In whatever age and country it is the prevailing mind and character of
the nation to regard the present life as subordinate to a life to
come, and to mark the present state, _the World of their Senses_, by
signs, instruments, and mementos of its connexion with a future state
and a spiritual world;--where the Mysteries of Faith are brought
within the _hold_ of the people at large, not by being explained away
in the vain hope of accommodating them to the average of their
understanding, but by being made the objects of love by their
combination with events and epochs of history, with national
traditions, with the monuments and dedications of ancestral faith and
zeal, with memorial and symbolical observances, with the realizing
influences of social devotion, and above all, by early and habitual
association with Acts of the Will, _there_ Religion is. _There_,
however obscured by the hay and straw of human Will-work, the
foundation is safe. In _that_ country, and under the predominance of
such maxims the National Church is no mere State-_Institute_. It is
the State itself in its intensest federal union; yet at the same
moment the Guardian and Representative of all personal Individuality.
For the Church is the Shrine of Morality; and in Morality alone the
citizen asserts and reclaims his personal independence, his
_integrity_. Our outward acts are efficient, and most often possible,
only by coalition. As an efficient power, the agent, is but _a
fraction_ of unity: he becomes an _integer_ only in the recognition
and performance of the Moral Law. Nevertheless it is most true (and a
truth which cannot with safety be overlooked) that morality _as_
morality, has no existence for _a people_. It is either absorbed and
lost in the quicksands of prudential _calculus_, or it is taken up and
transfigured into the duties and mysteries of religion. And no wonder:
since morality (including the _personal_ being, the I AM, as its
subject) is itself a mystery, and the ground and _suppositum_ of all
other mysteries, relatively to man.