roger, down," and stooped to repulse it; immediately afterwards he raised the horn, and seemed to drain the ale to the last drop.

"One more, and then I will not urge you again," said Mark to Gerald, eyeing him with a sharp, enquiring look.

"No, no, not one," replied the young man with disgust. "Already this unusual drink has confused my head. I am accustomed to water only – such was my uncle's mode of educating me. It is strange how my brain turns with this fermented liquor. I have done wrong to drink it," and Gerald rubbed his heavy forehead, and strained his eyes. His powers of vision became more and more confused, and it was with difficulty that he could now see before him the face of Maywood, which to his intellect, disordered by the liquor, seemed to wear a strange expression of cunning, and triumphant contempt. He made an effort, however, to shake off this feeling and raise his sinking head, but in vain. A sensation of overpowering drowsiness crept over him more and more. The thought of his watch, however, was still uppermost in his mind, and he had yet power sufficient to reflect that there was still some time to midnight, and that a little slumber might restore him; and giving way to the oppressive sleep which came over him, he laid his head on the table, and was immediately lost to all sense of what was passing around him.

At first Gerald's sleep was heavy and complete. How long it remained so, he had no power to tell. At length, however, it became lighter, and grew more troubled and confused. Wild dreams began to course each other through his brain – at first of an undefinable and fantastic nature – then they assumed a more definite shape. He dreamed of his father – that old, greyheaded cavalier, with his long white beard – and before him stood Lazarus Seaman, who accused him of absurd and imaginary crimes. And now they brought him into that open court – a file of soldiers were drawn up – their muskets were levelled at that old man's heart – Gerald struggled, and sought to spring between those deadly instruments and his doomed father, but his feet clove to the ground – he struggled in vain – the muskets were discharged, and his father fell weltering in his blood. With the last struggle of a convulsive nightmare, he started up, uttering a loud scream. It was but a frightful dream. And yet the noise of those fearful muskets – that discharge of artillery – still rang in his ears. As he opened his eyes, all was dark around him – the darkness of deep night. It was long before he could sufficiently recover his senses to remember what had passed; and when slowly the events of the day forced themselves upon his mind, his intellects seemed still confused and troubled. How strangely real now appeared the impression of that dream! It was with difficulty he could persuade himself that the firing had been imaginary; and even now there seemed a strange confusion of noise and voices around him; but that, surely, was the ringing in his head from the unusual draught he had taken.

Slowly his whole memory returned to him, and he recalled to himself that it was necessary for him to be ready to answer for Godlamb Gideon when that worthy's name was to be called over for the midnight watch. He staggered up unto his feet, and with difficulty found his way into the open air. As he gazed, with somewhat troubled brain, on the bright starlit sky, two or three soldiers hurried past them.

"Hark ye, comrade," he said to one, "how long is it yet to midnight?"

"Midnight! where have you been hiding yourself, comrade?" answered the man. "Midnight is long since past."

"Long since past!" screamed Gerald with frantic violence. "No! no! it is impossible – my post was at midnight in the tower court."

"Then you have escaped by wonderful interposition, friend, from the consequences of your absence; for I was there when the names were called, and 'present' was answered for the sentinel at the tower court."

"Father of mercy!" cried Gerald in despair. "What, then, has happened?"

"Happened!" echoed the soldier; "why, the prisoner has tried to escape! But didn't you hear the shots? They brought the old reprobate to the earth, of a surety."

Gerald uttered a loud groan and fell against the wall of the house; but in another moment he recovered himself by a desperate effort from a feeling of sickness and death, and repulsing violently the soldier who had come to his assistance, he rushed round the mansion with whirling brain and clenched teeth towards the tower court. His father had been killed – killed by his own folly. Rage, despair, contrition, self-horror, at having been so weak as to accept Maywood's proposal to drink that fatal drink which caused his deadly sleep, all tortured his heart, and drove him almost to madness. He could not doubt that it was that hated Maywood who had deceived him, drugged his liquour, cheated him into a sleep, in order to be present undisturbed at his rendezvous with Mildred; and now it was by his hand, by the hand of that villain, that his father had fallen.

