There is a difference between one and another hour of life in their
authority and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in moments; our vice
is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which
constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other
experiences. For this reason the argument which is always forthcoming
to silence those who conceive extraordinary hopes of man, namely the
appeal to experience, is for ever invalid and vain. We give up the past
to the objector, and yet we hope. He must explain this hope. We grant
that human life is mean, but how did we find out that it was mean? What
is the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent? What
is the universal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine innuendo by
which the soul makes its enormous claim? Why do men feel that the
natural history of man has never been written, but he is always leaving
behind what you have said of him, and it becomes old, and books of
metaphysics worthless? The philosophy of six thousand years has not
searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its experiments
there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could
not resolve. Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is
descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator
has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next
moment. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin
for events than the will I call mine.
As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that flowing
river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams
into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised
spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up and put
myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the
visions come.
The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the
only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we
rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity,
that Over-soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained
and made one with all other; that common heart of which all sincere
conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission;
that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and
constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his
character and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass
into our thought and hand and become wisdom and virtue and power and
beauty. We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles.
Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the
universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related;
the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose
beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and
perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the
seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the
world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but
the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. Only by
the vision of that Wisdom can the horoscope of the ages be read, and by
falling back on our better thoughts, by yielding to the spirit of
prophecy which is innate in every man, we can know what it saith. Every
man’s words who speaks from that life must sound vain to those who do
not dwell in the same thought on their own part. I dare not speak for
it. My words do not carry its august sense; they fall short and cold.
Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold! their speech shall be
lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the rising of the wind. Yet I
desire, even by profane words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate the
heaven of this deity and to report what hints I have collected of the
transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest Law.
If we consider what happens in conversation, in reveries, in remorse,
in times of passion, in surprises, in the instructions of dreams,
wherein often we see ourselves in masquerade,—the droll disguises only
magnifying and enhancing a real element and forcing it on our distinct
notice,—we shall catch many hints that will broaden and lighten into
knowledge of the secret of nature. All goes to show that the soul in
man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not
a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison,
but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not
the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the
will; is the background of our being, in which they lie,—an immensity
not possessed and that cannot be possessed. From within or from behind,
a light shines through us upon things and makes us aware that we are
nothing, but the light is all. A man is the facade of a temple wherein
all wisdom and all good abide. What we commonly call man, the eating,
drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent
himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the
soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action,
would make our knees bend. When it breathes through his intellect, it
is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it
flows through his affection, it is love. And the blindness of the
intellect begins when it would be something of itself. The weakness of
the will begins when the individual would be something of himself. All
reform aims in some one particular to let the soul have its way through
us; in other words, to engage us to obey.
Of this pure nature every man is at some time sensible. Language cannot
paint it with his colors. It is too subtile. It is undefinable,
unmeasurable; but we know that it pervades and contains us. We know
that all spiritual being is in man. A wise old proverb says, “God comes
to see us without bell;” that is, as there is no screen or ceiling
between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall
in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins.
The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of
spiritual nature, to the attributes of God. Justice we see and know,
Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no man ever got above, but they
tower over us, and most in the moment when our interests tempt us to
wound them.
The sovereignty of this nature whereof we speak is made known by its
independency of those limitations which circumscribe us on every hand.
The soul circumscribes all things. As I have said, it contradicts all
experience. In like manner it abolishes time and space. The influence
of the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to that degree that
the walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable;
and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the sign of
insanity. Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of
the soul. The spirit sports with time,—
“Can crowd eternity into an hour,
Or stretch an hour to eternity.”
We are often made to feel that there is another youth and age than that
which is measured from the year of our natural birth. Some thoughts
always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the
universal and eternal beauty. Every man parts from that contemplation
with the feeling that it rather belongs to ages than to mortal life.
The least activity of the intellectual powers redeems us in a degree
from the conditions of time. In sickness, in languor, give us a strain
of poetry or a profound sentence, and we are refreshed; or produce a
volume of Plato or Shakspeare, or remind us of their names, and
instantly we come into a feeling of longevity. See how the deep divine
thought reduces centuries and millenniums and makes itself present
through all ages. Is the teaching of Christ less effective now than it
was when first his mouth was opened? The emphasis of facts and persons
in my thought has nothing to do with time. And so always the soul’s
scale is one, the scale of the senses and the understanding is another.
Before the revelations of the soul, Time, Space and Nature shrink away.
