GOD.

All perfections in the universe are united in God. God and nature are

two magnitudes which are quite alike. The whole sum of harmonic activity

which exists together in the divine substance, is in nature the antitype

of this substance, united to incalculable degrees, and measures, and

steps. If I may be allowed this expressive imagery, nature is an

infinitely divided God.

Just as in the prism a white ray of light is split up into seven darker

shades of color, so the divine personality or Ego has been broken into

countless susceptible substances. As seven darker shades melt together

in one clear pencil of light, out of the union of all these substances a

divine being would issue. The existing form of nature's fabric is the

optical glass, and all the activities of spirits are only an endless play

of colors of that simple divine ray. If it pleased Omnipotence some day

to break up this prism, the barrier between it and the world would fall

down, all spirits would be absorbed in one infinite spirit, all accords

would flow together in one common harmony, all streams would find their

end in the ocean.

The bodily form of nature came to pass through the attractive force of

the elements. The attraction of spirits, varied and developed

infinitely, would at length lead to the cessation of that separation (or

may I venture the expression) would produce God. An attraction of this

kind is love.

Accordingly, my dear Raphael, love is the ladder by which we climb up to

likeness to God. Unconsciously to ourselves, without laying claim to it,

we aim at this.

Lifeless masses are we, when we hate;

Gods, when we cling; in love to one another,

Rejoicing in the gentle bond of love.

Upwards this divinest impulse holdeth sway

Through the thousandfold degrees of creation

Of countless spirits who did not create.

Arm-in-arm, higher and still higher,

From the savage to the Grecian seer,

Who is linked to the last seraph of the ring,

We turn, of one mind, in the same magic dance,

Till measure, and e'en time itself,

Sink at death in the boundless, glowing sea.

Friendless was the great world's blaster;

And feeling this, he made the spirit world

Blessed mirrors of his own blessedness!

And though the Highest found no equal,

Yet infinitude foams upward unto Him

From the vast basin of creation's realm.

Love is, Raphael, the great secret that can restore the dishonored king

of gold from the flat, unprofitable chalk; that can save the eternal from

the temporal and transient, and the great oracle of duration from the

consuming conflagration of time.

What does all that has been said amount to?

If we perceive excellence, it is ours. Let us become intimate with the

high ideal unit, and we shall be drawn to one another in brotherly love.

If we plant beauty and joy we shall reap beauty and joy. If we think

clearly we shall love ardently. "Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven

is perfect," says the Founder of our Faith. Weak human nature turned

pale at this command, therefore He explained himself in clearer terms:

"Love one another!"

Wisdom, with thy sunlike look,

Awful goddess! turn thee back,

And give way to Love;

Who before thee went, with hero heart,

Up the steep and stormy path

To the Godhead's very throne;

Who, unveiling the Holiest,

Showed to thee Elysium

Through the vaulted sepulchre.

Did it not invite us in?

Could we reach immortality--

Or could we seek the spirit

Without Love, the spirit's master?

Love, Love leadeth only to Nature's Father,

Only love the spirits.

I have now given you, Raphael, my spirit's confession of faith--a flying

outline of the creation I have undertaken. As you may perceive, the seed

which you scattered in my soul took root. Mock, or rejoice, or blush at

your scholar, as you please. Certain it is this philosophy has ennobled

my heart, and extended and beautified the perspective of my life. It is

possible, my excellent friend, that the entire structure of my

conclusions may have been a baseless and visionary edifice. Perhaps the

world, as I depicted it, nowhere exists, save in the brain of your

Julius. Perhaps, after the lapse of thousands on thousands of years,

when the wiser Judge promised in the future, sits on the judgment-seat,

at the sight of the true original, filled with confusion, I should tear

in pieces my schoolboy's design. All this may happen--I expect it; and

even if not a vestige of reality is found in my dream, the reality will

fill me with proportionately greater delight and wonder. Ought my ideas

to be more beautiful than those of the Creator? How so? Could we

tolerate that His exalted artistic structure should fall beneath the

expectations of a mortal connoisseur? This is exactly the fiery

probation of His great perfection, and the sweetest triumph for the

Exalted Spirit, that false conclusions and deception do not injure His

acknowledgment; that all tortuous deviations of the wandering reason at

length strike into the straight road of everlasting truth; that all

diverging arms and currents ultimately meet in the main stream. What an

idea, Raphael, I form of the Great Artist, who, differently travestied in

a thousand copies, still retains identical features in all this

diversity, from which even the depreciating hand of a blunderer cannot

remove admiration.

