Our instincts are idealists. Contradicting impressions of the senses,
they prompt us forth to the noblest aims and endeavors. Aspirants
for the best, they prick us forward to its attainment, the more
successfully as our theories of life lift us above the planes of
precedent and routine, whereon the senses confine us, to the mount
of vision and of renovating ideas. Nor are these too lofty or too
beautiful to be unattainable. 'Tis when practice strays wide and falls
below that they appear visionary and fall into disrepute. Only those
who mount the summits command the valleys at their base.
"When we ourselves from our own selves do quit,
And each thing else, then an all-spreading love
To the vast universe our soul doth fit,
Makes us half equal to all-seeing Jove;
Our mighty wings, high-stretched, then clapping light,
We brush the stars, and make them seem more bright."
Enthusiasm is essential to the successful attainment of any high
endeavor; without which incentive one is not sure of his equality to
the humblest undertaking even. And he attempts little worth living
for if he expects completing his task in an ordinary life-time.
His translation is for the continuance of his work here begun, but
for whose completion time and opportunity were all too narrow and
brief. Himself is the success or failure. Step by step one climbs
the pinnacles of excellence; life itself is but the stretch for that
mountain of holiness. Opening here with humanity, 'tis the aiming at
divinity in ever-ascending circles of aspiration and endeavor. Who
ceases to aspire, dies. Our pursuits are our prayers; our ideals our
gods. And the more persistent our endeavors to realize these, the less
distant they seem. They were not gods could we approach them at once.
We were the atheists of our senses without them. All of beauty and of
beatitude we conceive and strive for, ourselves are to be sometime.
Man becomes godlike as he strives for divinity, and divinity ever
stoops to put on humanity and deify mankind. Character is mythical. The
excellent are unapproachable save by like excellence. A person every
way intelligible falls short of our conception of greatness; he ceases
to be great in our eyes. God is not God in virtue of attributes, but
of the mystery surrounding these. Could we see through the cloud that
envelopes our apprehensions, he were here, and ourselves apparent in
his likeness. "God," says Plato, "is ineffable, hard to be defined, and
having been discovered, to make fully known."
"He is above the sphere of our esteem,
And is best known in not defining him."
Any attempted definition would include whatsoever is embraced within
our notion of Personality,--would exhaust our knowledge of nature and
of ourselves. Only as we become One Personally with Him do we know Him
and partake of his attributes.
"In the soul of man," says Berkeley, "prior and superior to intellect,
there is a somewhat of a higher nature, by virtue of which we are one,
and by means of which we are most clearly joined to the Deity. And as
by our intellect we touch the divine intellect, even so by our oneness,
'the very flower of our essence,' as Proclus expresses it, we touch the
First One. Existence and One are the same. And consequently, our minds
participate so far of existence as they do of unity. But it should
seem the personality is the indivisible centre of the soul, or mind,
which is a monad, so far forth as she is a person. Therefore Person is
really that which exists, inasmuch as it partakes of the divine unity.
Number is no object of sense, but an act of the mind. The same thing
in a different conception is one or many. Comprehending God and the
creatures in one general notion, we may say that all things together
make one universe. But if we should say that all things make one God,
this would indeed be an erroneous notion of God, but would not amount
to atheism, so long as mind, or intellect, was admitted to be the
governing part. It is, nevertheless, more respectful, and consequently
the truer notion of God, to suppose Him neither made up of parts, nor
himself to be a part of any whole whatsoever."