In common speech we refer all things to time, as we habitually refer
the immensely sundered stars to one concave sphere. And so we say that
the Judgment is distant or near, that the Millennium approaches, that a
day of certain political, moral, social reforms is at hand, and the
like, when we mean that in the nature of things one of the facts we
contemplate is external and fugitive, and the other is permanent and
connate with the soul. The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by
one, detach themselves like ripe fruit from our experience, and fall.
The wind shall blow them none knows whither. The landscape, the
figures, Boston, London, are facts as fugitive as any institution past,
or any whiff of mist or smoke, and so is society, and so is the world.
The soul looketh steadily forwards, creating a world before her,
leaving worlds behind her. She has no dates, nor rites, nor persons,
nor specialties nor men. The soul knows only the soul; the web of
events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed.
After its own law and not by arithmetic is the rate of its progress to
be computed. The soul’s advances are not made by gradation, such as can
be represented by motion in a straight line, but rather by ascension of
state, such as can be represented by metamorphosis,—from the egg to the
worm, from the worm to the fly. The growths of genius are of a certain
_total_ character, that does not advance the elect individual first
over John, then Adam, then Richard, and give to each the pain of
discovered inferiority,—but by every throe of growth the man expands
there where he works, passing, at each pulsation, classes, populations,
of men. With each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the
visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspires and
expires its air. It converses with truths that have always been spoken
in the world, and becomes conscious of a closer sympathy with Zeno and
Arrian than with persons in the house.
This is the law of moral and of mental gain. The simple rise as by
specific levity not into a particular virtue, but into the region of
all the virtues. They are in the spirit which contains them all. The
soul requires purity, but purity is not it; requires justice, but
justice is not that; requires beneficence, but is somewhat better; so
that there is a kind of descent and accommodation felt when we leave
speaking of moral nature to urge a virtue which it enjoins. To the
well-born child all the virtues are natural, and not painfully
acquired. Speak to his heart, and the man becomes suddenly virtuous.
Within the same sentiment is the germ of intellectual growth, which
obeys the same law. Those who are capable of humility, of justice, of
love, of aspiration, stand already on a platform that commands the
sciences and arts, speech and poetry, action and grace. For whoso
dwells in this moral beatitude already anticipates those special powers
which men prize so highly. The lover has no talent, no skill, which
passes for quite nothing with his enamoured maiden, however little she
may possess of related faculty; and the heart which abandons itself to
the Supreme Mind finds itself related to all its works, and will travel
a royal road to particular knowledges and powers. In ascending to this
primary and aboriginal sentiment we have come from our remote station
on the circumference instantaneously to the centre of the world, where,
as in the closet of God, we see causes, and anticipate the universe,
which is but a slow effect.
One mode of the divine teaching is the incarnation of the spirit in a
form,—in forms, like my own. I live in society, with persons who answer
to thoughts in my own mind, or express a certain obedience to the great
instincts to which I live. I see its presence to them. I am certified
of a common nature; and these other souls, these separated selves, draw
me as nothing else can. They stir in me the new emotions we call
passion; of love, hatred, fear, admiration, pity; thence come
conversation, competition, persuasion, cities and war. Persons are
supplementary to the primary teaching of the soul. In youth we are mad
for persons. Childhood and youth see all the world in them. But the
larger experience of man discovers the identical nature appearing
through them all. Persons themselves acquaint us with the impersonal.
In all conversation between two persons tacit reference is made, as to
a third party, to a common nature. That third party or common nature is
not social; it is impersonal; is God. And so in groups where debate is
earnest, and especially on high questions, the company become aware
that the thought rises to an equal level in all bosoms, that all have a
spiritual property in what was said, as well as the sayer. They all
become wiser than they were. It arches over them like a temple, this
unity of thought in which every heart beats with nobler sense of power
and duty, and thinks and acts with unusual solemnity. All are conscious
of attaining to a higher self-possession. It shines for all. There is a
certain wisdom of humanity which is common to the greatest men with the
lowest, and which our ordinary education often labors to silence and
obstruct. The mind is one, and the best minds, who love truth for its
own sake, think much less of property in truth. They accept it
thankfully everywhere, and do not label or stamp it with any man’s
name, for it is theirs long beforehand, and from eternity. The learned
and the studious of thought have no monopoly of wisdom. Their violence
of direction in some degree disqualifies them to think truly. We owe
many valuable observations to people who are not very acute or
profound, and who say the thing without effort which we want and have
long been hunting in vain. The action of the soul is oftener in that
which is felt and left unsaid than in that which is said in any
conversation. It broods over every society, and they unconsciously seek
for it in each other. We know better than we do. We do not yet possess
ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more. I feel
the same truth how often in my trivial conversation with my neighbors,
that somewhat higher in each of us overlooks this by-play, and Jove
nods to Jove from behind each of us.
