UC-NRLF ^B M3 7MM r "•1 :^' '^t ^^^^ \ i LIBRARY OF THE University of California, Mrs. SARAH P. WALSWORTH. Received October, 1894, zAccessions No.S^^^^Mf- Class No, (^^ . ^^ yr^l^U^t^n^ /K^Za '^a-'^-^'^Ct^ ^ 7>*^ Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/constitutionofhuOOstorrich GRAHAM LECTURES THE Otwnstittttion of % ^nmm Saul SIX LECTURES DELIVERED AT 1^ 0«- RRl)^aK L Y N INSTITU BROOKLYN, N. Y. TE, BY RICHARD S. STORRS, Jr., D.D. ^^ Of THB*^^ [TJ5I7BRSIT7] NEW YORK: ROBERT CARTER & BROTHERS, 530 BROADW AY. 1857. # Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1856, by EOLLIN SANFOED, President of the Brooklyn Institute. la the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern District of New York. JTlir^^ STEEEOTYPEDBY PBINTEDBY TnOMA8B.BMITir, E.O.JEXKIN8, 82 & 84 Beekman-street, N. Y 28 Frankfort-street, N. Y. m ^ GRAHAM LECTURES: ON THE POWER, WISDOM AND GOODNESS OF GOD, # AS MANIFESTED IiX HIS WORKS. * VOLUME I. PUBLISHED BY THE BROOKLYN INSTITUTE, CONTENTS PAGES HISTORICAL PREFACE, 5-12 THE HUMAN SOUL, ENDOWED WITH PERSONAL LIFE, 17-63 ENDOWED WITH FACULTIES FOR KNOWLEDGE, . 65-110 ENDOWED WITH FACULTIES FOR VIRTUE, . . . 111-163 ENDOWED WITH FACULTIES FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION, 165-21H ENDOWED^ WITH FACULTIES FOR HAPPINESS, . . 219-274 ENDOWED WITH FACULTIES FOR IMMORTAL PRO- GRESS, 275-338 [TJHIVBRSITr HISTORICAL PREFACE. In publishing this, the first course of Graham Lectures, delivered at the Brooklyn Institute, it appears proper to give the public some account of the Institute itself, and of the origin of the lectures to be delivered on Sunday evening^, as provided for in the will of the late Augustus Graham, on the " Wisdom, Power and Goodness of God, as manifested in his works." In the summer of 1823, some gentlemen, among whom were Augustus Graham, Robert Snow, and Alden Spoon- er, met at Stevenson's Hotel for the purpose of establish- ing a Free Library for the apprentices in the city of Brooklyn. After several meetings, they adopted a con- stitution, in which they expressed themselves as "de- sirous of extending the benefits of knowledge to that portion of our youth who are engaged in learning the mechanic arts, thereby to qualify them for becoming use- ful and respectable members of society ;" and also, " of collecting and establishing a library for the benefit of ap- prentices." They issued an eloquent circular "to the citizens of Brooklyn," in September; in which they solicited donations of books and maps, with pecuniary assistance, to enable* them to spread before the rising gen- eration the stores of knowledge, and the means of men- VI HISTORICAL PREFACE. tal improvement. They urged their claims on the con- siderations, " that the wealth and happiness of a country rest on the immovable basis of industry and intellectual acquirements/' and that "the great Author of nature distributes talents without distinction, among the differ- ent classes of society ;" they therefore desire the means of bringing forth the shining ore of genius from obscurity ; " to develope, perhaps, a Franklin, a Rittenhouse, or a Fulton, who may themselves make new discoveries in the principles of science, extend the boundaries of knowledge, and shed lustre on our country and benefit on mankind " They were incorporated by the Legislature of the State November 20th, 1824, under the name of the " Brooklyn Apprentices' Library Association ;" and soon after leased a plot of ground, on the corner of Henry and Cranberry-streets, on which to erect a building for the purposes of the Library. The corner-stone of this build- ing was laid on the 4th of July 1825, with Masonic ceremonies, by the great and good Lafayette, amid a large concourse of our citizens. This building was erected, and the first course of Lectures was commenced on the 15th of March 1827, by Professor Dana, of the Medical CoUege of New York. This course of Lectures he did not live to finish ; hav- ing departed this life, after a short illness, in the early part of April, universally regretted. But his talents and amiable manners had already endeared him, when he died, to very many of his hearers; and a general interest had been manifested in his instructions. The Library building was afterwards sold to the city, for public offices, &c., and the Library removed to the Lyceum buildings in Washington-street. In May 1842, HISTORICAL PREFACE. VU the Lyceum of Natural History transferred all their specimens, fixtures, and other Society property, to the Apprentices' Library Association, for safe keeping. The success of this Institution had gradually increased. Sometimes in a state of prosperity, at other times de- pressed and neglected, its importance and utility became more and more obvious, and it evidently grew in favor with our citizens. Its permanence and usefulness were at length cemented by the munificence of our generous and noble fellow-citizen, Augustus Graham, who had long felt a Hvely interest in the Institution, and who at the time of which we speak was its President. In a conversation with Mr. James Walters, he stated that he had made provision in his will for the purchase of the Lyceum building, if it could be had for 20,000 doUars ; and, if not, for the erection of a building for the accom- modation of the Apprentices' Library Association. Mr. Walters suggested that it would be preferable to purchase the building at once, as it probably could be had cheaper then than at a future period. He urged upon Mr. Gra- ham the propriety of making this disbursement under his own supervision, as reliance could not always be placed upon executors for carrying out the wishes of testators, especially when large sums of money were to be distrib- uted. Mr. Graham, after thinking of this suggestion for a few days, authorized Mr. Walters to ascertain what the building could be purchased for. He did so, and learned that it could be had for 18,500 doUars. For this sum the purchase was made, and the lots and building were conveyed to the Association ; though they had cost origi- nally 35,000 doUars. There was a mortgage of 12,000 doUars on the buUding, which remained; Mr. Graham Vm HISTORICAL PREFACE. paying down 6,500 dollars, and expending another 1,000 dollars in repairs. To cover these last two items, a mortgage was executed to Mr. Graham by the Associa- tion for 7,500 dollars ; both mortgages to be eventually cancelled from his estate. In April 1843, an amended charter was obtained from the Legislature, for the Association, which now took the name of The Brooklyn Institute. Under this name, and with the advantage of a central and convenient building, the Institute continued to prosper. Lectures were given by the best talent of our country; exhibitions of paintings, fruit, flowers, &c., were opened; a Board of Natural His- tory was established ; and the Library diffused informa- tion and amusement throughout the community. The 4th of July 1848, was a day to be remembered with grateful feelings, by the friends of the Institute ; as on that day the Board of Directors, Trustees, and friends of the Institute, were invited to meet Mr. Graham at the Directors' room, to receive at his hands the completion of the donation of the Institute building. A meeting was accordingly held, and Mr. Cyrus P. Smith, on behalf of Mr. Graham, read the following communication : " To the Trustees of the Brooklyn Institute. Herewith I present to you the satisfaction of a bond and mortgage, held by me on the prop- erty of the Institute, for the sum of seven thousand and five hundred dollars ; and I herewith present to you bonds and mortgages amount- ing together to the sum of twelve thousand and five hundred dollars. This latter sum is to be applied and appropriated by your Board to the payment and cancelling of a Bond and Mortgage outstanding on the property of the Institute, given to Mr. Peabody. The bonds and mort- gages at this time presented to you, constitute the cost of the building, purchased in the name, and for the purposes of the Institute, and now paid for by me, according to my original plan, at the time of the pur- HISTORICAL PREFACE. IX cbQe of said premises. And I desire that the sum, thus now presented, shall be appropriated, as soon as practicable, to the payment of the out- standing mortgage ; in order that the premises may be free from debt, and the Institution from any pecuniary embarrassment. " I give this sum with the injunction to your Board, that they apply, for the benefit of the youth and citizens of Brooklyn, after paying the salaries of the keeper and librarian, the fuel, and other incidental ex- penses, the one-half of the nett income from the buildings, by rent and otherwise, to the increase and keeping in order of the Free Library for the use of minors. The residue of said rents and income, to be applied in part to the expense of an address to be delivered annually before the readers of the Library and others, on the evening of the 22d of February, the birthday of George Washington, on the character of that great man, or of some other benefactor of America. And, on the same evening, pre- miums shall be awarded and distributed to the most meritorious of the readers of the Free Library, as may be evinced by application of their talents, either mental or mechanical ; and for good conduct. The pre- miums shall consist of books, medals, or other articles useful in their re- spective callings. The expense of such premiums is to be paid out of the ftmds aforesaid ; and the residue of such rents and. income to be applied to defray the expense of so many free lectures, on Sunday evenings, in the Lecture-room of the Institute, during the Winter months, as the funds will allow, on the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as mani- fested in his works. " I desire, and so direct, that neither the Lecture-room, nor any other part of the building, shall be used for any political purpose, or any ex- hibition, or any lecture on any subject having an immoral tendency; but that the whole building, and income thereof, shall be used and appropriated to influence the moral, mental, and intellectual condition of the readers of the Library, and the community at large. " Given, at the City of Brooklyn, under my hand and seal, this 4th day of July, 1848. " Augustus Graham." Mr. Smith also read a communication from Mr. Gra- ham, the purport of which was, that he gave 30,000 dol- lars towards purchasing ground and erecting a building X HISTORICAL PREFACE. for the city Hospital. He also gave 2,000 dollars- for a Dispensary, to be connected with the Hospital. The day, the occasion, and the act of this generous benefactor, who spoke not a word, Avere so impressive, that feeling overpowered every attempt to make a suita- ble reply of gratitude and obligation. Mr. Robert Nichols said in substance, on behalf of the Trustees of the Insti- tute, " that they accepted and would carry out the trust." The amounts given, on this occasion, by Mr. Graham, were as follows : To the Institute, mortgages and interest, $22,58750 To the Hospital, 30,000 To the Dispensary, 2,000 Making together |54,58Y 50 But the days of our noble benefactor drew to a close. At a special meeting of the Board of Directors, held No- vember 28th, 1851, Robert Nichols, the Vice President, announced that the venerable President of the Board, Augustus Graham, had passed from the scenes of his benevolent labors, to the reward which awaits the good and just. In his will he had still further provided for the usefulness of the Institute, as the following extracts from it will show : " I give and bequeath unto the Brooklyn Institute aforesaid, the sum of Five Thousand dollars, to be invested on Bond and Mortgage upon real estate, or upon such security as the Savings Banks are required to invest monies therein deposited ; and the rents, interest, income, and dividends of the same to be applied to the purchase of apparatus, and the estab- lishment and support of a course of Free Lectures annually, upon Me- chanics, Natural Philosophy, and Science, for the apprentices and other HISTORICAL PREFACE. XI youth of the City of Brooklyn ; to be delivered in the basement Lecture- room of the Brooklyn Institute. " I give and bequeath to the said Brooklyn Institute, the sum of Five Thousand dollars, to invest the same in the manner last aforesaid, and to apply the income thereof as follows : one half thereof towards the sup- port of a School of Design ; and the other half, annually, to a specimen of the Fine Arts, to be executed by a native Artist, and kept in said Institute for the pui-pose of forming a gallery of fine arts. And I also give and bequeath to the said Brooklyn Institute, the further sum of Five' Thousand dollars, to be invested as aforesaid; the rents, interest, income and dividends thereof to be applied to the purchase of speci- mens of Natural History, and in causing Free Lectures to be delivered upon the subject of Natural History, from time to time, in the Lecture- room of said Institute ; and also to the support and benefit of the Natu- ral History department of the Brooklyn^Institute ; and any surplus of said income to be applied to the general objects of said Institute. " And I also give and bequeath to the said Brooklyn Institute the sum of Twelve Thousand dollai's, to be invested as aforesaid, and the income thereof to be applied to the delivery of Sunday-evening Lectures, at such times as may be deemed most advisable by the Directors or Trustees thereof, on the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in his Works." It will be perceived that it was in accordance with the latter clause of the foregoing extracts from the will of Mr. Graham, that the lectures now published, were de- livered. And the Directors take this occasion to express their high satisfaction with the general character, and manner of delivery of this the first of a series of highly important, interesting and useful lectures on an exalted subject. These lectures will be continued, as directed in the will of Mr. Graham, as suitable talent and culture for the work can be secured by the Directors. Thus endowed, by the liberality of its late President, we trust the future course of the Brooklyn Institute will XU HISTORICAL PREFACE. still more entitle it to the regard of our fellow-citizens ; and that it will continue to be one of the most useful and agreeable features of our pleasant city RoLLiN Sanford, President ; Peter G. Taylor, Vice President ; John W. Pray, Secretary ; Gerrit Smith, Treasurer. Oliver Hull, Samuel Lounsbury, Thomas Woodward, Thomas Rowe, Austin Melvin, Elias Lewis, Jr., K Dire(}tors. Ambrose A. Lane, Richard L. Wyckoff, Daniel D. Badger, Brooklyn, September, 1856. INTRODUCTORY NOTE. The following Lectures were prepared to be delivered before a purely popular audience, assembled week by week, on successive Sunday evenings, in the public Lec- ture-room of the Brooklyn Institute. It was necessary to the purpose of the Lecturer, and of the Directors, that the circle of themes embraced in Psychology should in some measure be treated, in six discQurses. At the same time, these discourses were designed to leave special re- ligious impressions on the minds of thos^ who heard them. The Lectures should be judged, therefore, by those who may read them, with a candid reference tp these necessary conditions, which invested and governed them. They are not at aU scientific in their form, for they were not prepared for a class of students. Their style is not that of the essay or the treatise, for they were written, primarily, to be delivered from the desk, not to be printed ; and a style more fluent, repetitious, and rhe- torical than that of the essay, was therefore desirable. Xiv INTRODUCTORY NOTE. The writer was at liberty, he was even required, to avoid the special metaphysical methods of analysis and argument, and also the particular philosophical nomen- clature. His only aim was to interest and instruct, if he might, and coincidently with this to religiously impress, the old and the youngs the men and .the women, the cul- tivated and the illiterate, who should assemble, as oppor- tunity and inclination might prompt, on each Sunday evening. And this aim he did what he could to realize, amid manifold cares. H^ is happy to know that some of those who attended upon the Lectures felt themselves interested and profited by them. If others, who read them, shall share such advantage, and find their thoughts stimulated, or their reverence for God increased and quickened, by any thing he has said, he will be more than repaid for the addi- tional labor of conducting them through the press. • E,. S. Storrs, Jr. Brooklyn, N. Y., October 25th, 1856. [UHIVBRSITT] GEAHAM LECTUEES. LECTURE I. Ladies and Gentlemen: • In commeiicing this course of lectures, intended as the first in a series of courses to be delivered here through successive years, I pause in admiration of the greatness of the theme which is thus to be presented. We, to whom is assigned the function which I am the first and the least worthy to fulfil, are to speak of God, the Eternal One; and to set forth His wisdom. His power, and His goodness, as these are exhibited in the works of creation. In its scope, then, the theme is commensurate with the Universe. Wherever are material masses or atoms which God has formed, or relations which He has constituted, or laws which He has established, or powers which He has energized, or life which He has originated, and which He now upholds and governs, — where waters roU or colors brighten, where grasses and plants, or statelier growths, 16 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. in their manifold ranks adorn the earth, where plan- ets and stars move silent in their courses, wherever thought or life is developed, or even the fashion of inanimate matter declares the arrangement of an intelligent will, — thither reaches this theme ; pervading and encompassing as gravitation itself; ubiquitous and all-penetrating as the thought of the soul, considering and interpreting the operations of God. We cannot reckon the capacities, or anticipate the attainments, of the Angelic intelligence. We only know, that they are higher than ours ; that with faculties superior, through an exercise more prolonged, from higher points of view, and with opportunities of culture transcending our thought, those eminent spirits consider the universe; and that doubtless our knowledge, in many departments, is but infantile to theirs. And yet the Angelic intelligence, in its grandest enlargement aA)^- elevation of power, though conducting its processes in the presence of the -Creator, and expressing its conceptions in the unbounded freedom of a spiritual language, cannot fully contain or utter the truth on this theme. As only the mind which in some hour of fortunate extasy has originated the poem, knows all the significance and" the virtue of its work, the subtle harmonies of feeling and thought that play amid the modulated lines, the delicate shades of superior meaning or of occult suggestion involved in INTRODUCTOEY REMARKS. 