All was commotion in the fortress. Gerald, as he rushed forward, heard the noise of voices and boats upon the water – the voice of Lazarus Seaman – now the men calling to each other. Horror-stricken, overwhelmed with despair, convulsed with rage, he bounded through the vaulted passage. In the moonlit court stood now but one figure alone – the sentinel, who was bending over the parapet, and seemed to be watching with interest the movement of the boats upon the water. With the rage of a tiger Gerald sprang upon him, and seized him by the collar with frenzied gripe. It was, indeed, Maywood – pale, agitated, and excited.

"Villain! traitor! assassin!" screamed Gerald madly, frantic with passion and despair, "you have betrayed that greyheaded old man; you have murdered him; but I will have revenge! He was my father, and it is you have killed him."

"Your father!" exclaimed the young sentinel in a voice choked by emotion. "He was mine, and I have saved him."

Gerald released his hold and staggered back.

For a moment the young men stared at each other in bewildered surprise. Then all at once the truth flashed across them.

"Brother! brother!" burst simultaneously from their lips. "Gerald! Everard!" they exclaimed again; and Everard Clynton, flinging himself into his brother's arms, gave way to his suppressed agitation, and burst into a flood of tears. At this moment a distant sound of a gun came across the water; Everard sprang up and grasped his brother's arm.

"Hush!" he said, "three shots from the sea are the signal to me that he has escaped in safety to the vessel that awaits him."

Another boomed faintly across the broad. A pause of fearful interest followed, and then another. Once more the brothers fell into each others' arms.

In a few words Everard Clynton explained to his brother, how, after his father's capture, he had enlisted in the troop quartered in the fortress, in order to save him. How he had known from their friends without the means provided to effect his father's escape; how he, too, had sought, with desperation, the midnight watch upon which depended his father's delivery; and, finding himself overcome by his supposed rival, he had administered to him a sleeping draught in order to secure the post; how his pretended admiration for Mistress Mildred had been assumed in order to forward his views and colour his designs, by giving a pretext to his desire to obtain the post of sentry in the court; how Mildred had never given him any encouragement, Gerald's unreasonable jealousy having supplied the rest.

He had assisted his father to escape, and only long after his flight had given the alarm, and fired upon the water, pretending to call for a sudden pursuit.

Mark Maywood, however, was tried by a court-martial for negligence upon duty on the night of the prisoner's escape; but the constantly exhibited violence of the Republican principles which he had affected, as well as his zeal and exemplary good conduct since he had joined the troop, saved him in the colonel's eyes. He was acquitted. Shortly afterwards he disappeared altogether from the fortress, after an affectionate farewell to Gerald Clynton, who had the good fortune to receive, in due time, the assurance of his brother's safe escape to join his father in Flanders.

Not long afterwards, the death of Colonel Lazarus Seaman leaving his daughter an orphan, Gerald Clynton married pretty little Mistress Mildred, and, quitting the service, retired to Lyle-Court, the estate bequeathed to him by his uncle.

There is no doubt that pretty little Mistress Mildred's eyes were given to be coquettish in spite of themselves; but yet, notwithstanding sundry little symptoms of jealousy exhibited by Gerald, there is every reason to believe that he was as absurd and misled in his jealousy after as he was before his marriage, and that she made him a most excellent wife.

During the more peaceful times of the Protectorate, Gerald received news from time to time of the welfare of his father and his brother; and, upon the Restoration, he had the happiness of welcoming them to the English shores once more.

Although Lord Clynton always preserved a predilection for his elder son, yet he had somehow found out that Gerald bore an extraordinary resemblance to his deceased mother, and always treated him with the utmost love. He never forgot, also, the deep affection Gerald had displayed in his efforts to save him during that never-to-be-forgotten Midnight Watch.

