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We see how, behind convent disputes and the obstinacy of nuns, we recover one of the great provinces of human psychology; how fifty or more characters, rendered invisible through the uniformity of a narration careful of the proprieties, came forth in full daylight, each standing out clear in its countless diversities; how, underneath theological dissertations and monotonous sermons, we discern the throbbings of ever-breathing hearts, the excitements and depressions of the religious life, the unforeseen reaction and pell-mell stir of natural feeling, the infiltrations of surrounding society, the intermittent triumphs of grace, presenting so many shades of difference that the fullest description and most flexible style can scarcely garner in the vast harvest which the critic has caused to germinate in this abandoned field.
Intermingled with dissertations on abstract causes and the hidden forces of Nature are to be found descriptions of taps and pumps and syphons, and of the water-screw of Archimedes, the re-invention of which caused poor Galeazzo Rosso, Fazio's blacksmith friend, to go mad for joy. There are diagrams of furnaces, of machinery for raising sunken ships, and of the common steelyard.
They not only murmured at the grievances of the nation, but composed and published elaborate dissertations upon the same subject.
He it is Who hath caused the Rock to shout, and the Burning Bush to lift up its voice, upon the Mount rising above the Holy Land, and proclaim: “The Kingdom is God’s, the sovereign Lord of all, the All-Powerful, the Loving!” We have not entered any school, nor read any of your dissertations.
Conscious from the very beginning of His twofold mission, as the Bearer of a wholly independent Revelation and the Herald of One still greater than His own, He could not content Himself with the vast number of commentaries, of prayers, of laws and ordinances, of dissertations and epistles, of homilies and orations that had incessantly streamed from His pen.
Among his writings are Ancient Law , Village Communities , Early History of Institutions , and Dissertations on Early Law and Customs . Historian, studied at Camb. and Paris, was the teacher of John Knox and George Buchanan. In 1506 he was a Doctor of the Sorbonne, and in 1519 became Prof. of Divinity at St. Andrews.
Now I am not going to weary you with mere dissertations upon the significance of these words. But let me single out two points about them, which perhaps though they may be perfectly familiar to you, may come to you with fresh force from my lips now. Mark, first, whom it is that we are to believe on.
And the peculiar doctrines which marked Calvin and his disciples were those deduced from the majesty of God and the comparative littleness of man, leading to and bound up with the impotence of the will, human dependence, the necessity of Divine grace, Augustinian in spirit, but going beyond Augustine in the subtlety of metaphysical distinctions and dissertations on free-will election, and predestination, unfathomable, but exceedingly attractive subjects to the divines of the seventeenth century, creating a metaphysical divinity, a theology of the brain rather than of the heart, a brilliant series of logical and metaphysical deductions from established truths, demanding to be received with the same unhesitating obedience as the truths, or Bible declarations, from which they are deduced.
The ancient and perpetually changing distribution of nations in Scythia or Tartary, in its most extended sense, almost elude research, and would require lengthened dissertations instead of illustrative notes. From the subsequent travels of Rubruquis, it will appear, that this ceremony was in honour of the Tartar messengers going from Baatu to the emperor, not from respect to the papal envoys.
To "make men better" by choice dissertations about Utopias, to sit in marble halls and have a fair and fondly ardent jeunesse doree reclining about your knees while you discourse, in rounded periods, concerning the salvation of their souls by means of transcendental Love it would suit me well enough, at this present moment; far better than croaking, forlorn as the night-raven, among the ruins of their radiant lives.
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