17 terms which a disciplined intuition, working with exactest method and care although with freest force and beauty, has selected from their synonymes, and the inmost secrets of experience which these utter ; as only the trained and capacious soul which takes architecture for its instrument, conceiving the whole figure and each line of the cathedral before the spade or the chisel have begun, knows all the complete proportion of the building, — ^wherein every angle hath a meaning and a power, and every tint is related to the distances, masses and heights around it, and where the whole structure grows up from its base by a law that is at once invisible and determinate, — so, and much more, only the mind of God Himself, the poet and the architect who originated the Universe and established its laws, can comprehend the mysteries of order and of grace embraced among its orbs, whose choiring movements in perpetual anthem rise before Him, whose majestic proportions are reared as a Temple amid the expanse of unoccupied space. To investigate this theme will be the enjoyment, I gladly believe, of those exalted by deliverance from the earth, and made superior to our mortal limitations ; inheritors, thus, of the " secret of the Lord." The utterance of this shall lay a burden of richer praise even upon celestial harps ; and the compass of Inmior- tality shall not be too vast to pursue and unfold it. ■"ft 18 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. And yet from this whole we may measure off parts ; as the scholar may dissect certain stanzas or a canto from the series of the poem, as the student of archi- tecture may take portions from the building, for his closer survey. And by a sufficient observation of these, we may approach more nearly the conception of their Author; of Him who ordained, and who now upholds, this living, far-reaching, and interlocked system. It is this which the Founder of these courses of lectures, if I have apprehended his purpose aright, designed to have done here. The arrangement which he has made looks to years and generations for its gradual accomplishment ; and the managers of his trust propose to fulfil his comprehensive plan by securing year by year some cultivated person, who shall speak on successive Sabbath evenings in this place of that department of the creation with which he is familiar; exhibiting the demonstrations of God that are in it, and unfolding for others His forming thought. Thus shall the lessons of the whole be expressed to us. Flowers and herbs shall find a voice through the mind that has studied them, and has caught some share of their native grace, and so shall yield their modest witness to Him who saw them before they were. In- sects and birds shall tell in articulate and harmonious utterance their story of His wisdom. The murmur of the sheU, translated into the laws that pulsate in it. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 19 shall become in its turn a musical evangel ; and the pearly sheen which lines that shell shall be shown to reflect the glory of His thought who hath made even it so " beautiful in his time." Fishes and quadrupeds, aU living things, the distant orbs treading their silent round through ether, mosses and lichens, the crust of the globe with its hoarded metallic and mineral treas- ures, the atmosphere and its elements, light, fire, ther- mal and climatic changes, the differences and the unity of race among men, the very progress and develop- ment of civilized society, — the history of which is all but a record of one supreme Pro\ddence, working through free or unfriendly instruments to realize its designs — all these shaU here offer, as presented by intelligent and reverent minds, their tribute unto God! It is a noble, an admirable design. The thought of the eager Hebrew singer seems responded to in it, when he cried with such lyric inspiration and sweetness : " Praise ye Him, sun and moon ! Praise Him, aU ye stars of light! Praise Him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens ! * * * Praise the Lord from the earth, ye dragons and all deeps ! Fire and hail; snow and vapors; stormy wind, fulfilling His word; mountains, and all hills ; fruitful trees, and aU cedars ; beasts, and all cattle; creeping things, and flying fowl; kings of the earth, and all people; princes, and aU judges 20 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. of the earth : * * * let them praise the name of the Lord! for His name alone is excellent; His glory is above the earth and heaven!" I earnestly rejoice in the liberal and permanent foundation of these lectures. And I cannot but believe that under the teachings to be annually uttered here, on a theme so wide, so sublime, yet so practical, not only will this particular community be year by year instructed and refreshed, its outlook be enlarged over the domain of the creation, and its vision be made clearer of God's meaning in this, but also the common Christian literature of our time will be expanded and enriched, and thus many minds be made permanently wiser. May a spirit of intelligence, of candor, and of religious earnestness, of fidelity to truth and fidelity to God, prevail in these lectures; and a blessing from above rest evermore upon them ! Amid the expanse thus opened before us, I am to explore, like those who shall come after, one limited province. My office is, in the lectures which I present, to treat of Man ; of man, as the centre and the head on earth of all that we see, or hear, or consider; the personal microcosm, in whom all else is imaged and foreshadowed ; the marvellous creature, by whom all else is surpassed and is ruled. Nor yet of Man, in all that distinguishes him, am I to speak, but only of his Mental and Moral Constitution; of that vital and INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 21 spiritual principle within him, which is higher than the body, and which gives to that its dignity and value. The existence of such a principle, will hardly, I suppose, be questioned by any one. It would be doubtless a mere waste of time to undertake to demon- strate it. Intuition affirms it. All action reveals it. And every observation which we make upon life declares it to us. The physical frame which first confronts us as we analyse man — the bones, the muscles, the nerves, the blood, the yielding flesh, the sensitive tissues, the pliant and encompassing integu- ment which is over them — ^at once confesses that it is not the whole, that it is not chief in importance and worth, in the human constitution. There is a something behind, which, though invisible, is innately superior to all this fabric; which is permanent, while this wastes; which lives and acts, while this is passive; which takes upon itself the various impres- sions imparted from without, through the medium of the frame; and which in return, gives energy, direction and persistency to that frame, in its contacts with matter. The frame is but the material mechanism, within and through which works and reigns the quickening Spirit. The frame gives the organs, through which this invisible principle becomes man- ifest. 22 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. As I said, our instant consciousness tells us this. We always assume it, in our intercourse with others. It is so perfectly an axiom, that no man could dispute it, even, without thereby at the same time demon- strating it. We know that his lips do not move of themselves. There is a spirit behind, which urges and directs them. I shall not, therefore, pause on the outward frame, in inaugurating these annual courses of lectures. There are wonders, indeed, of formation and relation, included in this, which might well arrest and repay our attention, and some of which those who have not studied them with professional minuteness may be competent to set forth. A treatise has been written for example, as you know — and one of the most elegant and fascinating treatises in the compass of English literature — on the form, the capacities, and the manifold adaptations of the human Hand. And no one, probably, has ever arisen from the study of that treatise, without a new impression of the mysteries of wisdom incorporated in the hand; of the goodness and the skill of Him who framed it, to be His minister and artisan on earth; the dexterous mechanic accom- plishing His designs, or the ardent apostle distributing everywhere the messages of His love. If a similar treatise could be written upon the Eye, that wonderful organ, more delicate and more splendid in its almost spiritual structure than either of the others that INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 23 illustrate the frame, which stands as the chief and most perfect ambassador between nature and the soul, making us acquainted with the distant and the minute, revealing at once animalculse and the stars ; if a similar treatise could be written upon the Ear, which rears the Appian way of thought between one mind and another, through which we become inheritors of all the knowledge that is syllabled into speech, and find the responsive spirit stirred by all the music "Which in the winds, on the waves dotli move, Harmonizing this earth with that we feel above ;" yea, through which comes to us that nobler music which human minds have spoken in eloquence, or have chanted in song : — ^if these treatises could be written, and others with them, on the different parts of this harmonious and confederated frame, wherein every member holds constant fellowship with every other, and where the whole is proportionate and organic, the gain to Christian knowledge could hardly be overstated. Such treatises, declaring plain facts to plain men, yet involving the substance of scientific expositions, and setting that forth in its religious relations, might show at the same time how noble is that science which becomes thus the helpful minister of religion, and how grand the religion which can thus be illustrated but never overthrown. They might 24 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. shine with the beauty of the lustrous eye. They might move to the measure of those great harmonies, to which the quick and sensitive ear returns its meet and prompt response. I hardly know another oflSce more noble or more needful than that of him who should thus, with clear and adequate knowledge, in the lucid utterance of a transparent style, set before us the stately and rhythmical proportion, the completeness of each organ, the correlate proprieties and interde- pendencies of all, in this our ordered and compact frame. He would celebrate that which men in all ages have loved to 'contemplate. He would eclaricise a structure which, since the Lord hath ascended from the grave, bears upon it the prophecy of revival and immor- tahty ! But this, it is not my office to attempt. This is for others, to whom the appropriate preparatory studies are a loved specialty. I am to treat of that within the frame, which is higher than itself; the highest thing, in fact, in all the terrestrial system around us ; the spiritual principle created in us by God. And then from this shall radiate hereafter, as shining spikes from a concentric axis, the subjects that successively shall engage your attention. And I am to treat this, not scientifically only, but religiously as well; with a clear apprehension of the facts which I present, and an effort to unfold the INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 25 psychologic order which includes and reconciles them, but also with a constant reference of these facts, and of the laws they involve, to the creating Power above them; with so much of literary skill or ornament as may readily be commanded, and may conduce to the happiest expression of the theme, but especially with a prevalent Christian earnestness, connecting that which we consider with the mind of the Most High, and seeking to illustrate the goodness and the wisdom of Him who hath formed us. I am here, as not merely an observer of nature, but a pupil of Christ, spontaneously referring aU facts to God's ' authorship. I am bound, too, by the very terms of my theme, to treat it religiously, and not merely with scientific or literary aspiration. While, therefore, I hope not to repulse your attention by awkwardness of statement, or to lose it by confusion and careless- ness of method, or Jby debility of style, I shall not aihi to make this service a mere evening's entertainment, as a lecture on science or on history might be, deliv- ered amid the hurry of the week, simply secular in its character, and alternating naturally with concerts and shows, the opera or the assembly; but I shall seek to set forth clearly the great verities of theology, as these are manifested in the frame of the soul. I shall not speak, of course, of those particular truths, con- cerning which, though Christians, we may honestly 2^ THEHUMANSOUL, differ. Nor shall I assume, any further than may be necessary for the purposes of illustration, any principles concerning the Divine Revelation which we all, I suppose, are agreed in admitting to have been made in the Scriptures. But I shall assume the existence of God, as the one Eternal and Infinite Being, and His personal connection with the work of creation; for to this, if nothing more, my theme entitles me. And then I shall endeavor to set forth His character, and the greatness of His power, as these are expressed in the marvellous interior constitution of our being. I would bring to light the Divine thoughts within us ; and would speak with a just veneration and love of Him to whom all that we are we owe, and to whom we should render continual worship. And may He accept the humble, but grateful and reverent service ! In the present lecture I am naturally to* consider the constitution of the soul which God has given us, in its primary aspect: — as involving Life; a Life PERSONAL AND SELF-CONSCIOUS, AND THEREFORE MORAL, IN EACH OF us; A LiFE TRANSMITTED TO EACH THROUGH OTHERS; AND CAPABLE, AND EVEN PROPHETIC IN EACH, OF CONTINUANCE AND ADVANCEMENT. When this has been considered, we may notice more particularly the ENDOWED WITH PERSONAL LIFE. 27 special relations sustained by this our living consti- tution, and the special aptitudes and forces which are lodged in it, adapting it to fill these. But this is primary, and will occupy us this evening. It is not at all the less important because it is familiar. " And man became A Living Soul." Herein is the summit of the Biblical cosmogony. From chaos, and the order which followed and suspended that, from the gathering of the waters in a place by themselves, and the pouring of Kght on the now opened earth, from the quickening of the soil to the production of its fruits, and the population of sea and land, of earth and air, with their appropriate animated tribes, we come at last, in this ascending series of effects, to Man, the head. " And God said," it is written in the oldest of all extant historic writings, " Let us make man in our image, after our likeness ; and let them have dominion, over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created Man, in His own image ; in the image of God created He him." Or, as it is more particularly stated, a little further on in the same record : — " The Lord God formed Man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of Life; and he became a Living Soul." There is a peculiarity of expression in the 28 THE HUMAN SOUL, latter declaration, as it occurs in the original, which has sometimes attracted the attention of commentators. It should strictly be rendered : ' and breathed into his nostrils the breath of Lives;' as if all the powers of life, imparted to the lower ranks of creatures by the action of God, were combined in man, while one still higher was superadded to them; the life of the plant, the life of the insect, the animal or the bird, being consummated in him who was subordinately to represent God to them, and who alone among them all was made in God's image. So man became a Living Soul; replete with Life; and by virtue of this his original constitution putting the crown on all that had preceded him. I. As we contemplate the Soul, then, — by which one term we may summarily express the whole spiritual and invisible constitution within us, — we must ponder it, first, as a repository of this Life; and notice what wonders of power, wisdom and goodness combined, are inseparably involved in this formation of it; how it transcends imitation ; how it even surpasses our analysis, and our thought ! We take, with the carefulest and most cunning selection, the choicest material structures on earth ; take marble from Pentelicus, or ivory from India ; take gold or gems, the violet-tinted iodine, the occult and ductile cadmium, the fluent mercury ; take that ENDOWED WITH PERSONAL LIFE. 29 which is more sensitive, the woods cut from trees whose inhaling leaves have drawn their breath beneath tropical skies ; the fragile and tender flower-stem or* petal, which almost visibly starts and palpitates if light or a shadow fall suddenly upon it; — we take the costliest, or the most ethereal and superior products, which matter in all its range presents to us, and as these lie spread out for our experiment there is in them no intelligent Life; no consciousness, or even sensibility, that we discern ; no principle like that which mysteriously pulsates in every frame that holds a living soul within it. The materials we are to vivify lie passive before us. There are forces in them, pervading them, and giving them cohesion, shape, and in some instances the power of development and growth ; but there is no Life, like that which each of us feels in himself, and which instantly resides in every most weak and helpless infant that opens its gaze on unfa- miliar things and persons. How then shall we generate it ? this is the problem. By what process shall we induce such Life in these materials? We carve them subtly, into all graceful forms. We arrange them with each other in surpassing combina- tions ; making each illustrate the beauty of the rest ; framing statues of the ivory ; wreathing jewels and gold into inestimable combinations of tiara and diadem; infolding the flowers in caskets of pearl; making 30 THEHUMANSOUL, marble mimic the human form, till it seems to tremble, to agonize, or to erect itself, beneath the touch of the chisel. And still we have quickened no Life within them. The statue lies before Pygmalion, and answers not to his passionate adjuration. The flowers wither amid the pearl, which becomes to them as a sepul- chre. And the odorous woods, while imparting of their fragrance and instructing us by their beauty, show no power of motion, and no consciousness of being. We tint them, then, with all vivid colors; we pour the glory of rainbows on them; we ply them with quickening electrical forces ; we breathe over them the loftiest inspirations of genius ; we resort to incantation, magic, and their arts, endeavoring to invoke by this clamorous madness a power from nature that shall transcend our own; and still all our eifort is entirely ineffectual. We have not altered the nature of our materials, or ennobled their qualities. Least of all have we endowed them with that supreme and invis- ible force, which alone can make them self-conscious, active, the possessors of human life, and the subjects of its appropriate law. We dissolve, then, and recombine them. By the manifold agencies of chemical science, we blend