fancy, nor will be subordinated or outgrown. It is our sublimest force. But while inward seeking employs the best powers, it finds the clearest answers. Physiology is deputy, but not chief justice. I cannot analyze the sentiment which, like magnetism, pervades the world, but I feel its support at every step. Himself from God he could not free. Atheism professed is only rejection of some definition. But what least thing, that we are drawn by, can we define? With what graduated trust the heifer steps till she licks my hand, and lets me pinch her neck and play with her budding horns! Is there no reality in the relation because it is not understood? When the train thunders along, I see a process no more genuine, however easier to state in terms. A principle cannot be verified by what is below it, and Infinity has no certificate. Yet it is one motion in many things, the wind, the smoke, the cloud, the tide, swaying branches and waving grass, the moon getting the start of the sun in their blue circus, the opening leaves and blossoms, the summer-beam at play with the shadow or under the stream, the pencil in my hand and the throb in my heart, yonder thread of the moon hauling the sea to its highest point in tides of a double miracle each day beyond the passage of the Jordan, the water turning to wine in a thousand vineyards, and a millionfold more than was held in those Hebrew jars; all movement, but no mover? That is "the breath without lungs." How many proverbs hint the personal force! Handle it with care or it will hurt somebody: if I come I shall be worst devil of all, and there will be damages to pay: beware of the thirdsman; — such sayings suggest something more potent than any powder; so sharp that every general truth touches me in all my relations. What preacher but has had surprises of irritating hearers he never thought of, who supposed they were aimed at by the bow drawn at a venture. Every random bullet strikes. I once expounded good and bad temper from a Scripture text, under the title of The Two Winds, and raised a tempest about my own ears. The devil is here; I mention no names, said the radical sage, peering round with his blue eyes. What fatality arrested the glance at one spot! What audacity in a perception! One compliments an adversary of his cause as Satan, with the coolness of classifying a bug. I held up the standard of chastity, and nominated nobody; yet I was reproved as referring to a particular scandal. A candidate for preeminent license at once appeared. Induction leads to deduction, and truth is never more vague than electricity in a thunderbolt. Hearing the clap, we wonder where it fell. The pungent orator is asked why he cannot talk about something else than justice; it is so personal. It gets into families. It is the sword sundering houses Jesus brought. Let us have the doctrine of charity, the wounded cry, as if kindness and equity were not the same, or anything could be such a pest as dissolute love! A rotting lily, others as well as Shakespeare have noticed, makes a worse odor than withered grass. The smell of hay is pleasant, not of the churchyard or the morgue. The censor has heat, but no hate, - necessity drives him. All must be searched. Obsequious writers and conspirators of guilt rush to the sinner's defence. Society is a joint-stock company to protect certain crimes. He must be an unquestionable villain who, when he is acquitted, is not cheered. Nevertheless, the self-executing statute will fetch us all to our knees. Not at the individual, but the evil it aims. No philosophy can cover our experience. The "golden vials, full of odors, which are the prayers of saints," were mined, and wrought, and filled, where no mariner sailed or geologist went down. The Beautiful Soul, in Goethe's chapter of her Confessions, declares that the power she sought never failed; and what history of Gibbon or treatise of Paine outweighs such an artist's romance? Milton's "Live Coal," or "Sweet Refreshing," is as good evidence as any of Darwin's analogies, and has no gaps of imperfect record to be filled. Is it to any materialist, or to Raphael, Michael Angelo, Dante, and Shakespeare, we go for a fine touch? The blaze of the sun, and of him who casts it for a shadow, may dazzle and hinder sight; yet what but some response to every wronged sufferer explains the miracles of patience on crosses, amid faggots, under noose and axe, which make so tawdry the blasting of a barren fig-tree, and the money in a fish's mouth? Who but must repeat Christ's composure beneath accusation heavier than the beams he bore to Calvary? In a curious experiment with glass tubes one sound is made to still another which it meets on the way; and our voice, encountered by the divine, dies without a murmur in our throat. What unseen hand holds back that we would raise for a blow, so that the boy Theodore Parker cannot strike the turtle? Say what sceptics will, books of martyrs and sentences of old devotion are no counterfeit or play; and what Tauler or Thomas-à-Kempis wrote is worth reading, as well as the Report of the British Association. I know not about the warm circumpolar sea; only that amid field-ice of misfortune, and at the frosty centre of friends' indifference, is navigable water and a temperate clime,- in the heart and axis of the world's aversion, and under the six months' night of unpopularity, is light like that of the curious substance the condition of whose shining is pitch dark. The supersensual things alone are of intrinsic moment. We can get along without knowing about North-west passage or spontaneous generation, development or evolution, our chronological kinship to angel or brute. But when, like Othello, we are “perplexed in the extreme," or "the world has been too many for us," as to dying Tulliver, in the tale; when love becomes enmity, and confidence is cool, and the earth is a blind alley, and our way, like Job's, is hid and hedged up till a curse lights on the day of our birth, and we hunt round for the grave, then insanity is not knowing which way to turn, and suicide is inability to take it, or our conclusion that there is none to take. But not a case of calamity in which interior perception is not poise and peace. Call it delusion and unscientific, yet the man says: No matter, be it sunlit hill to tread, or valley of the shadow of death to totter down, I have a staff more than my own strength. Max Müller affirms language as the distinction between man and beast; if any animal could name its own place in the scale, as a horse or dog, it would be a man, and the line erased. If an animal had the consciousness which words of devotion express, the balance for flight of the soul when the body fails, it would be an angel. It is all perception. Wait till you have proved the God you lean on, and the heaven you go to? It is atheism, not only actual, but on principle, to subject the Divine Being to the test of our sense or understanding. It asks not leave of them to be, or be believed in. Their hill-top is not high enough for any Moses to see Canaan from. I can wait for your answer to my question, your appearance at the station, or return from the door; but some things I cannot wait for. John Quincy Adams, dying, says: This is the last of earth; I am composed. He must give this trust who has it! I talk with my sick friend, for whom life and death hang a doubtful beam; but the swaying does not reach her fearless mind. How is she so strangely even for either fate? From no influence of church or priest; she has heard no public prayer which was not an offence. Her state avouches itself. Only insolence cross-questions tranquillity. I die content, said the expiring saint. But I wanted to get your views of death, answered the parson, so stout and well-fed. Turn the dogmatist out of doors, and let the saintly mother die in peace! Leave her to her assumption, as the Virgin was left. Every thinker starts somewhere from a position granted which he did not establish. Is matter your first term? But who and what are you that make it such? Does matter observe matter, or do you despair of self-knowledge? Have you come out of the clod |