VESTIGES OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION

We should take but a limited view of science if we supposed, that the laws of nature of which it is cognizant have for their object the continuance only and preservation of the several parts of the universe; they provide also for change, improvement, development, progression. By these laws not only are the same phenomena, the same things, perpetually reproduced, but new phenomena, new arrangements, new objects are being successively developed. In short, we are able to perceive, to a certain extent, that not only the world is preserved and renewed, but grows and is created according to great general laws, which are indeed no other than the great ideas of the Divine Mind.

The modern science of geology has more especially led us to extend our view of science in this direction. The discovery of those mute records of past changes which lay buried in the earth, has induced us to investigate with awakened curiosity those changes which are actually taking place before us in the broad day, and in our own generation; and the result has been a conviction, that in the activity of nature there was a provision made, not only for restoration from decay, and a perpetual renewal of the individuals of each species, but for successive transformations in the surface of the globe, fitting it for successive forms of vegetable and animal life. The plant that lives, and sows its seed, and dies, has not only provided for its own progeny; under many circumstances it prepares the soil for successors of a superior rank of vegetation – "Pioneers of vegetation," as Dr Macculloch calls them, "the lichens, and other analogous plants, seek their place where no others could exist; demanding no water, requiring no soil, careless alike of cold and heat, of the sun and of the storm; rootless, leafless, flowerless; clothing the naked rock, and forming additional soil for their successors." The whole tribe of corals, whose lives are sufficiently brief and sufficiently simple, are yet not permitted to die away from the scene, and leave it, as so many of us do, just as they found it; they build up such a mausoleum of their bones – (for what used to be considered as the shell of the animal, is now pronounced to be a sort of bony nucleus or skeleton) – that large islands are formed, and a corresponding displacement of the sea is occasioned. The little creatures heave up the ocean on us. The river that to the poet's eye flows on for ever in the same channel, "giving a kiss," and kisses only, to every pebble and every sedge "it overtaketh in its pilgrimage," is detected to be secretly scraping, abrading, cutting out the earth like a knife, and washing it away into the sea. On the other hand, the earthquake and the volcano, which were looked on as paroxysms and agonies of nature, are transformed in our imagination into the constant ministers of beneficent change, and of creative purposes; and the momentary violence they commit, is to be excused on the plea of the great and permanent good they effect. For it is they who build the hills and the mountains, whence flow the streams of abundance upon the earth, and which, instead of being the gigantic, melancholy ruins Bishop Burnet took them to be, are the palaces and storehouses of nature, which it is given in charge to these sons of Vulcan to construct and to repair from the ravages which the soft rains of heaven incessantly commit upon them.

Astronomy, too, notwithstanding the severe discipline she has undergone, has in these later times resumed all the boldness of her youth, and brought her stores of science to the construction of the most splendid cosmogony that ever attracted the faith of the learned. She has girt her long robe around her, and entered the lists with, and far outstripped, whatever is boldest in the speculations of the youngest of the sciences. The nebular hypothesis, though not yet entitled, as we think, to be considered other than an hypothesis, has assumed a shape and consistency which forbids an entire rejection of it, which enforces our respect, and which, at all events, habituates the imagination to regard our planetary system as having probably been evolved, under the will of Providence, by the long operation of the established laws of matter.

It is quite a legitimate object of science, therefore, to view the laws of the physical world – whether they regard its mechanic movement, its chemistry, or its zoology – in their creative as well as reproductive functions; and it is the purpose of a work lately published, entitled "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation," and which has drawn to itself considerable attention, to collect and arrange whatever hints or fragments of knowledge science affords, enabling us to bring the successive phenomena of creation under the formula of general laws. In this purpose it is impossible to find a shadow of blame, and the work will probably answer one good end, that of directing the studies of scientific men into paths but little or timidly explored. But unfortunately, what the author has collected as the results of science, are, in some instances, little else than the wild guess-work of speculation. He has no scruple whatever in imitating those early geographers, who, disliking the blank spaces of undiscovered regions, were in the habit in their charts

"Of placing elephants instead of towns."