them together in an intimate fusion. We again change their proportions, and again recombine them ; and at last' exhale them, into invisible elements. Still the ENDOWED WITH PERSONAL LIFE. 31 end is the same. We cannot impart to them this, which they have not. We cannot evolve from them this, the very prophecy or capability of which is not found among them. We cannot exalt them to the sphere of vitality. And nature around us affords no power wherewith to accomplish so lofty an office. ^ The Depth saith, It Ls not in me. And the Sea saith, It is not with me. The gold and the crystal cannot equal it; and the exchange of it shall not be for jewels of fine gold.' We have labored for a result, the very nature of which eludes our analysis, and the power to produce which surpasses aU our force. And yet with this regal and fruitful energy, so inaccessible to our imitation, the soul in us is inly pervaded at every moment. We are what we are, only and strictly, by reason of it. It is throned, invisibly, on every beat, and it forbids any pause, of the pulsating heart. It is beaming through the eye. It is uttered on the voice. It is fluent and free in every part of the complex frame ; roUing along the ruddy current that bears its ministry of supply to each vein ; making the frame lovely or forceful, a thing to be cherished, reverenced, celebrated, while life remains, and only when that leaves it to be solemnly buried. Every member of the frame takes its value from this ; only because of it, the eye being able to go out to the stars, and shod with light to tread the misty rings B2 THEHUMANSOUL, of Saturn, or see where Sirius leads his troop; only because of it, the ear being quick to catch unseen aerial motions, and the tongue to charge such with the utterance of thought. And while we cannot tell the nature of it, or read the mystery of its production or its continuance, while the soul itself, — which can go back over history, and summon again the efforts and the events that have given a lustre and consecra- tion to the earth, which can make its own acts and its long-buried thoughts arise before it in vivid array, — cannot get back to the source of its consciousness, or tell what its own unseen life consists in, this fills that soul at every instant, and stocks it with power, and gives it a glory which matter does not rival, which art cannot imitate, and which language itself hath not terms to set forth. This hath its origin then, demonstrably, certainly, in the mind of the Most High ! And it shows at the first glance, this power of Life wherewith the spirit in us is replete, how unspeakably forever His power and wisdom transcend our own; this highest effect, which we cannot approximate, and cannot even under- stand, being easy to Him ; the very dust of the earth being filled with life, at a breath of His will ! Before this, pauses our most soaring intuition. Before this, fails our most rigorous analysis. We enter the supernatural, we meet the immediate operation of ENDOWED WITH PERSONAL LIFE. 33 God, we can only say, in reverent awe, ^He is higher than we all,' the moment we consider this primary mystery, the elemental energy of Life in the soul. II, But it is not only Life which God hath given us, and which is infolded and exhihited by the soul. It is A PERSONAL AND SELF-CONSCIOUS LiFE, INDIVIDUAL IN EACH ; fenced out from even the participation of the Infinite, and made separate and peculiar in each subject of it. Consider it thoughtfully, then, in this second aspect. What faculty in the soul is the centre of this its constant personality,- or how this element should scientifically be defined, I do not discuss. I only hold up to you the obvious fact that such a radical spirit- ual division distinguishes our being, and is permanently inwrought with it. There is, as I have said, a certain life-force in the plant, in the tree, and in all vegetable organisms. But it wants in each, it wants entirely, this remarkable element of self-consciousness and personality. It hath nothing individual or moral, therefore, in it. It does not constitute the flower or the tree a separate personal subject and agent, in the universe of Being; capable of receiving instructions and laws, of being impressed by arguments and motives, and of responding with its own self-moved activities to an influence exerted upon it from without. The flower is passive. 3 34 It is generated, and then is governed, by forces alto- gether exterior and physical; and the life which is in it is only separated in space, or separated in time, is not separated at all by a spiritual division, from the equal life in other flowers, or other natural growths. It is one force which resides and works universally in the soil, and which shows itself in all this teeming production. As the spring, which sends its waters downwards from the far mountain-summit, may show those waters first in the cascade, then in the rivulet peacefully winding among the trees, then in the tiny and transparent lake collected within the grass-rimmed basin, ' the smile of the mountain' as men playfully call it, and afterwards in different jets and fountains, the wayside brook, the tumbling rapid, and bye and bye in the mill-stream, yet everywhere it is the same water from the same spring which is thus revealed, the fountain being only phenomenally different from the cascade or the rivulet — so it is one and the same energy, and that purely physical, which is shown in the violet, the anemone, and the rose, or equally in the beech- tree, the elm, and the oak. Each one of these is distinguished from each of the others by mechanical division, and by external attributes ; but neither is distinguished from any of the others by a personal separation. One force pervades and vivifies aU; no more attaining self-consciousness in either than gravi- ENDOWED WITH PERSONAL LIFE. 35 tation attains this when it acts upon the star rather than the pebble, or than the crystalizing force which permeates nature attains this and displays it, when it shapes the diamond rather than the flint. And so it might, I think, have seemed probable that the utmost force of Creative Power when exerted upon man, in giving to him that far nobler life which the soul contains, would have been ex- pressed in a similar result; in communicating a share of the universal animation to each successive subject of it, and making each soul to be in turn but a tran- sient and disappearing emanation from the Infinite ; its life re-absorbed, when the term of its temporary exhibition was reached, as the waters of the stream are drawn upward into the skies, again to fall in showers or dews on other summits, and again to lapse, in constant revolution, downward to the sea. Such a constitution as this for mankind lies nearer the level of our conceptions than the one that has been realized. And so that philosophy which takes its rise and finds its laws in the mere human judgment, acting apart from or against Revelation, has always been inclined to substitute this for our actual and far more astonishing constitution. But God, our infinite Author, transcends the bounds of this arrangement at the very first step. He not only communicates life to the soul, and the highest m life of which we esm conceive, but he sejfarates that life, by a complete inward division, from every other. He creates the soul a self-conscious Person, by the motion of his will. He endows it with its separate faculties and being. He makes it, in every case, an individual agent; whose life is intermingled with the life of no other, but is radically and forever distinguished from that; whose consciousness overlays the consciousness of no other, and is in turn overlaid by no other ; which stands toward Himself, even, as a separate Being; dependent upon Him, yet having its sources of impulse and volition within itself; as purely a personal actor in the universe as He himself is ; capable of acting against him if it choose, and neither impaired in its personality, nor determined in its operations, by His presence with it. It is not an emanation from him ; but a separate, living, and self-moved Person, created by him. Its will is not His will. Its mind is in no sense a part of His mind. In His infinite intuition, in His eternal experience, its consciousness hath no part. Our primary intuition reveals this, and proves it ; our most searching analysis only confirms it ; our latest recollection invoh^es it still. So soon as we are conscious, we are inly persuaded of this our final and complete personality of life and faculty. "I think, therefore, I am;" is the old logic. And while as an argument to demonstrate our existence it is certainly ENDOWED WITH PERSONAL LIFE, 37 worthless, mvolving the conclusion in tke first term of the premise, it is interesting to note how it involves this sense of personality in each part. "I think, therefore, I am;" 'I' — a living, ajcting, and separate Intelligence, identified with no other, in no smallest degree confounded with any other, not a fractional segment of a Universal Life pervading the race, but a personal being, with my own entire endowment of faculty, complete in myself, and self-determined, — ^I think, and am!' The child owns this intuitive conviction. The man can neither outgrow it in kis experience, nor supplant it by his logic. Society stands on it; and all the relations we assume towards each ether involve the consciousness of this personal constitution, self-centred and final in every one. • ' I, and Mine,' ' Thou, and Thine,' ^He and His,' — ^because of these radical, inde- structible distinctions, to fortify the interests which naturally arise from them, Society exists, with gov- ernment for its instrument; and with reference to these, its whole administration is instinctively ordered. So in literature and art, in all codes of morals as well as of legislation, in the daily conduct of household life, in every act, impulse and hope, of the human Intelligence, this permanent and paramount distinction of individuals, the life in each one of whom is separate and peculiar, set apart from every other, is continually 38 THEHUMANSOUL, recognized. The conviction of it is ineradicable in the race ; and no possible mental training can ever obliterate it. Delirium itself — it is a noticeable fact— in its ordi- nary developements still assumes the validity of this central distinction ; and its climax is reached, the very summit of its absurdities, the aphelion of its wanderings, when it forgets or overrides this. The consciousness of this is sunken so deeply into the soul, that our whole organization must be upturned and confounded before this is disturbed. We feel this ourselves, at every moment. No more are we certain, each for himself, of being a man, with a living soul, and not a pebble, a plant, or a brute, than of being one man, of a personal spirit, with its separate, self-governing, and incommunicable powers, and not another, or a fractional manifestation of a universal force. From the material creation we are set apart by elevation ; being in the natural dignity of our life exalted above it. From the sentient and intelligent creation around us, we are set apart by division ; being in the essence and the scope of our life individualized from it. Neither matter on the one hand, therefore, with its multiform forces, nor the universal animation of Pan-theism on the other hand, includes or contains our personal being. But apart from all others, in essential singularity of constitution and life, each watches and acts, and is acted on by ENDOWED WITH PERSONAL LIFE. 39 others, continually roYealing his own peculiar and un- shared existence, continually putting forth individual powers. It is a natural effect of this, and thus in turn an illustration of it, that nothing else interests man so quickly, or affects him so powerfully, as does the pressure of another personal soul against his ; the contact of its life, with his separate and different life. The great masters in literature and art have been those who have been able to impress their own personality, most exactly and powerfully, on the words which they uttered, or the works which they sent forth; so that we stUl instinctively say, as we read or survey these, ' that sentence, that dialogue, is instinct with the very life of Plato ; his genius urges in every line :' ^ that figure, that picture, still glows in each line, and each radiant color, with the quickening force of Raphael's soul;' ^it is their Life that meets us, quickening the utterance.' And just in proportion as the work which is sent forth wants this vital unity, is devoid of this informing power which makes it almost as personal as its author, it perishes the more speedily. As a mechanical compact of separable particulars, the revo- lution of the world's thoughts shake it apart, and leave no trace of it. It is essentially the same fact, which gives to eloquence, or to music, as now uttered by men, their 40 most thrilling power. The personal soul in anothei speaks to iis through these instruments; and through poetry, as well; and sometimes in the simplest utter- ances of life. And there is no other appeal that can be made to our sensibilities so mighty as that, so searching and inspiring. The storm that whirls among the mountains, the stoop of the whirlwind that wrenches the tree from its bed in the soil, the utmost rage of oceanic commotions, — they have not that dominant power upon them to start our spirits, and carry our sympathies to an equal agitation, which eloquence has, when it utters the force of one aroused soul, or which music has, when the life of a fine and energizing mind is revealed to us through it. And no rainbow that paints its arch upon the cloud, no river that courses like liquid silver through emerald banks, no sunset that opens its deeps of splendor, with domes of sapphire and pinnacles of chrysolite, hath any such beauty to him who surveys it, as the poem or the discourse which speaks the peace, or the triumphing hope, of an- other human soul. For forever is it true that the life in each stands apart from the life in every other. It hath its centre, though not its cause, within itself; is full-orbed in each; commingled with that of no other being ; as separate in each, and as purely individual, as .if there were no other besides it in 'existence ! How marvellous is this ! and how infinite the Power, ENDOWED WITH PERSONAL LIFE. 41 bow infinite the Wisdom, which conceived and ordained this constitution of the soul! We cannot at all com- prehend such a Power ! It is because they cannot comprehend it, as I have intimated, that some philos- ophers have attempted to deny this radical personality of our spiritual life ; to resolve our wondrous individual being into the special and transient manifestation of an all-pervading Spiritii^ Miindi. But their arguments and conclusions splinter instantly into fragments against the invulnerable conviction of the soul. It is because they cannot comprehend this, that other adventurers on the sea of speculation have been moved to depreciate the costly and supreme quality of this endowment which we receive; to interpret the Life which distin- guishes the soul, as the crowning product of our physical conformation, the topmost expression of mechanical forces. But again all their processes are arrested, and brought to nought, before our intuitive and constitutional conviction. The fact remains, as against either class, so palpable that no man can fail to perceive it, so central that nothing can eliminate it from consciousness, that the life within us, so secret in its nature, so subtle in its operations, and yet so copious, princely and governing — which the microscope cannot trace, which the earth cannot limit — ^is different from gravitation, superior to any force of chemical attraction, in its kind inimitable, as in its value 42 THEHUMANSOUL, unspeakable ; and that this is personal, final, self- conscious, in every one ; capable of acquisition, capable of self-government, susceptible to injury, and fringed with quick sympathies, but fenced out from the partici- pation of all others, not constrained or diminished by even the all-comprehending life of its Author ! Apart though observant, independent though created, it sur- veys, affects, and is influenced by others, but never includes them, nor is itself included by them. And God himself, as a separate Person, must show his thoughts to it, that it may apprehend them. Herein is Power, that passes immeasurably beyond our computation ; and herein, too, are Wisdom and Goodness combined, in an equal exhibition. This primary fact, which we touch in our simplest survey of the soul, sets God before us in his true glory ! For upon this rigidly personal constitution of the soul in each man, is built the whole series of the attainments he may make. Around it are set all the circles of obligation that environ and discipline him. He is made a moral being, responsible for the use of the powers that have been given him, because those powers have strictly and solely been given to Am, and are his own and not another's. He is introduced to the relations that surround him in life, only through the same discriminating constitution. As I have said, all society stands on this, and therefore, by its existence, becomes ENDOWED WITH PERSONAL LIFE. 43 in turn a witness for this. And all the more subtle and intimate relations which unite man to his fellows, the relations of mutual acquaintance and friendship — those relations that give their basis and their birth to kindnesses, generosities, and greater philanthropies — become possible to him, through the same constitution. Yea, the higher relations that unite him to the Past, and make him the inheritor of those immense fruits which have sprung from its great action and endurance ; the highest relations, that unite him to God, and to those unseen celestial Beings who are around God's throne, with whom it is now man's privilege to sym- pathize, with whom bye and bye it may be his privilege to hold intimate converse ; those relations that may be hereafter unfolded, though not as yet anticipated by us, connecting the life of each pure man with the Universe of sentient and intelligent being ; — all these become actual or possible to us, only and solely because we are Persons. They are brought, as wreaths of laurel and of oak-leaves, or of celestial amaranth, to crown our nature, by that won- drous constitution which distinguishes each living soul from all others. Not one of them would be even conceivable by us, except for this. Self-culture becomes possible, too, through this constitution, and only through this; and so this is the base, if not the germ, of all knowledge which is 44 truly such, and of all peculiar and satisfying happiness. Our life not being an emanation from God, but a personal self-containing product of his power, we are not born to a perception of truth which floods our capacities as soon as they are opened, as the tides of a sea pour up each inlet that is scooped out to receive them ; we do not receive pleasure, and utter it mechan- ically, as the pipes of the organ pour out without partaking the harmonies that breathe through them. But we, each one of us, as our life is unfolded, separate from all others, radically