Men descend to meet. In their habitual and mean service to the world,
for which they forsake their native nobleness, they resemble those
Arabian sheiks who dwell in mean houses and affect an external poverty,
to escape the rapacity of the Pacha, and reserve all their display of
wealth for their interior and guarded retirements.
As it is present in all persons, so it is in every period of life. It
is adult already in the infant man. In my dealing with my child, my
Latin and Greek, my accomplishments and my money stead me nothing; but
as much soul as I have avails. If I am wilful, he sets his will against
mine, one for one, and leaves me, if I please, the degradation of
beating him by my superiority of strength. But if I renounce my will
and act for the soul, setting that up as umpire between us two, out of
his young eyes looks the same soul; he reveres and loves with me.
The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we
see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose. Foolish people
ask you, when you have spoken what they do not wish to hear, ‘How do
you know it is truth, and not an error of your own?’ We know truth when
we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are
awake. It was a grand sentence of Emanuel Swedenborg, which would alone
indicate the greatness of that man’s perception,—“It is no proof of a
man’s understanding to be able to confirm whatever he pleases; but to
be able to discern that what is true is true, and that what is false is
false,—this is the mark and character of intelligence.” In the book I
read, the good thought returns to me, as every truth will, the image of
the whole soul. To the bad thought which I find in it, the same soul
becomes a discerning, separating sword, and lops it away. We are wiser
than we know. If we will not interfere with our thought, but will act
entirely, or see how the thing stands in God, we know the particular
thing, and every thing, and every man. For the Maker of all things and
all persons stands behind us and casts his dread omniscience through us
over things.
But beyond this recognition of its own in particular passages of the
individual’s experience, it also reveals truth. And here we should seek
to reinforce ourselves by its very presence, and to speak with a
worthier, loftier strain of that advent. For the soul’s communication
of truth is the highest event in nature, since it then does not give
somewhat from itself, but it gives itself, or passes into and becomes
that man whom it enlightens; or, in proportion to that truth he
receives, it takes him to itself.
We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its
own nature, by the term _Revelation_. These are always attended by the
emotion of the sublime. For this communication is an influx of the
Divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet
before the flowing surges of the sea of life. Every distinct
apprehension of this central commandment agitates men with awe and
delight. A thrill passes through all men at the reception of new truth,
or at the performance of a great action, which comes out of the heart
of nature. In these communications the power to see is not separated
from the will to do, but the insight proceeds from obedience, and the
obedience proceeds from a joyful perception. Every moment when the
individual feels himself invaded by it is memorable. By the necessity
of our constitution a certain enthusiasm attends the individual’s
consciousness of that divine presence. The character and duration of
this enthusiasm varies with the state of the individual, from an
ecstasy and trance and prophetic inspiration,—which is its rarer
appearance,—to the faintest glow of virtuous emotion, in which form it
warms, like our household fires, all the families and associations of
men, and makes society possible. A certain tendency to insanity has
always attended the opening of the religious sense in men, as if they
had been “blasted with excess of light.” The trances of Socrates, the
“union” of Plotinus, the vision of Porphyry, the conversion of Paul,
the aurora of Behmen, the convulsions of George Fox and his Quakers,
the illumination of Swedenborg, are of this kind. What was in the case
of these remarkable persons a ravishment, has, in innumerable instances
in common life, been exhibited in less striking manner. Everywhere the
history of religion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm. The rapture of
the Moravian and Quietist; the opening of the internal sense of the
Word, in the language of the New Jerusalem Church; the _revival_ of the
Calvinistic churches; the _experiences_ of the Methodists, are varying
forms of that shudder of awe and delight with which the individual soul
always mingles with the universal soul.
The nature of these revelations is the same; they are perceptions of
the absolute law. They are solutions of the soul’s own questions. They
do not answer the questions which the understanding asks. The soul
answers never by words, but by the thing itself that is inquired after.
Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The popular notion of a
revelation is that it is a telling of fortunes. In past oracles of the
soul the understanding seeks to find answers to sensual questions, and
undertakes to tell from God how long men shall exist, what their hands
shall do and who shall be their company, adding names and dates and
places. But we must pick no locks. We must check this low curiosity. An
answer in words is delusive; it is really no answer to the questions
you ask. Do not require a description of the countries towards which
you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and to-morrow
you arrive there and know them by inhabiting them. Men ask concerning
the immortality of the soul, the employments of heaven, the state of
the sinner, and so forth. They even dream that Jesus has left replies
to precisely these interrogatories. Never a moment did that sublime
spirit speak in their _patois_. To truth, justice, love, the attributes
of the soul, the idea of immutableness is essentially associated.
Jesus, living in these moral sentiments, heedless of sensual fortunes,
heeding only the manifestations of these, never made the separation of
the idea of duration from the essence of these attributes, nor uttered
a syllable concerning the duration of the soul. It was left to his
disciples to sever duration from the moral elements, and to teach the
immortality of the soul as a doctrine, and maintain it by evidences.
The moment the doctrine of the immortality is separately taught, man is
already fallen. In the flowing of love, in the adoration of humility,
there is no question of continuance. No inspired man ever asks this
question or condescends to these evidences. For the soul is true to
itself, and the man in whom it is shed abroad cannot wander from the
present, which is infinite, to a future which would be finite.
These questions which we lust to ask about the future are a confession
of sin. God has no answer for them. No answer in words can reply to a
question of things. It is not in an arbitrary “decree of God,” but in
the nature of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow;
for the soul will not have us read any other cipher than that of cause
and effect. By this veil which curtains events it instructs the
children of men to live in to-day. The only mode of obtaining an answer
to these questions of the senses is to forego all low curiosity, and,
accepting the tide of being which floats us into the secret of nature,
work and live, work and live, and all unawares the advancing soul has
built and forged for itself a new condition, and the question and the
answer are one.
By the same fire, vital, consecrating, celestial, which burns until it
shall dissolve all things into the waves and surges of an ocean of
light, we see and know each other, and what spirit each is of. Who can
tell the grounds of his knowledge of the character of the several
individuals in his circle of friends? No man. Yet their acts and words
do not disappoint him. In that man, though he knew no ill of him, he
put no trust. In that other, though they had seldom met, authentic
signs had yet passed, to signify that he might be trusted as one who
had an interest in his own character. We know each other very
well,—which of us has been just to himself and whether that which we
teach or behold is only an aspiration or is our honest effort also.
We are all discerners of spirits. That diagnosis lies aloft in our life
or unconscious power. The intercourse of society, its trade, its
religion, its friendships, its quarrels, is one wide, judicial
investigation of character. In full court, or in small committee, or
confronted face to face, accuser and accused, men offer themselves to
be judged. Against their will they exhibit those decisive trifles by
which character is read. But who judges? and what? Not our
understanding. We do not read them by learning or craft. No; the wisdom
of the wise man consists herein, that he does not judge them; he lets
them judge themselves and merely reads and records their own verdict.
By virtue of this inevitable nature, private will is overpowered, and,
maugre our efforts or our imperfections, your genius will speak from
you, and mine from me. That which we are, we shall teach, not
voluntarily but involuntarily. Thoughts come into our minds by avenues
which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through
avenues which we never voluntarily opened. Character teaches over our
head. The infallible index of true progress is found in the tone the
man takes. Neither his age, nor his breeding, nor company, nor books,
nor actions, nor talents, nor all together can hinder him from being
deferential to a higher spirit than his own. If he have not found his
home in God, his manners, his forms of speech, the turn of his
sentences, the build, shall I say, of all his opinions will
involuntarily confess it, let him brave it out how he will. If he have
found his centre, the Deity will shine through him, through all the
disguises of ignorance, of ungenial temperament, of unfavorable
circumstance. The tone of seeking is one, and the tone of having is
another.
The great distinction between teachers sacred or literary,—between
poets like Herbert, and poets like Pope,—between philosophers like
Spinoza, Kant and Coleridge, and philosophers like Locke, Paley,
Mackintosh and Stewart,—between men of the world who are reckoned
accomplished talkers, and here and there a fervent mystic, prophesying
half insane under the infinitude of his thought,—is that one class
speak _from within_, or from experience, as parties and possessors of
the fact; and the other class _from without_, as spectators merely, or
perhaps as acquainted with the fact on the evidence of third persons.
It is of no use to preach to me from without. I can do that too easily
myself. Jesus speaks always from within, and in a degree that
transcends all others. In that is the miracle. I believe beforehand
that it ought so to be. All men stand continually in the expectation of
the appearance of such a teacher. But if a man do not speak from within
the veil, where the word is one with that it tells of, let him lowly
confess it.