Indeed, his book is an assemblage of all that is most venturous and most fanciful in modern speculation, in which the most conspicuous place is allotted to a modification of Lamarck's theory on the development of animal life.

The charge of an atheistic tendency, as it is the heaviest which can be made against a work, so it is the last which ought to be hazarded without sufficient cause. In general, owing to the very sacredness of the subject, we feel disposed, in all suspicious cases, to pass over in silence both accusation and defence; and if in the present instance we depart, for a moment, from this line of conduct, it is only to give expression to a conviction – which we share, we believe, with all who have both the interest of science and the interest of theology at heart – that the fair efforts of the scientific enquirer should never be impeded by needless objections of a theological character. What we mean is this: though a suspicion may cross the mind, that a writer does not hold the religious tenets which we should desire to see every where advocated; yet if we are persuaded, at the same time, that this laxity of faith has no real logical connexion with the scientific results with which he is occupied, we ought not to inflict on them any portion of our suspicion or distrust. We shall always protest against confounding the legitimate attempts of science with the erroneous principles of certain schools of metaphysics, which may or may not be connected with them. If there is atheism in the world, we know whence it comes; we know well it is in a very different laboratory than that of the chemist that it has been distilled.

The unknown author before us, repeatedly protests against being numbered amongst atheistic philosophers; on our own part, we are thoroughly convinced that no formula of physical science could possibly interfere with a rational belief in the power and wisdom of God; what remains, then, but to treat his book purely in a scientific point of view?

To reduce to a system the acts of creation, or the development of the several forms of animal life, no more impeaches the authorship of creation, than to trace the laws by which the world is upheld and its phenomena perpetually renewed. The presumption naturally rises in the mind, that the same Great Being would adopt the same mode of action in both cases. If, for instance, the nebular hypothesis, to which we have already alluded, should be received as a scientific account of the proximate origin of our planetary system, this, as Mr Whewell has shown in his "Bridgewater Treatise," would serve only to enlighten and elevate our conception of the power of God. And indeed to a mind accustomed – as is every educated mind – to regard the operations of Deity as essentially differing from the limited, sudden, evanescent impulses of a human agent, it is distressing to be compelled to picture to itself the power of God as put forth in any other manner than in those slow, mysterious, universal laws, which have so plainly an eternity to work in; it pains the imagination to be obliged to assimilate those operations, for a moment, to the brief energy of a human will, or the manipulations of a human hand. Does not the language even of a Christian poet, when he speaks of God as launching from his ample palm the rolling planets into space, in some measure offend us? Do we not avoid as much as possible all such similitudes, as being derogatory to our notions of the Supreme?

There are still, indeed, some men of narrow prejudices who look upon every fresh attempt to reduce the phenomena of nature to general laws, and to limit those occasions on which it is necessary to conceive of a direct and separate interposition of divine power, as a fresh encroachment on the prerogatives of the Deity, or a concealed attack upon his very existence. And yet these very same men are daily appealing to such laws of the creation as have already been established, for their great proofs of the existence and the wisdom of God! Their imagination has remained utterly untutored by the little knowledge which they have rather learned to repeat than to apprehend. Whatever words they may utter, of subtle and high-sounding import, concerning the purely spiritual nature of the Divine Being, it is, in fact, a Jupiter Tonans clad in human lineaments, and invested with human passions, that their heart is yearning after. Such objectors as these can only be beaten back, and chained down, by what some one has called the brute force of public opinion.

Some little time ago men of this class deemed it irreligious to speak of the laws of the human mind; it savoured of necessity, of fatalism; they now applaud a Dr Chalmers when he writes his Bridgewater Treatise, to illustrate the attributes of God in the laws of the mental as well as the physical world.