discriminated in its vital unity from that of every other, must set up for ourselves on the theatre of the universe ; surveying and appropriating by our personal activity, and making some domain in the system of truth, some home amid the possibilities of experience, our own by our personal mastery of it. We must come up to the study of the system of things, as if no being had existed before us, as if no being now existed beside us ; gaining help from other persons, but not sharing their enjoyment, or partaking their knowledge, by prerogative of birth ; possessing nothing which we do not by our own endeavor appropriate. And then, when appropriated, this is our own, and not another's. We do not partake' a promiscuous opu- knoe; but every soul first gains, and then keeps, its special wealth. Its faculties are invigorated by the very effort to gain this; and it reaches a fresh and ENDOWED WITH PERSONAL LIFE. 45 more copious developement, it rises to new vigor, it becomes imbued with an enduring beauty, because it was set apart from all others, and made to stand an individual in the universe. And so from this constitution of our being comes finally, but directly, the infinite variety that is shown among men; a variety of attainment, of character and tendency, and even of essential spiritual force, and not a mere variety of circumstances and of aspect. The personal constitution in every man asserts itself in differences which discriminate him from all his equals ; and these differences, as developed and perpetuated by culture, preserve the realm of human life from the smallest monotony. They make it more various, di- versified and changeful, than the surface of the earth, or the system of the clouds. One is intellectual in the very bent of his constitution, and so in his habit, and the tone of his character; another is afifectionate, sensitive, emotive ; one is impulsive, and another deliberate; another hath that delicate humor in him which extracts the pleasing from every occurrence, and runs its thread of sUvery radiance through even the darkest tissue of disaster; another is marked by force of will; and another stOl is artistically inspired. And even beneath these general diversities, other minor peculiarities become equally apparent. Of sev- eral intellectual persons, one is more analytic, and an- 46 THEHUMANSOUL, other more discursive. One finds a fact, but discerns nothing in it. Another lays it away, as the shell-fish lays the sand-grain, in the cleansing crypt of his more subtle and renovating genius, till bye and bye it is changed into the principle of philosophy, or the very pearl of poetry, instinct with chaste and harmonious beauty. One meditates an enterprise, and another achieves it, and still another celebrates it ; the same executive and heroic force residing in each, and manifested in either, but in different degrees. One pours the genial light of kindness on all by the hearth- side, and another encompasses the poor with his com- passions, and yet another hath that sweet charity in the soul to which all creatures of God are precious, and which finds a friend in the African or the Islander ; and the separate beauty of either example contrasts, yet enhances, the beauty of the other. And so an infinite variety is given to the sum of human life. Rembrandt paints all in shadow, and Claude Lorraine in sunny light. Petrarch frames with cunning skill his chiming 'sonnets, and Dante portrays with majestic hand, that makes the page almost tingle with fire, his vision of the Future. Shakspeare, with a well-nigh prescient intelligence, interprets the secrets of history and of life, and reads the courses of the Future in the Past; and Milton rolls, from beneath the great arches of his religious and cathedral-like soul, its sublime ENDOWED WITH PERSONAL LIFE. 47 oratorios. And the copiousness of experience, the variety, affluence, multiformity of life, as it exists upon earth and arrests our attention, is derived alto- gether, in the ultimate analysis, from this personal constitution of each individual. The most various tints, and tones, and forms — more various than the tints of grasses and flowers, of clouds and of sunsets, more various than the tones of song-birds and of winds, more diversified than the forms of the earth and the sea — are made to adorn and characterize society, to reproduce themselves there and to replenish it forever, by that simple and primary constitution of God, according to which, in His infinite power. He makes the life in each man to be personal, dividing it from the similar life in all others, from even His own all-including Personality. The demonstrations of our Author are in this constitu- tion, as vivid as the stars that front us in the sky ! III. But, yet further, we must notice — for it presses itself upon us, the moment we regard the constitution of the soul — that the Life which is thus inimitable and personal in each subject of it, comes TO EACH BY TRANSMISSION FROM PARENTS AND AN ANCESTRY, and is thus organically, by its creation, set in INTIMATE relations WITH THE EQUAL AND SIMILAR LIFE OP OTHER PERSONS; with that, indeed, of the whole Race of men. Here another mysterious and beautiful thing becomes evident in it, and the mind of the Most High is still further displayed to us. 48 THE HUMAN SOUL, Clearly this method is freely chosen by our Creator. It is not made necessary by any thing in our nature. It does not obtain, so far as we are told or can properly conjecture, among other orders of personal beings. They seem, rather, created with full powers at the outset; each one owing being to the simple creative fiat of God, and each as a prince and a hierarch before Him, in the panoply of his faculties, commencing •his experience. Undeniably, this would have been jjossible among men. It could have been no task to Omnipotence so to ordain it. God did so ordain it in the constitution of the first man who came into being on the earth. But this is not the particular constitu- tion w^hich He has elected with reference to us. We are created by Him according to a method which interlinks generations; and the personal self-conscious life of each, which surpasses all speech, all reckoning or thought, is transmitted to each through the ministry of others. It comes by pro-creation, and not simply by an immediate operation of Omnipotence. It is inchoate at first, and grows gradually out to a perfectly self-containing and self-governing developement. And thus it is related to the series of the Race. Everv soul is individual, but none is solitary or isolated on earth; and every one is an heir of the Past, and a parent of the Future. That this is the actual constitution of our being, ENDOWED WITH PERSONAL LIFE. 49 as realized now in us and all others, cannot be denied. Whatever observation we make upon society, our own experience, reveals it too clearly. That this constitu- tion exhibits wisdom, goodness, and power, on the part of our Creator, in a pre-eminent degree, is what we are less apt to recognize and feel. Yet this, I think, wlQ be evident to us the moment we consider it. It may seem at first, to the superficial observer, that the power of God is less signally displayed under this arrangement, in the creation of each living and personal soul, than it would have been under the other which I have indicated. But the contrary is true. For the power of God is always most impressively exhibited in nature in making slight forces, and evidently unequal and incompetent forces, produce in their action vast efiects; in conditioning majestic and stupendous results on agencies inadequate, or even foreign and uncongenial. Thus a word, we are told, being clothed with an energizing and organific efficiency by the will of the Almighty, formed the World, at the beginning; and a movement, as of breath, infused life into the Soul. Thus the spittle and the clay, which lay passive before the Lord, till He infused divine energy into them, were the means of restoring his sight to the blind; and a touch, or a word, raised the dead even to life. The miracle was not less but more apparent, because such conditions, in themselves 4 50 THE HUMAN SOUL, SO inadequate, were preliminary to it. The mind springs up, in interpreting the event, from the evident insufficiency of the material means, to a higher appre- hension of that supreme and inconceivable power which could make such gross and unfit conditions the agency for accomplishing a result so astonishing. It measures the sight restored to the blind against the spittle; it measures the life restored to the dead against the mechanical pressure of the fingers; and it knows all the more that Omnipotence was involved in producing the effect, because the veil of such an apparatus was interposed before it. And so in the creation of the personal Soul, with its self-conscious life. God makes these mortal frames of ours pro-creators of it, by his own free yet fixed arrangement. He evolves, through the action of the body which he has formed, a spirit which that body cannot equal or emulate; a spirit akin to His own, in constitution; and from which the body derives its power, and every value. He makes the frame His material mediator in the production of this Life ; which, except in the mode ordained by Him, it is just as incapable of producing in another as it is of generating light or thought by a muscular motion, or of quick- ening waves or pavements into speech. The condition has therefore no inherent sufficiency, or even similarity, to the transcendent result ; and the power of God is ENDOWED WITH PERSONAL LIFE. 51 revealed in that result, to the eye that sees clearly, in really the most marked and amazing exhibition. See how Poetry bears its unconscious witness to the justness of this argument. When the artist or the enthusiast, in the delirium of his dream, would try to form the conscious Spirit, indued with life and personally active, he seeks the most subtle and ethereal element within the compass of all known nature. He tries to come nearest the level of his effect in the means which he employs. Air, light, j&re, foam, electric forces, chemical agencies — these are the imple- ments which he would subordinate. The goddess of the Grreek mythology springs from the crest of the curling sea. The Spirit of poetic and legendary lore is born of moonbeams playing upon fountains. The glittering elf of the household story leaps up on the shaft of the quivering flame. The meteor is invoked, or the morning-star, to give birth to new spirits ; the sunset-sheen on distant hills is imagined to become in^ corporate in them ; or the west-wind, toying over banks of flowers, to drop their delicate life from its wings. But when God forms the Life, in each conscious soul, and fills this with its strange and unsearchable powers, he creates it by a ministry diverse from all these, and as distantly removed as it is possible to conceive from its own unique nature, and its height of prerogative. He creates it by the ministry of these fS THE HUMAN SOUL, fleshly forms ; which are authors, under Him, of a life that transcends them; a life not limited as they are by space, not subject as they are to material assaults, and not dependent as they are on shelter or on food. Herein, then, is revealed, in most evident demonstra- tion, the omnipotence of God ; and in every birth is shown a real miracle ! And manifest as is God's power in this arrangement, how manifest are also his goodness and his wisdom, which set the personal life of each in such intimate relations with the life of all others, and without abridging its completeness and unity, interhnk it with all the successions of the Race ! Consider the incessant and far-reaching play of all human sympathies, the foundation for which is laid thus in our constitution ; the impulse to affection between parents and children, to the fourth generation, which results directly from this arrangement, this interdependence of one life on another. Consider the educating demand which is made by it on each generation; in the fact that the next is to draw its life through this, and that that life, in its first rudimental state, shall be committed to this, to nurture and protect it. Observe what a vast and incalculable premium is put upon virtue and moral refinement in each generation, by the fact that the influence of these shall be transmitted and inherited by children, shall be further handed on, and shall thus at ENDOWED WITH PERSONAL LIFE, 53 a thousand further points, along the progress of the continuance of the race, like the long-concealed stream of classic story, burst forth to light, and shine in beauty. And consider the immense and most vital inheritance which is gradually thus gathered — ^an in- heritance not so much of knowledge or science, or any outward possession, as of courage, faith, moral force and attainment — to be possessed by the children of a virtuous ancestry; with what instincts their earliest life is imbued, with what an influence it is invested, which come to it only through this constitution. Of course there are perils as well as benefits con- nected with this. For it is a principle which we must every where take with us, in trying to interpret the operations of God, that every benefaction has its side of danger. It is so with us, as well as with our Author. Your compassion toward the destitute may stimulate indolence, instead of quickening to generous effort. The fire which warms us with its peaceful glow, will scathe us as freely, and desolate our home, if we neglect its admonitions. And the light which covers with a radiant benediction, like the smile of its Creator, the whole visible Universe, becomes to the eye diseased and irritable the occasion of pain. And so the arrangement which makes the personal life in each soul to be transmitted to it through the action of its parents, thus setting it in intimate and organic relations with all 54 that hath preceded, with all that now surrounds it, may be made by mans vice an occasion of disaster; and he who will not heed the intimations which are brought to him by this marvellous plan, and will not elevate his life into harmony with its grandeur, may transmit to his offspring a congenital impurity, impress- ing his own corruptness upon their being. We see these inherent possibilities illustrated, with terrible dis- tinctness, in every depraved and degraded household. We see them displayed among all savage nations. Indeed, the history of the race, thus far, except as Christianity has intervened to renew it, has been hardly more than their constant exhibition. But with all these liabilities, how wise in its nature, how benign in its tendencies, is this constitution ; how amply does it justify God to us ; with what privilege and opportunity does it endow each life ! Your Soul, and mine, through this arrangement, while separate and personally complete in each of us, so revealed to our consciousness, so attested by others, is isolated in neither. It is set apart in no one of us, in a sohtude of nature, from the equal souls in others ; but is knit to them, and interlocked with them, by many affiliations. It is related to the Past. It is what it is in each of us, partly by reason of the fact that Homer sang in the earhest Greece, that Plato mused beneath the plane- trees; that prophets preached, and martyrs died, in ENDOWED WITH PERSONAL LIFE. 55 their far ages; and that they to whom our life was entrusted in its earliest developement, and who in some measure impressed themselves on it, had taken of the influence of such a Past. And tv^e in oiir turn are animated by the fact to a higher endeavor, in the effort after courage, virtue, and all moral grace, that the life transmitted through us to others may be still nobler; that happier circumstances, and a more genial influence, may infold that at the outset ; that its whole developement may be more lofty. It reaches over ages, this peculiar constitution, and makes the earliest day, the latest cycle, strike hands together. We stand midway along the course of its gradual operation ; and the grandest and crowning results of it shall only be seen amid that Future for which humanity hopes and for which faith watches, when the triumph and peace of a perfect moral culture, wrought out by centuries of slow struggle and advance, shall become the opulent inheritance of the Race ; when each moral person, in all the completeness of his separate life, shall receive as his inestimable birthright a native supremacy over evil and doubt! It will be se^n then, by all who consider it, a not more manifest trophy of God's power, than it is of his infinite goodness and wisdom, that this Life in each soul, while so high in its nature and so personal in each, essentially independent, in no degree physically commingled with any other, is si THE HUMAN SOUL, transmitted to each through the ministry of parents, and thus is set in an inward relation with the life of all others ! Redemption itself shall then be seen to have been reared upon the root of this constitution; with Millennium for its fruit! IV. I have only a single point to add to those which I have suggested, and the aim of the present lecture is fulfilled. It is, that the Life which is given to each soul, which is personal in each, and yet is so related to the similar life in others, is constituted for contin- uance, AND ALSO FOR ADVANCEMENT: it has the element and the expectation within itself of evolution and progress. This sets it fully and clearly before us. Wherever we find life, there we find a certain tendency to developement and advancement ; in the flower or the tree, or the animal organism. This characterizes Life, and sets it apart from all other forces. A spring of air never loses its elasticity ; but it never gains an energy which it had not at first. Though pressed a thousand years under incumbent weights, the instant they are removed it reassumes its original volume; but it gathers no more from the long repose. But the life in the seed tends constantly toward developement, into the stalk, the blossom and the fruit. As long as the seed remains, perfect and vital, this tendency remains, inhering in it; so that three thousand years after it was shaken from the ENDOWED WITH PERSONAL LIFE. 57 wheat-ear on the Nile, if planted it developes and brings forth fruit in English gardens. But in the plant, or the animal structure, the peculi- arity of this tendency is, that it acts within narrow and definite limits, and does not point to high attainments. In the life of the Soul its peculiarity is, that there it is stronger than anywhere else, that the attainment to which it points is indefinite and ideal, and that the limits which must arrest it, if such there are, are not yet apparent. Each faculty embraced in our spiritual being reveals the same tejidency. The power of thinking, the power of loving, are both alike in this regard. The power to perceive and interpret one fact, leads necessarily towards, if it does not involve, the power to apprehend and investigate others, to unfold their laws, and to arrange them in a system; and thus it directly prophesies the power of gradually ascending from one fact to another, from one series to a higher, as the range of experience and observation is enlarged, till the sphere of existence