Moreover, my representation may certainly be fallacious, wholly an

invention,--nay, I am persuaded that it must necessarily be so; and yet

it is possible that all results of this may come to pass. All great

sages are agreed that our whole knowledge moves on ultimately to a

conventional deception, with which, however, the strictest truth can

co-exist. Our purest ideas are by no means images of things, but only

their signs or symbols determined by necessity, and co-existing with

them.

Neither God, nor the human soul, nor the world are really what we

consider them. Our thoughts of these are only the endemic forms in which

the planet we inhabit hands them to us. Our brain belongs to this

planet; accordingly, also, the idioms of our ideas, which are treasured

up in it. But the power of the soul is peculiar, necessary, and always

consistent: the capricious nature of the materials through which it finds

expression changes nothing in the eternal laws, as long as this

capriciousness does not stand in contradiction with itself, and so long

as the sign remains true to the thing it designates. As the thinking

power develops the relations of the idioms, these relations of things

must also really be present in them. Therefore, truth is no property of

the idioms, but of the conclusion; it is not the likeness of the sign

with the thing signified, of the conception with the object; but the

agreement of this conception with the laws of thought. In a similar

manner, the doctrine of quantity makes use of cyphers which are nowhere

present, except upon paper, and yet it finds with them what is present in

the world of reality. For example, what resemblance is there between the

letters A and B, the signs : and =, +, and -, and the fact that has to be

ascertained? Yet the comet, foretold centuries before, advances from a

remote corner of the heavens and the expected planet eclipses the disk

at the proper time. Trusting to the infallibility of his calculation,

the discoverer Columbus plunges into unknown regions of the sea to seek

the missing other half of the known hemisphere--the great island of

Atlantis--to fill up a blank in his geographical map. He found this

island of his paper calculation, and his calculation was right. Would it

have been less great if a hostile storm had shattered his fleet or driven

it back? The human mind makes a similar calculation when it measures the

super-sensual by means of the sensible, and when mathematics applies its

conclusions to the hidden physics of the superhuman. But the last test

of its calculations is still wanting, for no traveller has come back from

that land to relate his discovery. Human nature has its proper bounds,

and so also has the individual. We will give each other mutual comfort

respecting the former: Raphael will concede this to the boyish age of his

Julius. I am poor in conceptions, a stranger in many branches of

knowledge which are thought to be essential in inquiries of this nature.

I have not belonged to any philosophical school, nor have I read many

printed books. It may quite well be that I occasionally substitute my

fancies in the place of stricter logical proofs, that I mistake the rush

of my blood or the hopes of my heart for sound wisdom; yet, my dear

friend, you must not grudge me the moments I have thus lost. It is a

real gain for universal perfection: it was the provision of the Wisest

Spirit that the erring reason should also people the chaotic world of

dreams, and make fruitful even the barren ground of contradiction. It is

not only the mechanical artist who polishes the rough diamond into a

brilliant whom we ought to value, but also that one who ennobles mere

ordinary stones by giving them the apparent dignity of the diamond. The

industry displayed in the forms may sometimes make us forget the massive

truth of the substance. Is not every exercise of the thinking power,

every sharpening of the edge of the spirit, a little step towards its

perfection; and every perfection has to obtain a being and substantial

existence in a complete and perfect world. Reality is not confined to

the absolutely necessary; it also embraces the conditionally necessary:

every offspring of the brain, every work elaborated by the wit, has an

irresistible right of citizenship in this wider acceptation of creation.

In the measureless plan of nature no activity was to be left out, no

degree of enjoyment was to be wanting in universal happiness. The great

Inventive Spirit would not even permit error to be wasted, nor allow this

wide world of thought to remain empty and chaotic in the mind of man.

For the Great Ruler of His world does not even allow a straw to fall

without use, leaves no space uninhabited where life may be enjoyed; for

He converts the very poison of man into the food of vipers; He even

raises plants from the realm of corruption, and hospitably grants the

little glimmer of pleasure that can co-exist with madness. He turns

crime and folly into excellence, and weaves out of the very vices of a

Tarquin the great idea of the universal monarchy of Rome. Every facility

of the reason, even in error, increases its readiness to accept truth.

Dear friend of my soul, suffer me to add my contribution to the great

woof of human wisdom. The image of the sun is reflected differently in

the dewdrop and in the majestic mirror of the wide-stretching ocean.

Shame to the turbid, murky swamp, which never receives and never reflects

this image! Millions of plants drink from the four elements of nature; a

magazine of supplies is open for all: but they mix their sap in a

thousand different ways, and return it in a thousand new forms. The most

beautiful variety proclaims a rich Lord of this house. There are four

elements from which all spirits draw their supplies: their Ego or

individuality, Nature, God, and the Future All intermingle in millions of

ways and offer themselves in a million differences of result: but one

truth remains which, like a firm axis, goes through all religions and

systems--draw nigh to the Godhead of whom you think!