No, there is nothing atheistic, nothing irreligious, in the attempt to conceive creation, as well as reproduction, carried on by universal laws. For what is the difference between individual isolated acts, and acts capable of being expressed in a general formula? This only, that in the second case the same act is repeated in constant sequence with other acts, and probably repeated in many places at the same time. The divine work is only multiplied. If the creation of a world should be proved to be as orderly and systematic as that of a plant, this may make worlds more common to the imagination, but it cannot make the power that creates them less marvellous.

But while we would reprove the narrowness of spirit that finds, in any of the discoveries of science, a source of disquietude for the interests of religion, we have here an observation to make of an opposite character, which we think of some importance, and which we shall again, in reviewing the theories of our author, have occasion to insist upon. It is undoubtedly true that there rises in the minds of every person at all tinctured with science, a presumption that every phenomenon we witness might be, if our knowledge enabled us, reduced under the expression of some general law; and that whatever changes are, or have been, produced in the world, might be traced to the interwoven operations of such laws. But however prevalent and justifiable such a presumption may be, we hold it no sound philosophy to give it so complete a preponderance as to debar the mind from contemplating the possibility of quite other and independent acts of divine power, the possibility of the abrupt introduction into our system of new facts, or series of facts, with their appropriate laws. The author before us, in his anxiety to explain, after a scientific manner, the introduction of life, and the various species of animals, into the globe, seems to have thought himself entitled to have recourse to the wildest hypothesis rather than to the immediate intervention of creative power; as if it were something altogether unphilosophical to suppose that there could be such a thing as a quite new development of that plastic energy. It is not even necessary that we should urge, that if a Creator exist, it is a most unwarrantable supposition to imagine that all his creative power has been exhausted. We say, even to an atheistic philosophy, that it is an unauthorized limitation that would forbid the mind to contemplate the possibility of the uprise, in time, of entirely new phenomena. Can any philosopher, of any school whatever, be justified in saying, that there shall be no new fact introduced into the universe? – that its laws cannot be added to? Why should he recoil from the introduction of any thing new? If he is one whose last formula stands thus, whatever is, is– this new fact will also fall, with others, into his formula. Of this, also, he can say, whatever is, is. There is, we repeat, a strong presumption in favour of a scientific sequence, of an unbroken order of events; but this presumption is not to authorize any hypothesis whatever in order to escape from the other alternative, an immediate intervention of creative power. This, also, is a probability which philosophy recognises, and in which a rational mind may choose to rest till science brings to him some definite result.

We are very far from intending to follow the author of the Vestiges of the Natural History of the Creation through all the sciences along which his track has led him. We shall limit ourselves to what forms the most peculiar and startling portion of his work – to his theory of the origin and development of animal life.

But for the discoveries of geology a certain philosophy might have been content to say of the animal creation, that it was the law of nature that life should beget life – that reproduction, like nutrition, to which it has been assimilated, is a part of the definition of life – and that, as to a commencement of the various tribes of animals, we are no more bound to look for this than for the commencement of any other of the phenomena of nature. From the researches, however, of geology, it is evident that there was a time when this earth revolved around the sun a barren and untenanted globe – that there was a time when life did make its first appearance, and that in different epochs of the world's existence there have flourished very different species of animals than those which now inhabit it. Here, at all events, the imagination cannot gain that imperfect repose which it finds in the contemplation of an eternal series. It is a plain historical fact, that life had a beginning on this earth, and that from time to time new forms of life, new species of vegetables and animals, have been introduced upon the scene. Here are two great facts to be accounted for, or to be left standing out, unconnected in their origin with that interlinked series of events which creation elsewhere displays. Life reproduces life, the plant its seed, the animal its young, each after its kind, such is the law; but this law itself, when was it promulgated, or when and how did it come into force and operation?

For ourselves, in the present imperfect condition of our knowledge, we are satisfied with referring life, in all its countless forms, at once to the interposing will of the Creator. We listen, however, with curiosity and attention to any theory which the naturalist or physiologist may have to propose, so he proceed in the fair road of induction. There is nothing in the laws of life which forbids, but much, on the contrary, which invites, to the same pains-taking examination which has been bestowed, with more or less success, on other phenomena of nature.