amid which we are placed shall be measured and understood. The faculty for loving a single friend holds within it the germ and the predictiori of a faculty, which if fully developed shall encompass all beings with an appropriate affection, and be still unimpaired by the largest exercise. And thus our infancy bears the presage of great Futures. Our Life is not only pre- 68 THE HUMAN SOUL, pared for such ; by innate tendency it anticipates such, and rises towards them. We have an ideal of spiritual completeness, which is not determinate, like the plan of the completion of the flower or the tree; which ever recedes as we advance, as the line of the horizon retreats before the sailor, at each moment unattained, but therefore at each moment inviting and inciting to a further advance. Our want of satisfaction in any spiritual attainment shows us fitted for a higher, and is a continual irritant within us impelling us to attempt that. The soul refuses to be limited to one thought; but instantly, while it considers that, it has shot forth to others, and the images it has gathered have become multitudinous. It will not consent to be shut up to one science; but immediately, when it has explored that science, it is searching around it on every side, and seeking to adjust it in its normal relations to the universal Cosmos. Its affections will not be limited to the family ; but patriotism becomes to it as real an experience as fireside love; and philanthropy, which is nobler, and is conscious of no boundaries — and piety, which goes up with its ardent offering to the very throne of the Eternal, and with undazzled sight lays its praises before Him — are both possible to it. The soul, in its pure state, when acting according to the law of its constitution, is fitted to love all those whom it hath seen; it aspires towards those whom it ENDOWED WITH PERSONAL LIFE. 59 has not yet seen, and is qualified to love Principalities and Powers, and to meet with the recognizing glance of affection every value in character, wherever that is shown. The tendency to advancement is therefore innate to it; and the terms which surround this, and limit its operation, are not apparent. Shall it stop with old age, the decline of the body? But any apparent pause at that period is adequately explained by the increasing debility of this instrument of the frame, which the soul must employ; and indications are not wanting, they even abound, in the lofty and singular wisdom of age, that there too this progress may still go forward, and that no increase of infirmity shall arrest it. Shall it stop with Death? the final dissolution of the physical mechanism? But taking away the hand, or the foot, does not limit or impede it ; nor does blotting out the eye, or cutting off the tongue. Amid all such outward deprivation of members, the Soul still lives, supreme and young, untouched by mutilation; and even the pain, which searches the frame, only quickens this often to a more intense and imperious activity. Shall any experience of hardship and dis- couragement arrest this tendency ? But it is interesting and very instructive to observe, how each experience which is met by the soul, and is mastered or endured by it, becomes a fresh helper to its developement; the 60 THEHUMANSOUL, temptation and the sorrow as well as the science, the failure and the fall as well as the victory, affording occasion for new endeavor; and all the rough experi- ences of the world but disciplining the force which they cannot break down. Where is the limit, then, to the continuance and the advancement of that self-conscious Life which the soul holds within it ? a continuance, and an advancement, of which the quick and urgent prophecies abound around us. We cannot discern it. We are instinctively impelled to believe that it outlies, at least, our present range of vision or of anticipation; that disaster does not furnish, and death does not fix it ; that when the body has been altogether shorn away from the Soul — when every stone and beam and bolt in this building for it has failed — that Soul, in its separate and spiritual life, released to a more triumphant activity, may march with grander step across the immense domain of truth, and may pour from itself, over wider realms of being, a more unchecked and copious love. So it may be ! So it shall be! Philosophy herself takes cognizance of the prospect, and Religion incorporates it among her verities. It is one of the certainties of Christianity, and not less a suggestion of true mental science. The capacities for progress which inhere in this so mar- vellous life, the soaring aspirations that refuse to be satisfied with any thing terrestrial, that have ENDOWED WITH PERSONAL LIFE. 61 "An Ideal too sublime For the low-hung sky of Time/* that transcend distances, years, and history, and tread upon the stars as on the dust of their temporary pave- ment, and that cannot rest outside of or beneath the Beatific Vision — ^these foretell an indefinite evolution of force, a still advancing and culminating progress, as possible for each personal and self-conscious spirit. And so is revealed, most fully and finally, the august dignity, the transcendent value, of the Life committed to that; the power, the wisdom, and the goodness of Him who hath wonderfully formed it! He has given this Life, which we cannot understand in the mystery of its nature. He has made this Life personal, indi- "vddual in each; with a yet stranger power dissecting it out from the consciousness of all others, even severing it radically from His own eternal being, so that it hath its forces and its sphere, as distinct as His own, and its own responsibility. And yet, at the same time. He has subtly connected the communication of this Life with the action of parents, thus making the Race inter-dependent and historic, organically relating each person to all others. And then He sets upon the soul, thus stocked with life, the crown which is given this by its vast capacity for developement and progress. He forms it full of the presages, quick with the germs, of indefinite evolution ! 62 THEHUMANSOUL, Herein then is revealed, in the very being of the Soul, in its endowment of existence, in most evident exhibition, the glorious character and power of the Creator. This is His topmost work on earth. On this, as the summit of the terrestrial system, lying but just beneath His creative mind, we properly take our primary stand, in contemplating His works. No wonder that according to the majestic imagination of the poet of Paradise, when Man was made, " A creature, who, not prone And brute, as other creatures, but endued With sanctity of Reason, might erect His stature, and upright, with front serene, Govern the rest, self-knowing;" — * * * * "the harp Had work, and rested not; the solemn pipe And dulcimer, all organs of sweet stop. All sounds on fret, by string or golden wire, Tempered soft tunings, intermixed with voice, Choral or unison; * * * the Empyrean Rang with hallelujahs. Thus was the Sabbath keptP Hence, from the centre, we may survey the circle, even outward to the periphery. From this high sum- mit, shall spread before us the landscape of nature; and God, I am sure, shall be seen in it all! But before we go forth to other provinces of the creation which tarry for our study, we must pause yet a little ENDOWED WITH PERSONAL LIFE. 63 longer upon this, and consider the Soul, whose marvel- lous endowment of life has thus been, shown us, in other and more particular relations. We must measure it against each of the Ideal Goods which it is fitted to realize, before we can fully understand or appreciate it. As capable of Knowledge, of Virtue, and of Happiness, so we must study it ; as capable by its constitution of Beneficent Action, framed for this, pressed towards it, by an impulse in its being; and, finally, as capable of a free, majestic, and unsearchable progress amid the Future. So regarding the Soul, which God hath ordained to be His personal representative on earth, we shall see, I am sure. His wisdom revealed in all its frame. And then, in the light which shines from this, His other works shall be interpreted to us ; and all shall be shown, radiant at each point, like fields laden with dew at morning, with the tokens of a kindness that like the dew hath been dispensed, in gracious stillness, but in boundless profusion, from the Benignity on high! LECTURE 11. Ladies and. Gentlemen : In the Lecture with which I commenced this series, I delineated briefly the plan which their Founder designed to have realized, and which the managers of his Trust propose to accomplish, in these successive annual courses. That plan, conceived in a religious and reverent spirit, contemplates the exhibition, year after year, of the Wisdom, the Goodness, and the Power of God, as these are made evident in the works of creation. The character and the power of the Most High are the theme, which must underlie all, and preside over all ; but the illustrations of it are to be gathered, not from the Scriptures, as is usual in the pulpit, but from the actual frame of things, which lies in part within ourselves, which arches above us, and spreads around us on every hand, and which reason accepts as the work of God's mind. Wherever there are bodies, forces, or laws, which manifest to us an Intelligent Will, designing, arranging, and causing them to subsist, thither extends, unlimited otherwise in its bounteous scope, the plan of these Lectures. Man and 66 THEHUMANSOUL the earth, the shell-fish and the sun, rocks, jewels, metals, mountains, all animals and plants, seas and their tides, the atmosphere and its changes, impon- derable elements as well as organized frames and structures, or the uses and the changes of inorganic masses — all may be brought to testify of God. The progress of History, too, the recorded develop ement of those spiritual forces which He has implanted in man his subject, and the operations of his Providence wherever he has manifestly intervened to overrule these, are legitimate to these discourses. And the design of their Founder will only then have been reahzed, when from these all has been unfolded an exhibition, more vivid and more impressive than would otherwise have been possible, of the omnipotence which formed, of the wisdom and goodness which planned and which guide, this complex, outreaching and inter- volved system. Indeed, the plan can never cease to need fresh accomplishment, as the researches of science bring to light fresh phenomena, or interpret the facts already observed into higher, more recondite and more perfect laws, revealing more clearly the mind of their Author. Amid the broad, the unbounded domain, thus opened before us — unbounded, except by that term on the one hand which the microscope cannot find, and that term on the other hand which the telescope cannot see — at CAPABLE OF KNOWLEDGE. 67 each Lecturer is to take his particular province; and by the more thorough exposition of that, is to exhibit more clearly the secrets of character and the mysteries of force which are lodged within it. So — even as in the building, the completeness of each part is the condition of the completeness of aU when assembled, and the statue in its niche must be just as apt and as perfect in its relations as the buttress or the spire, in order to the proportionate finish of the edifice — so, in this system of Lectures, continued perhaps through many generations, each department of the creation should be adequately treated, in order to the final completeness of the result. The mosses on the rock, as well as the trees that bend stately above them, the birds that fly and sing in heaven, as well as the clouds that gather and dissolve there, the mimosa that closes its sensitive petals if a footfall approaches, and the stars that reign silent on empyreal thrones — each must in turn give witness to the Most High; tUl the frame of Creation shall be aU eclaircised, not so much a piUar engraven around with the trophies of Omnipotence, as a solid but transparent sphere of crystal, lighted from within by the calm thought of God ! The province which I have selected for my own, not more because of preference than because of the con- trolling suggestions of my position, as the first in the series of these annual Lecturers, is the constitution of 68 THEHUMANSOUL, the Soul of Man; of that living and energizing principle within us, which we receive by bestowment of God, and which makes us what we are; itself superior to all else which we possess; itself the ground of all other possessions. It is manifest that this is the highest thing on earth. It is higher than the body, and gives to that its validity and value. It is higher, absolutely, than any thing around us ; higher in capacity, in essence, and in worth. The mountain is vast in size and weight. The weary feet clamber over it painfully. It offers homes along its breast to the enterprise which seeks them. Its quarries build palaces, and its woods timber navies. It lifts its crown of snow and ice against the sky, and stands amid the scene a very monarch of earth, primaeval and abiding. But the soul can compass that mountain in its thought, without weariness or pain; can take it up and weigh it, in the balances of exact mathematical computation ; and spurning it then, as a mere footstool for its activity, can spring from it to that boundless expanse amid which the mountain is less than is the least of the dust-grains of the balance to its solid bulk. No element is so rare, no substance is so costly, no other life is so delicate and ethereal, that it can be matched as an equal with the Soul. This stands back of all operation of man ; of war and diplomacy, of religion and of science, of art and literature, of society and CAPABLE OF KNOWLEDGE. 69 of government. Itself unseen and inaccessible, it scans all else. Itself unreached by any sense, it feels or suffers whatever we experience. The moment it has left the body, you may hew that to pieces, or burn it to ashes, without causing a throb of sensation within it. But so long as this remains, it vitalizes the body, surveys nature, reaches outward to the Unseen ; exam- ines, and either accepts or rejects with its own free activity, what claim to be Revelations ; is the actor or the sufferer in all the successes and the endurances of life. It transcends constitutionally, in its being and its action, the limitations of space. It surpasses and oversteps the boundaries of time. It is, as in- tuitively and inevitably it is recognized by every observer, the highest existence within the compass of that portion of the Creation which is as yet accessible to our study. And as thus first in importance and dignity, transcendent in its essence, it is first to be examined in considering God's works. And as we contemplate the constitution of the Soul, certain things become apparent in it immediately and clearly demonstrating God in it, and illustrating the character and the power which have formed it. It presents itself to us, the moment we regard it, as a Repository of Life : endowed with this Life by the win of the Creator, and consciously replete with it. And in this its primary aspect and relation, it chal- 70 lenges our wonder, and stimulates our praise. For the Life thus imparted to the soul, and by it thenceforth possessed and infolded, is a spiritual force incomprehen- sible by us. We cannot produce it in any foreign substance, through any operation which we can put forth. Nay, we cannot understand it, as it subsists in ourselves. We only know that it is, and is active, and that we ourselves have being and capacity by reason of it. It refers us thus at once, the moment we consider it, to that supreme and omnipotent Will which alone could have created it, and which surpasses our thought as the cope of the heavens surpasses the reach of our hand. And so, for another thing, this Life which the Soul by its constitution holds within it, its elementary endowment, is not general, indeterminate, as air is, or light, or any more subtle electrical force, but it is personal in each, and strictly individual ; divided from all other Life in the universe, and made to stand and act by itself, in a final, self-conscious and perfect unity. It is inwardly and by nature complete, in each one ; not capable of being essentially commingled with any other ; fenced out, even, and divided from a participation in the infinite consciousness of the mind which created it. And so the Soul becomes personal and responsible. While sympathizing with others it is set apart from them, and ordained to endure and to work for itself. CAPABLE OF KNOWLEDGE. 71 And yet, though thus perfect and individual in each, the life which every Soul hath within it has come to it, hy a special ordination of God, in trans- mission from others ; and so it is intimately and organically related to the similar Life in them and in all, in all behind, and all around it. The race of human intelligences is thus made continuous and interdepend- ent ; each successive generation recei^dng from its an- cestors, and transmitting to its posterity, this subtle, supreme, and inimitable spirit which vitalizes all, and all being confederated in a necessary society. And, finally, the Soul, thus planned and thus constituted, and thus interlinked by its constitution of being with a system of similar and equal intelligences, is pregnant with the germs and is prescient of the certainty of continuance and evolution. It finds in every living faculty, in each aptitude for culture and each sense of unperfectness, as weU as in every winged thought and each ascending aspiration of desire, the promise of a Future, of loftier attainment. It wears upon its brow the prophecy of a progress unlimited by any bound as yet evident. K even here, then, we should pass from this theme, I think we could hardly have failed to receive an impression of the wisdom, the goodness, and the power of Him who conceived and who framed the Human Soul. Demonstrably, God, the Infinite, is in this; with a 72 force which we cannot search out to perfection; with a spirit of character which we never can properly cease to revere. But now going forward from this primary view of the constitution of the Soul, it is proper that we consider it more minutely and more largely, as I intimated before, in the different powers that are associated within it ; especially as these relate it to the goods which all must feel to be desirable for it; for which, indeed, the instinctive affirmations of every soul declare it to have been formed. As related to Knowledge, to Virtue, to Virtuous and Ben^ificent Operation upon others, as related to Happiness, as related above all to a Future Career of enjoyment and of usefulness, how, and how amply, is it furnished with powers by the gift of its Creator ? We must test it thus, we must measure it against these supreme Ideals, which the intuitive conviction of all men accepts as expressing the highest attainments of the Soul, in order to estimate it ; to see how clearly and how com- prehensively its author is displayed in it. And the answers to these successive questions, as we reach them one by one, will exhibit to us fully the insignia of His power, and the illustrations of His character, so far as these are found in this living, personal, and advancing spirit. • In the present Lecture I propose to consider the CAPABLE OF KNOWLEDGE. 