The same Omniscience flows into the intellect, and makes what we call
genius. Much of the wisdom of the world is not wisdom, and the most
illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to literary fame, and
are not writers. Among the multitude of scholars and authors, we feel
no hallowing presence; we are sensible of a knack and skill rather than
of inspiration; they have a light and know not whence it comes and call
it their own; their talent is some exaggerated faculty, some overgrown
member, so that their strength is a disease. In these instances the
intellectual gifts do not make the impression of virtue, but almost of
vice; and we feel that a man’s talents stand in the way of his
advancement in truth. But genius is religious. It is a larger imbibing
of the common heart. It is not anomalous, but more like and not less
like other men. There is in all great poets a wisdom of humanity which
is superior to any talents they exercise. The author, the wit, the
partisan, the fine gentleman, does not take place of the man. Humanity
shines in Homer, in Chaucer, in Spenser, in Shakspeare, in Milton. They
are content with truth. They use the positive degree. They seem frigid
and phlegmatic to those who have been spiced with the frantic passion
and violent coloring of inferior but popular writers. For they are
poets by the free course which they allow to the informing soul, which
through their eyes beholds again and blesses the things which it hath
made. The soul is superior to its knowledge, wiser than any of its
works. The great poet makes us feel our own wealth, and then we think
less of his compositions. His best communication to our mind is to
teach us to despise all he has done. Shakspeare carries us to such a
lofty strain of intelligent activity as to suggest a wealth which
beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has
created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent
poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a
passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in
Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day for ever.
Why then should I make account of Hamlet and Lear, as if we had not the
soul from which they fell as syllables from the tongue?
This energy does not descend into individual life on any other
condition than entire possession. It comes to the lowly and simple; it
comes to whomsoever will put off what is foreign and proud; it comes as
insight; it comes as serenity and grandeur. When we see those whom it
inhabits, we are apprised of new degrees of greatness. From that
inspiration the man comes back with a changed tone. He does not talk
with men with an eye to their opinion. He tries them. It requires of us
to be plain and true. The vain traveller attempts to embellish his life
by quoting my lord and the prince and the countess, who thus said or
did to _him_. The ambitious vulgar show you their spoons and brooches
and rings, and preserve their cards and compliments. The more
cultivated, in their account of their own experience, cull out the
pleasing, poetic circumstance,—the visit to Rome, the man of genius
they saw, the brilliant friend They know; still further on perhaps the
gorgeous landscape, the mountain lights, the mountain thoughts they
enjoyed yesterday,—and so seek to throw a romantic color over their
life. But the soul that ascends to worship the great God is plain and
true; has no rose-color, no fine friends, no chivalry, no adventures;
does not want admiration; dwells in the hour that now is, in the
earnest experience of the common day,—by reason of the present moment
and the mere trifle having become porous to thought and bibulous of the
sea of light.
Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like
word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to be written, yet
are they so cheap and so things of course, that in the infinite riches
of the soul it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or
bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole
atmosphere are ours. Nothing can pass there, or make you one of the
circle, but the casting aside your trappings, and dealing man to man in
naked truth, plain confession, and omniscient affirmation.
Souls such as these treat you as gods would, walk as gods in the earth,
accepting without any admiration your wit, your bounty, your virtue
even,—say rather your act of duty, for your virtue they own as their
proper blood, royal as themselves, and over-royal, and the father of
the gods. But what rebuke their plain fraternal bearing casts on the
mutual flattery with which authors solace each other and wound
themselves! These flatter not. I do not wonder that these men go to see
Cromwell and Christina and Charles the Second and James the First and
the Grand Turk. For they are, in their own elevation, the fellows of
kings, and must feel the servile tone of conversation in the world.
They must always be a godsend to princes, for they confront them, a
king to a king, without ducking or concession, and give a high nature
the refreshment and satisfaction of resistance, of plain humanity, of
even companionship and of new ideas. They leave them wiser and superior
men. Souls like these make us feel that sincerity is more excellent
than flattery. Deal so plainly with man and woman as to constrain the
utmost sincerity and destroy all hope of trifling with you. It is the
highest compliment you can pay. Their “highest praising,” said Milton,
“is not flattery, and their plainest advice is a kind of praising.”
Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The
simplest person who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet for
ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and
unsearchable. It inspires awe and astonishment. How dear, how soothing
to man, arises the idea of God, peopling the lonely place, effacing the
scars of our mistakes and disappointments! When we have broken our god
of tradition and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the
heart with his presence. It is the doubling of the heart itself, nay,
the infinite enlargement of the heart with a power of growth to a new
infinity on every side. It inspires in man an infallible trust. He has
not the conviction, but the sight, that the best is the true, and may
in that thought easily dismiss all particular uncertainties and fears,
and adjourn to the sure revelation of time the solution of his private
riddles. He is sure that his welfare is dear to the heart of being. In
the presence of law to his mind he is overflowed with a reliance so
universal that it sweeps away all cherished hopes and the most stable
projects of mortal condition in its flood. He believes that he cannot
escape from his good. The things that are really for thee gravitate to
thee. You are running to seek your friend. Let your feet run, but your
mind need not. If you do not find him, will you not acquiesce that it
is best you should not find him? for there is a power, which, as it is
in you, is in him also, and could therefore very well bring you
together, if it were for the best. You are preparing with eagerness to
go and render a service to which your talent and your taste invite you,
the love of men and the hope of fame. Has it not occurred to you that
you have no right to go, unless you are equally willing to be prevented
from going? O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken
over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on
thine ear! Every proverb, every book, every byword that belongs to thee
for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open or winding
passages. Every friend whom not thy fantastic will but the great and
tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And this
because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall,
not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls
uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men, as the water of
the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.
Let man then learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to his
heart; this, namely; that the Highest dwells with him; that the sources
of nature are in his own mind, if the sentiment of duty is there. But
if he would know what the great God speaketh, he must ‘go into his
closet and shut the door,’ as Jesus said. God will not make himself
manifest to cowards. He must greatly listen to himself, withdrawing
himself from all the accents of other men’s devotion. Even their
prayers are hurtful to him, until he have made his own. Our religion
vulgarly stands on numbers of believers. Whenever the appeal is
made,—no matter how indirectly,—to numbers, proclamation is then and
there made that religion is not. He that finds God a sweet enveloping
thought to him never counts his company. When I sit in that presence,
who shall dare to come in? When I rest in perfect humility, when I burn
with pure love, what can Calvin or Swedenborg say?
It makes no difference whether the appeal is to numbers or to one. The
faith that stands on authority is not faith. The reliance on authority
measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul. The
position men have given to Jesus, now for many centuries of history, is
a position of authority. It characterizes themselves. It cannot alter
the eternal facts. Great is the soul, and plain. It is no flatterer, it
is no follower; it never appeals from itself. It believes in itself.
Before the immense possibilities of man all mere experience, all past
biography, however spotless and sainted, shrinks away. Before that
heaven which our presentiments foreshow us, we cannot easily praise any
form of life we have seen or read of. We not only affirm that we have
few great men, but, absolutely speaking, that we have none; that we
have no history, no record of any character or mode of living that
entirely contents us. The saints and demigods whom history worships we
are constrained to accept with a grain of allowance. Though in our
lonely hours we draw a new strength out of their memory, yet, pressed
on our attention, as they are by the thoughtless and customary, they
fatigue and invade. The soul gives itself, alone, original and pure, to
the Lonely, Original and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits,
leads and speaks through it. Then is it glad, young and nimble. It is
not wise, but it sees through all things. It is not called religious,
but it is innocent. It calls the light its own, and feels that the
grass grows and the stone falls by a law inferior to, and dependent on,
its nature. Behold, it saith, I am born into the great, the universal
mind. I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of
the great soul, and thereby I do Overlook the sun and the stars and
feel them to be the fair accidents and effects which change and pass.
More and more the surges of everlasting nature enter into me, and I
become public and human in my regards and actions. So come I to live in
thoughts and act with energies which are immortal. Thus revering the
soul, and learning, as the ancient said, that “its beauty is immense,”
man will come to see that the world is the perennial miracle which the
soul worketh, and be less astonished at particular wonders; he will
learn that there is no profane history; that all history is sacred;
that the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time. He
will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will
live with a divine unity. He will cease from what is base and frivolous
in his life and be content with all places and with any service he can
render. He will calmly front the morrow in the negligency of that trust
which carries God with it and so hath already the whole future in the
bottom of the heart.
X.
CIRCLES
Nature centres into balls,
And her proud ephemerals,
Fast to surface and outside,
Scan the profile of the sphere;
Knew they what that signified,
A new genesis were here.