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_ THE OVER-SOUL
"BUT souls that of his own good life partake,
He loves as his own self; dear as his eye
They are to Him: He'll never them forsake:
When they shall die, then God himself shall die:
They live, they live in blest eternity."
Henry More.
Space is ample, east and west,
But two cannot go abreast,
Cannot travel in it two:
Yonder masterful cuckoo
Crowds every egg out of the nest,
Quick or dead, except its own;
A spell is laid on sod and stone,
Night and Day 've been tampered with,
Every quality and pith
Surcharged and sultry with a power
That works its will on age and hour.
IX. THE OVER-SOUL
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. _
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