73 constitution of the Soul as related to the first of these, to the attainment of Knowledge; and to show how discreetly and how richly it is equipped for realizing this good. The others will follow this, in a natural order. This meets us at the threshold, and is first to be considered. I. Take, then, in the first instance, what is usually called the faculty of Perception; the power, that is, which the Soul possesses, of apprehending and ohserving that tvhich is without it; the power which lies nearest our consciousness of being, and which is the first to be unfolded in our mental operations. This power is universal. It is none the less wonderful because it is universal. The child, on awaking to the sense of existence, looks up to the loving face of the mother bending tenderly over it, sufiused with the tears perhaps of maternal anxiety, but with a radiant bloom of happiness beaming through those tears, as the smiling sunshine beams through raindrops, till a very bow of promises spreads all around it. It sees the form of the father, beside this ; the forms of attendants ; the new-discov- ered aspects of the room and its furniture. Vaguely and darkly, yet really and instantly, with the awakening of consciousness, it reaches forth to these phenomena of an outward existence, and an undefined perception of them becomes impressed upon its thought. And 74 continually, as that child's mind conies to further developement, it apprehends these things which are around and above it, -with greater clearness, exactness and completeness, and extends its observations over a more ample range. At last, it sees all things exterior to itself, yet accessible to its senses, easily and fully ; and is bent on exploring, to the laws which are beneath them, the appearances which confront it. We live thus, and move, at each instant of our being, in the midst of a universe which the Soul has discovered, and which is to each one as recent and complete as if no other had ever seen it. The daisy brightening in the shadow of the hedge-row, or strewing the fields as with golden flakes ; the trees spreading their whispering roof of tremulous foliage, or holding against the blast their rugged arms, inlocked with a trunk deep-set and rooted ; brooks, lapsing or leaping from their summit springs ; the ocean, which takes these to itself, without an added ripple on its bays, or an increase of its tides ; all sounds, of mirth, or suffering, or fear; the drowsy hum of multitudinous insects ; the arrowy song of birds, swifter than wings, aspiring to the skies; all forms and tones of human life ; the immeasurable azure which is over us every- where, brilliant with stars, or flecked with clouds, or made the blue and boundless realm of the victorious Sun ; — all these, and all the visible system which these CAPABLE OF KNOWLEDGE. 75 but partly represent, the Soul perceives. It goes out to them, in its observant, inspecting glance. It meets and hears them, if they are vocal, with its attent sense. It apprehends them all, arranges them in their natural and obvious order, assigns to each its place and service, and lives amid them as in a home reared for it and furniture d at the commencement of its being. It in a sense masters, appropriates these things, which are without and beyond it, through its inherent and dominating faculty of observation; and so it feels, instinctively, that they were made for it and its uses, not it for them. Observe then this faculty, so signal and occult, yet common to aU men, a part of the native endowment of the Soul. See not only how indispensable and how effective it is, in fitting us to gain knowledge, but what mysteries of Wisdom and what supremacy of Power are revealed in the gift of it to the personal yet impalpable spirit within us. It is idle to say that the EYE sees these phenomena ; that the ear, through its delicate and harmonious constitution, becomes sensitive to these sounds and cadences of the creation. The eye sees nothing, except the soul be behind it. The ear is not quickly alive to melodies, if the spirit that listened and responded within has ceased to make it the avenue of sensation. Each outward organ is a gateway, and nothing more, through which the Soul 76 THEHUMANSOUL, goes forth to meet the impressions of the world ; through which these come in turn to seek it, bringing their gifts of frankincense and myrrh. Every organ is as perfect in its physical conformation, the moment after the spirit has left the body, as the moment before this ; yet the change is from perfect sensibility and activity to utter deadness. The personal faculty that perceives and observes, is behind all these. It is lodged in the Soul, and belongs to that as a nature. From whence does that gain it ? How is it enabled to use this eye, this ear, this hand, and all these solid and physical instruments, to bring itself into connection with the universe around it? We cannot answer, except with the response of affectionate rever- ence to Him who created it. No anatomist can unfold to us the secret of this faculty, the ^hiding of its power.' We follow the lines of the sensible structure, we penetrate its recesses, we analyse the relations of each part to the rest, as his expert science discloses them to us ; we set them all up again, in their organic and perfect frame ; but we get no answer to this searching question. ' Thou hast not yet attained,' is the reply which comes from each section of the system ; the answer returned from the interlocked whole. We pass from the bones, from the muscles and ligaments, from the veins that have so lately been filled with currents, from the delicate membranes, vessels, and CAPABLE OF KNOWLEDGE. 77 tissues, to the nerves which are beneath them ; and we follow these, in their almost vanishing lines, to the brain which collects them in its ampler substance, and in which most anatomists place the shrine of the spirit. But still we have gaiaed no answer to our question. There lies the nerve dissected before us, in a tangible form, which the finger may lift, and the eye, as assisted by the microscope, examine; and now there is no sensation in it. You may twist it around your finger, you may snap it or bum it, and it will not respond. It is simply material, and therefore blind. And there the brain lies, poured bodily out in its cellular mass, white, rounded, and as passive before the touch, as dead to all impression, as the branch of the coral reef. The anatomist, therefore, has not helped us a particle, with all his nimble and careful skill. He has not advanced us a step on our way to the solution of this mystery : How is it that the Soul, which is spiritual, invisible, can look out through this matter which is sensible and opaque? It is as difficult to understand how it perceives through the brain, as if its instrument of inspection were the flesh or the bone. We can no more comprehend how the delicate nerve is made its minister, than how the hardier muscle could be, or how the hollow tube of the vein. The mystery lies in the Soul itself, and there at last all analysis must leave it; in that sublime and unsearchable constitution by 78 THEHUMANSOUL, which He who formed this imponderable spirit, gave to it the faculty of subordinating the material, and of looking out through the palpable organs on all that surrounds it. From the end of the finest attenuated nerve, that runs inward from the surface to the citadel of the brain, we step off at once upon this mystery of the spirit. We confront at last that marvellous, subtle, and inestimable faculty, which God has made to reside in the Soul, by which it becomes the lord of the body, and through which, though never apparent itself, it makes the universe apparent to it ! Itself infixed within the body, it can go out to Sirius or Canopus in its scrutiny. Itself unheard in any movement, it can catch each wave of melody in the air. It makes the whole frame transparent around it; and while it remains silent, secret, never seen, even at that moment when it passes from the body, it sees, apprehends, and examines all else, as if it went forth on wings of light, as if it actually touched and grappled the distant and the near. II. But this power of apprehending and observing what is without it, is not the only, nor is it the highest one, which the soul possesses, through which it becomes acquainted with the various forms and facts of exist- ence. It has also what is usually called the faculty of Reflection or Introspection; the power, that is, of observing and studying Us own invisible states and acts ; CAPABLE OF KNOWLEDGE. 79 and this is as directly related as the other to the attainment of Knowledge. As a demonstrated power, consciously and intelli- gently used by the soul, this facult}^ is developed later than the other, in the series of our experience; and because it is not so necessary as that to the conduct of life, it is not so constantly, or even so evidently, exer- cised by all. But it is part of the native and normal endowment of every soul ; an item in the inventory of the equipment God has given it. It comes out in some more visibly than in others, but in all really, with the progress of life. And when rightly examined there is found something in it not less but more surprising and mysterious than in that upon which we have hitherto been remarking. In a still superior exhibition of His wisdom, it sets God before us. As soon as the cliild is conscious of being, he is conscious of feeling, of thinking, of affirming. Indeed it is through his consciousness of this that he becomes aware of his personal existence. That existence is like the atmosphere, not apparent itself, but made apparent by the effects and the activities that are conditioned upon it; by the perfumes that breathe through it, the lights that shoot or stream atross it, and the winds that set it in motion against us. Because the child feels, he knows that he is. In the fact that he enjoys, that he suffers, tliat he thinks, his personal constitution 80 THEHUMANSOUL, and sensitive life unfold themselves to him. And ever afterward this power of self-observation and scrutiny is more clearly exhibited, as the soul comes to larger developement and culture. In the man it is a faculty so habitual and familiar, employed so easily, that he hardly understands until it is shown to him how subtle and transcendent a power it is ; what proofs are in it of the co-working kindness and power that have formed him. But think of it ! — ' I find myself here,' each one of us may say this evening, ^ a being of peculiar spiritual frame, in a state of developement which is also peculiar and perfectly individual. I have certain affections, towards friends and associates; toward society, and towards God ; which are my own and not another's, and with which no other may intermeddle. There may be others, in other persons, analogous to these ; but these are mine, dissevered vitally, dissevered altogether, from the similar experience in every other, special to me, and as perfect in themselves as if they had no- where any equal or parallel. I have certain native and cherished desires ; for happiness and its conditions, for friendship, literature, influence, a home. I have a desire for protracted existence, and for progress in all that is beautiful and worthy. Others may discern a resemblance to ijhese in their different hearts, but these are my own, an inseparable part of my spiritual developement; only recogniz'ed by my consciousness, CAPABLE OF KNOWLEDGE. 81 and hidden in their experience from every other. And so I have hopes, premonitions, foresights ; I have cer- tain positive self-acquired possessions, of knowledge and belief; I have fears of disaster, regrets for the past, penitential accusations, the remorseful consciousness of ill-desert and exposure; or, on the other hand, I have a cheerful sense of forgiveness, a lofty and firm interior assurance of the complacency of pure beings ; an unspeakable consciousness of the favor of God. All these are my own, a part of my life, revealed to my personal intuition alone, and in their nature unshared by any others, however others may sympathize with them. These enjoyments and these sorrows, these dreads and these desires, these memories, these aspira- tions, these loves and these aversion^, these convictions and beliefs, these fancies that touch the whole earth with their brightness, these ' thoughts that wander through eternity ;' all have their origin, their realm and their reign, within my soul. They make it populous with their animated presence. They are part of myself; of my experience, and my activity ; and it were to change my very identity to separate them from me. More than the flush inhering in the ruby, or the vari-colored beauty that almost pulsates in the opal, they characterize my soul.' All these are invisible, you observe. All these are within us. Yet neither their impalpableness, nor their 82 THE HUMAN SOUL, nearness to ourselves, can hide them from our simul- taneous observation ; but even while they are arising, or while they are fleeting instantaneously away, they pass before our introspective glance as evidently as the pageant that marches through the street before the glance of the eye. The same soul which feels them, observes them also. It can take them up and study them, at its own free pleasure. According to the consciousness of each of us, it hath this singular bi-fold capacity, by which it can erect itself above the level of itself, can stand outside of its own activity, and survey while it experiences the emotion and the thought. The physical eye, which is the instrument of the soul, sees only what is exterior to itself. If it would search its own structure, it must seek to learn that though examining the equal organ in another. The interior eye, which is the soul, introverting its gaze, and reduplicating its vision, can examine itself; and whUe it is in the very act of observing what passes before it, can see how it observes, and how each ray of perception and thought impresses its sensitive spiritual structure. The beating muscle of the heart is disturbed if we begin to reckon its pulsations. But the soul, which throbs and palpitates with desire, or thrills with the motions of unutterable love, will measure its own motions even while they are in progress, and will count while it distributes the currents of its feeling. CAPABLE OF KNOWLEDGE. 83 The eye cannot see the air around it. The soul can see the form, the measure, the proportion, of every airiest fancy or feeling, whose presence within it no sense discovers, whose luminous outline drops no shadow, whose ^printless foot' troubles no echo. There is here, then, not only a singular alertness and quick- ness of faculty, but a singular duality of faculty and function. Holding its own present thought before its vision, the soul can consider and investigate that, as if it were a permanent, palpable entity, existing apart from it. Turning back upon itself, in the exercise of its powers, it can scrutinize those powers through their own operation; can search them to their bases, and make them tell their mutual relations. Projecting before it its very feeling, which at that instant intensely lives and dominates in it, it can separately consider it, and feel again in view of its existence. This is a faculty, therefore, this one of Reflection, so fine and fleet, so full of spiritual insight and mastery, that we could not imagine it if we did not experience it. As I said, we are in practice so habituated to it that we hardly appreciate it. Its occult mystery fails to impress us, until another holds it before us. But the moment we think of it, we see that such a power of discerning the impalpable, of observing what passes or momently rests in the soul itself, this power of intro- spection and self-observation, has a wonderful height 84 THEHUMANSOUL, and dignity upon it. It illustrates the unsearchable wisdom and power that combine to create the human soul. The crystal, the stone, exhibit certain laws to us; but they give no evidence of an individual existence. The tree shows life ; and the animal another, higher and more powerful. The animal has powers of observation and motion, which evidently separate him from all beneath him ; and in certain higher classes of the animal kingdom, as the bee or the beaver, the bird or the dog, we discern an instinctive perception of relations, which enables them to arrange their action methodically, according to the laws established around them. But in none of these do we find this power of Reflection ; this capacity for an accurate and intuitive self-analysis ; this ability to observe and to measure the states which are purely internal, having gained no expression in word or act. This pertains to man only. Side by side it stands with that other faculty of which I have spoken, the faculty of Perception, which observes outward nature. As this has for its objects intellectual processes or emotive states, and not physical forces and material forms, it seems even higher and more recondite than that. It is a special and lofty preroga- tive of our spiritual being ; allying that being, most directly and evidently, with the infinite Intelligence which comprehends aU created spirits in the scrutiny CAPABLE OF KNOWLEDGE. 85 of its thought, and which ever contemplates with undazzled clearness, and ever enjoys with unbounded pleasure, its own eternal and unequalled constitution. Not outward, only, but inward also, we are privileged to look. The river and the sea, the mountain and the metal, the tribes of plants, the races of animals, the face of man, all these are open to our observation ; and even the soul, which no finger can touch, no balances weigh, and no microscope discern, must render up the feelings and the thoughts that lie within it, to our intent and imperial spirit. The conditions of true Knowledge are so far complete; for all the necessary materials for that are put within our reach by Him who hath ordained us. III. But now there is another faculty inseparably associated with these of Perception and Reflection, in the constitution of the soul, which further prepares it for the attainment of Knowledge, and which equally illustrates the character and the power of Him who forms it. It is what we ordinanly call the Judgment ; the logical and analytic faculty, that is ; the power of analysing and mentally reconstructing ivhat is observed^ so that each particular form or fact shall be discriminated from others, shall be assigned to its true place in the system which it subserves, and be made to render up the special meanings that are in it. With the operation of this faculty every one is fami- 86 THE HUMAN SOUL liar. Of its possession the soul in each of us^ and in each of our compeers, is intuitively certain. It is part of our endowment ; developed and instructed, but not produced, by cultivation. Yet no one can go back to its origin or its seat, and no one can overstate its importance or its dignity. The child, for example, among its first acts, distin- guishes with certainty the mother from the father; distinguishes each from the nurse, from a stranger, from the other children of the household. It early begins to distinguish the room to which it is accustomed from the carriage, from the open air, and then from other rooms that are comparatively strange to it. Gradually the objects within the room are separated from each other, are decided to be diiFerent, and are assigned to their several places and uses, by its enlarg- ing power of thought. The chair by the crib-side is seen to stand in contrast with the table beyond it ; the picture on the wall with the plaything on the floor, with the mirror or the mantel. The voices and forms of its companions are separated ; the colors of dress ; the periods of the day ; books, pictures, flowers, foods, the streets of the city, and the buildings that line them ; or roads, bridges, fields, birds, the lake or brook, the distant hills, if its developement begin amid country scenes. At last this faculty of division and analysis — which in some respects is higher and more purely intel- CAPABLE OF KNOWLEDGE. 87 lectual than either which I have named, but which is just as native and universal as they, and which comes to carry them to their useMness and fruition — ^is brought to full and continual exhibition, as childhood melts by degrees into youth, and youth is merged in a cultivated, practised and persistent manhood. It ranges then over a vastly expanded domain of facts. It acts with a vigor, a celerity and a confidence, which, as matched against the timid and hesitating though real action of the child, in similar directions, surpasses that, as the muscle of manhood surpasses while it involves the muscle of the child. Then knowledges spring from it, and arts are bom of it. All Science gains developement through the exercise of this power. Philosophies take their rise in it. And Inven- tions, which do but accept and apply the principles of science, or carry into apphcation the truths of philosophy, trace their parentage to it. The botanist, for example, selects his special department in the creation, dividing it out from the neighboring domain of the chemist, the mineralogist, or the student of geology; and amid this he finds an ample field for his research. He discriminates within it individuals, fami- lies, and classes from each other. The most obvious differences, which the child's eye detects, the differences of color, of height, or of evident form, are not those which detain him. He penetrates through these 88 superficial phenomena, to the structural laws wh^cli underlie and outlast them ; and from these less palpable, but more vital peculiarities, he builds up his system, arranging into orderly companies and platoons the seemingly heterogeneous productions of the spring. Each plant finds its fellow, before his quickened faculty, through a sympathy more recondite sometimes than that which allies two persons together whom all would pronounce at first sight dissimilar. Each family finds its kindred, or its including group ; each group or class its legitimate place, amid the innumerable out-ranging varieties of vegetable life. And it is not till he has distinguished and classified them all, has located each, and has organized their series — with the careful application of principles of division which commend themselves to his disciplined and accurate judgment — that the botanist is satisfied. He must reproduce, through his analysis, the thought and plan of the Creator himself, as He arranged these successive par- terres and plantations of beauty, before this faculty in him is satisfied. Until he has done this, it will not let him rest; but perpetually it haunts him with the suggestion of facts which he has not investigated, or of facts which his principles of division and arrangement have proved insufiicient to interpret and to reconcile. The same force is shown, in a perfectly harmonious and parallel exhibition, in the chemist, the geologist, CAPABLE OF KNOWLEDGE. 89 the ornithologist, the astronomer ; in him who considers the configuration, the structure, and the relations and uses, of shells or bones, of earths or metals ; in every dUigent and successful student of any part of the Creation. The same force is shown, as really if not as obviously, in the jurist and the publicist; and in him who reads history, not as a mere aggregation of particu- lars, but as the expression of great and permanent spiritual forces, the record or the index of one advancing plan of Providence. Everjrwhere, by the exercise of this faculty, true knowledge is gathered; from that' exercise, indeed, as conjoined with that of the faculty of observation, this knowledge springs, as the tree from its seed ; — the observer of Woolsthorpe arising from the fall of the apple in his garden to the induction of that invisible law which binds as well Orion and the Pleiades, which briugs forth Mazzaroth in his season, and guides Arcturus with his sons; Kepler, before Newton, unfolding from the data afforded by the observations of the accomplished Tycho Brahe those laws of the relations and motions of the planetary and stellar systems which have never been superseded, which have been the rule and the guide indeed of subsequent observations, and have prophetically pointed out its course of triumph to the studious telescope ; Gibbon, rearing the arch of his great history between ancient Rome and modern Europe; and Leibnitz, com- 90 THEHUMANSOUL, posing the separate treatises which seem to have been intended by him as the several parts of a universal science of matter and of mind ; — all^ in the use of the one innate faculty, and in obedience to the commands which it laid upon them ; the whole sisterhood of sciences arising into being before the wave of its wand, and all things animate, and all things inanimate, being made by it to troop around the soul as the animals around Adam when he gave them their names; the very stars in their courses being marshalled in their place by it: Philosophies, also, as I have said, become possible to us, through the presence of this faculty, and its ex- ercise by us ; as combined, of course, with that faculty of Reflection which has been previously discussed. Through it we learn not only to analyse, but also to estimate, our own mental states ; to separate those which are unlike or distinguishable; to set in com- parison those which are similar; to combine those which are inter-related. And so we arrive at the dignity of self-knowledge. Afterwards, then, from this knowledge of ourselves, we can reason out confidently to a knowledge of others, who are peers of ourselves, and who stand on the same gradation of existence. He who knows his own thoughts, by the exercise of the judgment, can read the thoughts of another as well. He who has sounded his own springs of affection, can CAPABLE OF KNOWLEDGE. 91 measure, or at least can apprehend and consider, the similar ones in others. And he who knows how unlimited in their range are the infinite desires and aspirations of his soul, and who is able to evolve and to set in their order the laws of that spirit which is broader in the scope of its thought and its hope than the creation in its range, can go around the souls of others, and count their palaces, and number their tow- ers, and examine all their costly and decorated frame. That a higher power still than these two uniting ones of the Reflective faculty and the Judgment, is needful to the production of a perfect Philosophy, must undoubtedly be admitted. But yet these two are indispensable to that, as well as its most effective auxiliaries. And the Judgment, as using the materials furnished by a careful introspection, can construct a most valuable science of the mind. And yet this faculty, which thus surpasses and thus completes the primary ones beneath it, is nothing rare, unwonted, extraordinary, possessed by few, and the creature in them of special felicities of structure or of training. It is part of the native endowment of each soul. That has by creation, by birthright, this faculty not only of perceiving the immediate phenomena, but of inferring the laws which pervade and determine them; of advancing outward, from the perceptions it first makes, till it groups and combines what seemed 92 THE HUMAN SOUL, inharmonious, and embraces* in the unity of a compre- hending law what looked most diverse. This is shown in commerce, and in legal procedures, as well as in the pursuit of astronomy, botany, ethics, or psychology. It is constantly revealed in the most familiar voluntary processes. It centrally lives in every soul, and helps to make that what it is. Conceive, then, crystals, metals or plants, endowed with this subtle intellectual faculty of analysis and arrangement by some action of yours, reflect what omnipotence that would show in your will, what wisdom in your mind, and what kindness in your heart, and what immeasurable import- ance it would confer upon them — and you see what God hath done for you, in so organizing the Soul! Not only are sciences born of this faculty. In- ventions equally, as I said, spring from it; and they as clearly illustrate its nature, and demonstrate its value. This is true of both physical and spiritual inventions. Of the former, the steam-engine is a sufficient example, as it is the most powerful and conspicuous product of modern inventive and mechanical skill. The fact that the cover of the tea-kettle rises, before the expansive power of steam, while it sinks again, the instant that steam has escaped, under the silent oppressions of the air — herein is the element, as all of us know, of that gigantic and unconquerable implement which now heaves up and down, with ever- CAPABLE OF KNOWLEDGE. 93 repeated and unwearied oscillation its iron anas, cleaving with ease the stormiest seas, drawing travel- ers in its train that might people a village, as it sweeps over the earth, and driving the thousand flying shuttles that clothe society with their beautiful fabrics ; carrying Civihzation, Commerce, and Protestantism to the mas- tery, of the world. The cotton-gin, the power-loom, the printing-press, the mariner's compass, microscopes, telescopes, the watch, fire-arms, balloons, railways, borers that eat "with ceaseless tooth through mountain rock, reapers with flying arms and bladed hands sweeping the wheat-field ; in a word, the whole series and array of inventions, which time has gathered, which use has matured, and which constitute now the copious and splendid apparatus of society, have sprung from the same intellectual faculty. A fact being perceived, the force underneath it has been explored and investigated by the inquisitive soul. The judgment has then arrranged, and the hands, its obedient servitors, have compacted, these invisible forces in new combinations. And so have been produced these manifold implements, deriving their efficiency from the powers inexhaustible which fill the creation, applying those powers to the furtherance of man's interests, and lining the armory of our peaceful civilization with trophies more precious than those of all conquerors. No invention has been dropped like an aerolite upon the earth; no invention 94 , THEHtJMANSOUL, has been born like a diamond in the darkness, to be picked up as easily by the idle and the careless, as by the industrious, the solicitous, and the thoughtful. But in each one the soul has been expressed, and in each one the consenting and cooperating faculties of which I have spoken have had their demonstration; the power to perceive facts — ^itself a high and mysterious prerogative — ^being crowned and completed by the power to explain them, and to find the invisible forces which are beneath. Most evidently is the Soul, which hath these powers, allied with Him who planned and formed, who now upholds, the frame of things ! And the same is as true of the other inventions, of a spiritual order, to which these are subordinate; of the invention of the state, as the fortress of society; and of government as its organ, with the adaptation of its methods and forms of administration to the wants of nations ; of the invention of literature, in its differ- ent departments, as adapted to instruct, to strengthen, and to enrich the thought of mankind; the invention of religions, and forms of worship, where these are not appointed by an authoritative Revelation. All arise from this faculty, first, of knowing ourselves, through the act of reflection, and then of reasoning outward from ourselves to other beings, and arranging institu- tions, legislations, letters, by their perceived wants. Theologies themselves are thus suggested ; and we CAPABLE OF KNOWLEDGE. 95 arise from the spirit which God has formed, in all its original constitutional endowment bearing his image, to Him who on high surveys seraphim in their orders, combining an unbounded intelligence and sensibihty with an absolute will, and reigning in the constant supremacy of goodness. We are thus related directly, by our nature, to the very highest knowledge. We are enabled to surpass the domains of science ; to superadd spiritual to material inventions ; and to reason upward from ourselves, through all ascending ranks of being, to Him who is throned above them all; the reflection of whose eternal mind is mirrored upon ours, but to whose ours is the sun-ray to the orb; is the drop of dew, in its tiny sphericity, to the infinite azure swim- ming ever overhead ! K any thing hinders man from the attainment of such knowledge, it is something out- side of his mental endowment. ly. But further, we must add to these faculties of the soul which prepare it to gain knowledge, the eminent faculty of Reason am) Imaginatiox ; the power, that is, which the mind possesses, of conceiving and of contemplating what is purely Ideal ; what never has had exhibition in phenomena, or direct representation in the facts of experience. This is as necessary as either of the others to the attainment of true knowledge. Indeed, it is primary; necessary to give value, coher- 96 THEHUMANSOUL, ence and usefulness to either of them, and it is as universally possessed by the soul. It takes notice of the axioms, the final and permanent laws of being, according to which all phenomena arise, upon which they are conditioned, and by which they are always to be measured and interpreted. It affirms these principles, and assures us of their validity; not so much believing them because they are proved, as seeing them because they are ; bearing an interior witness to them, which feels no hesitancy, and allows ^ no contradiction. That the whole is greater than a 'w' part ; that two things, each of which is equal to a third, are equal to each other; that the finite is necessarily conditioned upon the Infinite; that the sense of obligation implies a Law as its measure, and a Being as its executive ; — ^these are such principles as this faculty affirms. It affirms them with a final, self-supporting authority, from which there can be no appeal; and because it affirms them, and thus establishes a perma- nent platform upon which investigation and analysis may proceed, the further operations of the judgment become legitimate. They would have no basis, they would be governed by no rule, they would cease to be trustworthy, except for this architectonic faculty. But not to the affirmation of such 'axioms,' as we call them, such self-evidencing principles, is this faculty confined. It concerns itself also with all highest CAPABLE OF KNOWLEDGE. 97 themes, and brings us report respecting tham; with the themes that transcend, as well as with those that precede and underlie, the analyses of the judgment. And everywhere its characteristic is that it speaks with authority, and brings its sufficient and undeniable evidence in its very affirmation. It takes this devel- opement in the truly spiritual and transcendental philosopher; in the masters of art, of eloquence, or of song. It is in aU a religious faculty, by way of eminence ; because approaching most nearly the mind of the Creator. There is a beauty, above the beauty wliich is shown amid nature ; ^ a light that never was, on sea or land ;' a touching and transcendent music, before whose strains, unworldly and Divine, the harps above might pause to listen. To these the soul of the true and high artist instinctively reaches upward. It is they that select and ordain him their minister. And as he catches the vision or the voice of them, through his intent yet calm Imagination — ^which is only the Reason looking upward for its objects, and then informing the humbler powers — ^he pours them out, on poetry or music that are uttered for the ages; on paintings that glow with a flame of thought, celestial and unconsuming ; on cathedrals whose solid and deco- rated frame springs upward like a psalm, and loses itself like praise upon the air. The glory of High Art is thus attained. It does, not come from a careful 7 98 THE HUMAN SOUL. inspection of models and forms, and the exquisite rendering of the conceptions thus gained, in tints and tones. It is born of the visions that descend from above on the lofty Intelligence aspiring to reach them, and lighted when they touch it like Memnon by the sunbeam. It comes from that which to Sense is invisible, but to Reason is evident, expressed approx- imately in words and lines. And therefore we are certain that in all High Art the painter, the builder, or the poet, has not realized his ideal ; while yet in some respects he has surpassed his intent, and has ' builded better than he knew.' The thought has possessed him, not he the thought ; and while it has inspired and elevated his work, it has been too high for that fully to utter it. Philosophy, in its highest forms, requires this faculty, as I intimated before, and becomes possible to us only through its possession. As a mere ^science of mind,' as it is sometimes called — a superficial arrangement, that is, by the analytic power, of the mental phenomena which reflection reveals to us — ^it has comparatively little value. Into it there must come higher elements of truth, to ennoble and complete it. The perpetual and universal validity of Truth ; the authority of Right, and its immutable character ; the existence of a system of moral order in the universe, not disclosed to any eye, not breaking in its movement against any sense, CAPABLE OF KNOWLEDGE. 99 but real, imperative, and discerned by the soul ; these, and the personal being of God, as the sum of all good, requiring and imparting that good among his creatures ; these are the elements which Philosophy must include, to make it truly noble and enduring. As really as Theology — which runs parallel with Philosophy, through a part of its course, though it stretches on, with a grander current, beyond the term of the develop ement of this — ^it implies the use of that power in the soul by which we apprehend the purely Ideal, and affirm an ex- istence not demonstrated from without, nor discovered within; that inward eye of authoritative Reason, to which the palpable compact of elements around us, which we call earth, is not more real, is hardly more evident, than the system above, which no eye hath seen. When this grand power is freely and justly used, Philosophy takes its purest form. With accuracy, it unites dignity; with clearness of insight, it combines elevation and scope of vision. It interprets the facts of human nature, and translates into forms which all may apprehend, high spiritual verities. It is thence- forth a vision and a power in civilization : " a possession forever," to the Race which it illuminates. And to the eloquence which utters it, like that of Plato or of Paul, the centuries listen. There is an eloquence, with the judgment alone beneath it, like the ostrich in its motion ; running swiftly over the earth, never traversing 100 the skies; and there is an eloquence, informed by the Reason, and expressing the substance of great phi- losophies, that is to the other like the eagle in its flight; soaring upward from the sensuous, inhabiting higher regions, and descending from above on each eminent theme. And this is the eloquence which lives and reigns, which inspires and exalts ; because coming from a mind accustomed attentively to consider the Invisible, to contemplate truths which in their nature are unseen, but which in their being and history are primeval, and in their value immortal. Not outward, only, or inward, but upward also, the Soul must look, to gain the highest and most valuable knowledge. And the power to do this points instantly to God, as its author and architect, as the spire of the temple points upward to the skies. The perceptive, the re- flective, the inductive powers, give place to the Reason, in the scale of real excellence. The develope- ment of this makes the Seer among men. The in- struction of this, and its elevation by God, prepares one to be His veritable Prophet. And yet there is nothing rare in this faculty. It is not unprecedented, naturally extraordinary, in the human constitution. Instead, it is quite as universally found, it is quite as early and prominently shown, as any other faculty within the compass of the soul. Its light lighteth every man that cometh into the world; CAPABLE OF KNOWLEDGE. 101 and in the youngest, or in the rudest, it has sometimes the most vivid exhibition. Revelation appeals to it, directly and especially; and Revelation is designed to be permanent and imiversal in the range of its address. In childhood, we meet this faculty always. The child feels a certainty of the fixedness of Truth, of the instant and abiding authority of Duty. He has a sense of the Invisible around him. God is real to him ; the Angel near ; Right imperative ; Eternity waiting. He walks amid a glory, streaming down from the unseen; a glory which he cannot altogether comprehend, or articulately utter, but which redeems each scene from dulness, making the night-faU more portentous, the day-break more inspiring in its beauty. And so is exhibited at the start of our being — most evident, then, and only too apt to be sacrificed after- ward, or materially obscured, in the progress of our subsequent analytic enlightenment — this power of the soul. Genius itself is more the carrying on of this power, amid all mental growth, into all acquisition, than the superadding of any other to it. The man who cherishes it, finds it afterward combining in beautiful conjunction with his other mental forces, and giving them all a nobler grace. It makes him lord not of the Seen only, but of the Unseen as weU. He walks amid the Ideal, as well as on the earth which is sensible and near. He rises from the mount that 102 THE HUMAN SOUL, may be touched and that burns, and the laws that are audible, to the law which is spiritual, and the City on high, with its sublimer convocations. He apprehends, by intuition, the certainties of Truth. In no wildness of fantasy, in no extasy of trance, but in the legitimate use of a power as native to his soul as any other, he contemplates moral truths more august than the stars ; he finds the Possible as near him as the Actual ; he has the vision of a spiritual Governor. The Reason, we call this, as distinguished from the Judgment, in investigating truth. The Imagination, we call it, when it gives its visions to other powers, to be by them interpreted into formsr Emancipating the soul from subjection to space, to time, to the Actual, it makes it the student, and then the apostle, of uni- versal Truth. V. Only one more faculty remains to be noticed, to carry to completeness our survey of the Soul, as ordained by its Creator to be the subject of Knowl- edge. And this is The Memory; the power, that is, which is possessed by the mind, of retaining and recol- lecting the impressions that have been made on it ; of re- calling the thoughts it once has had, the convictions it has formed, and the sentiments it has cherished ; its power of presenting these, at a subsequent time, in almost their original clearness and scope. That this power is possessed by every mind, to CAPABLE OF KNOWLEDGE. 103 some extent, is matter of familiar and universal experience. That it may be cultivated, to almost any degree, by those who intelligently seek to cher- ish it, is also evident from the experience of men. That it equips the mind, finally, for the attainment of knowledge, and puts the key-stone in the arch of its acquisitions, is apparent at a glance. Through its possession of this the soul becomes capable, not only, as I have said, of looking outward on the frame of the physical creation, and gathering the various impressions of that; not only of looking inward, on its interior state and action, discerning its own move- ments, and reading the marvels of its personal struc- ture ; not only of reasoning forth from these forces and phenomena to the laws which infold them, and the sciences, inventions, philosophies, that spring from them ; not only of looking upward, to the Truths unseen, but supreme and primordial, which are the "master light of all our seeing;" but also of look- ing hackivard, on all that it has acquired in the Past, of making that its present possession, and giving to that its own immortality. It is a kind of ubiquity, an independence of space; a kind of omniscience, an independence of time ; which thus is given to the human soul. In foreign lands, it recalls the events and the scenes of its birth-place, as if they stood before the eye. In the last years of 104 THE HUMAN SOUL, life, it goes back to its youth; and again the now desolate rooms are populous, again the heart greets with its welcome the lips and eyes that have long been dust. The mountains melt, the city vanishes, the seas dry up, the crowded years fade out of sight ; the soul is alone, with its suffering or its song; and in the intense renewal of its experience the distant and the near are both alike. It is doubtful if an im- pression once consciously received, by a definite act of attention and thought, is ever lost, or can be, by the mind. It is doubtful, even, if an involuntary im- pression, really although unconsciously accepted, can ever afterward be obliterated from it. The Soul has such vital and marvellous energy, it so catches up, in- fixes, and eternizes whatever of thought proceeds within it, that it often retains what it seemed at the out- set scarcely to have noticed, and justifies the doubt whether any thing is ever lost by it. Thus instances are on record, you know, in which those who had heard passages from a foreign and perfectly unintel- ligible tongue, which seemed of course to have passed at once from out their recollection, as the breath fades off from the polished mirror — ^have afterwards recalled these in delirium or death, or at some moment of extraordinary excitement, with the utmost clearness and fulness of detail. And the instances are frequent, within our observation, in which aged men recall with CAPABLE OF KNOWLEDGE, 105 vivid distinctness the poetry they recited, the prob- lems they studied, the games they played, in the freshness of youth, or the arguments they made in the prime of their manhood ; although a thousand in- tervening events, which had taken a prominence before them since that these never had, seemed to have submerged these forever in their thoughts. What a power, then, is this ! and how du'ectly related to the gathering of Knowledge ! Made inde- pendent of the limitations of states by its Judgment and its Reason, the soul is made equally independ- ent of years by this faculty of Memory. In its highest activity, the whole of its experience becomes a Now to it. It can summon back the Past; can bring near the Distant; can give immortality to its every acquisition. In this it shows its innate and entire superiority to the body ; its likeness in con- stiution to the mind of the Most High. The retina of the eye retains no trace of the form that has impressed it, when that has retired to give place to another. An infinitesimal fraction of a second is the longest time allowed for its retention. The tym- panum of the ear will vibrate no longer, when the music or the clamor that arrested and aroused it has subsided into silence. But that invisible yet living Spirit, which watches through the eye, and hearkens through the ear, and which takes instant note of 106 whatever surrounds it, has caught the sight and the sound now vanished, and it will keep them forever. It writes its records, not as the Roman Laws were written, first on wood, then on brass, and afterwards on ivory; but at once on a tablet more impressible than wood, more vivid than brass, more precious than ivory, and more imperishable than either. Show again the same sight, strike again the same sound, and over the passage of throngs of years, it will recognize their identity. Our knowledge becomes cumulative, progressive, through this power. Opportunity is given at once for enlarging it, and for making it accurate ; each prin- ciple once affirmed becoming a new stone in the building of our knowledge; each subsequent acquisi- tion contributing to expand, to rectify, or complete, those previously made. If the soul had not this power of recollection, evidently its knowledge would at once be resolved into present impressions, uncon- nected with the Past, unprophetic of the Future; fleeting into air the moment they were made, and leaving no trace. But now, put a thought into its keeping, and years after you shall find it there, fresh as at first, though now not isolated, but grouped with many. Let a principle be accepted which is doubt- ful or untrue, and it shall afterwards be modified, as the better thoughts of other minds are measured CAPABLE OF KNOWLEDGE. 107 against it ; as its relations to our previous knowledge are more carefully ascertained ; as life and its expe- rience demonstrate its unsoundness. One fact appre- hended, may be put with another ; and these with others still, with all related and parallel facts, as they successively are brought to our view ; till the struc- tures of Science become extended and adequate. One art may be added to another in the soul ; new sciences to the former ones ; philosophies, histories, may be progressively mastered ; the ability to marshaU arguments, be supplemented by the ability to gladden the fancy and to arouse the feelings ; till the man be- comes thoroughly equipped and accomplished, a fur- nished, powerful, and energizing Thinker, through the ministry of this power. It gives the real value to aU the other intellectual faculties which I have sketched. It multiplies that value by a factor which the sum of the instants of our being, from the first to the last, were inadequate to express. And it holds in it the prophecy of stiU loftier attainments to be made in the Future. And yet, as I said — and therefore^ I might have said — this faculty is one universal among men, the loss of which implies a radical spiritual change and injury. It shows the soul, therefore, wherever that meets us, kindred with God's. Making the three score years of life to be to it but a day, enabling it to act in an 108 innate superiority over distances and times, and over intervals of experience, it allies it with His mind, who never has lost a single thought ; to whom the ages are now all present; who keeps, in His eternal conscious- ness, the secrets and the forms of universal existence. There is hardly another power, the communication of which to the finite Intelligence reveals more clearly the entire supremacy and omnipotence of God. There is no other which shows more clearly, with unanswer- able demonstration, both His kindness and His wisdom. My friends, we have here reached the end of the discussion which I proposed in this Lecture. There are other points which might be noticed, but these are the main ones, and the hour and your patience, both long since exhausted, forbid me to continue. As we pause, then, at this point, and look back over the course we have rapidly traversed, does not the whole character as well as the power of Him who framed the human soul to be the subject of Knowledge, become evident to us ? With what wondrous particularity and completeness of finish has he fitted it for this office ! With the power of perceiving outward facts and existences. He unites in it the power of examining itself, and reading its own invisible operations. To both he adds the power of analysing and comparing, of interpreting into laws, of distributing in order, the CAPABLE OF KNOWLEDGE. 109 phenomena thus observed. He fits it to look out on the Ideal, as on the Actual, and moves it by the im- pulse of its very constitution to affirm those essential primitive truths which underlie all others, and to contemplate those supreme though invisible ideas Tvhich govern eternally in the sphere of moral principles. What, it gathers it retains, too ; and drops with years no item of the gains which years have brought it. " Full of eyes," is the spirit ; able ' to look before and after ;' to look outward, inward, around, above ; and to keep in its remembrance all which it discovers. We hardly need, then, the records of history, to tell us what its performance will be, when sent to act on the arena of the earth; how sciences, arts, inventions, philosophies, histories, poetries, religions, will spring from it ; how every form of human utterance will gradually become rich with the treasures of its thought ; till navies sink, and cities vanish, before the vast accumulations of knowledge with which the stream of Time comes freighted, which outlast governments and states themselves. We hardly need the declara- tions of the Scripture to show us beforehand, that when it is released from its bondage to the clay, when all its powers are renewed and illuminated by change to higher spheres, no department of the creation shall be too distant for the search of this Soul, too high for its study, or too broad f6r its survey; no lapse of 110 THE HUMAN SOUL. years sufficing to interrupt the continuity of its thought; no theme of philosophy, or theology it- self, becoming too majestic for its intent scrutiny. Already, we know, it can compass and surpass the earth ; can range over the Past ; can receive from others, interpret nature, explain itself. It is competent, even, to consider Revelations ; and, accepting their lessons, to think again the thoughts of God, to under- stand His mighty plans, and almost to share His prescience of events. Intellectually, then, it is His representative. The solid earth is not too vast, too beauteous, or too firm, to be the cradle of its august being. Above all uttered praises of its speech, ascends each moment the praise returned by its sublime and living frame, to Him who formed it! Regarding it, as He left it, with its faculties and forces all springing into developement, with its fitness to gather and its fitness to keep the elements of truth, with its power of judgment and its vision of Reason, that transcend innately all the limits of sense, God well might say of it : " Behold, it is good !" LECTURE III. Ladies and Gentlemen : In the last Lecture of this course, it was my aim to set forth, as far as it could be done within the necessary limits prescribed to these discourses, the constitution of the Human Soul as related to Knowledge; as preparing man for successful and emi- nent progress in the mastery of Truth. That this is a Good, intrinsic and permanent, needs no demon- stration. The instincts of every soul perceive it to be such. The spontaneous effort of every one, who is conscious of the value and dignity of his being, declares it to be such. And the large apparatus of Educational helps which each more advanced com- munity prepares, and the preparation of which more than any thing else attests its real progress in civil- ization, is itself the sufficient exhibition of the fact. He who knows the facts, the forces, and the laws which prevail around him, who has an acquaintance with the systems of Being that are concentric with his own, with the 'principles that pervade and the rules that guide them — he, in other words, who ap- # 112 THE HUMAN SOUL, prebends and has appropriated the Truth on these themes, — is superior to him whose knowledge is less. He has realized a good as real and permanent as the mind itself ; a good which all fine spirits crave ; a good, the fruit whereof is better than gold, and the revenue of it than choice silver. The relation which is held then by the constitution of the Soul to the attainment of such Knowledge, is a proper test of God's wisdom in forming it. If it be framed with reference to this, and be interiorly adapted to it, it shows us evidently both His power and His goodness. There were passed in review, therefore, in the progress of the discussion, rapidly indeed, yet clearly enough I trust for my purpose, the various faculties Avhich inhere in the Soul, adapting it to this good; first, the power of apprehending and observing what is outward, a power most familiar to our experience and our use, yet mysterious and unsearchable in both its nature and its action; then the power of reflection and self-inspection, by which the mind can consider independently its own action and state, and scruti- nize the experiences which hold within them the se- crets of its constitution ; then, the yet higher power of examining the facts thus brought to our notice, of distinguishing the invisible forces which are in them, and of distributing and combining these in a systematic order; — ^a power from which, as connected ENDOWED FOR VIRTUE. 113 with the others, spring sciences and philosophies, and all forms of invention; then, the power of Reason, or otherwise of Imagination, by which we affirm and contemplate the truths which are supreme and invis- ible, having no immediate exhibition in phenomena, being involved in our consciousness, but not directly appealing to it ; and, finally, the power of memory, or recollection, by which the mind retains in its pos- session, and is able afterward to represent to itself, independently of the lapses and changes of time, the impressions once received, the knowledge once gained. These faculties all belong, constitutionally, to the Human Soul. They are not rare and extraordinary in it, they are universal ; the elements of its native and normal endowment; not attributes of a special and dis- tinguishing genius, but the usual and familiar equipment of mental life. And by them the mind is amply pre- pared for the attainment of knowledge. Sciences, his- tories, poetries, art, theologies even, and the higher philosophies, are gathered by it through these. They spring forth from these, in the natural developement, the legitimate use of them. And in the present exist- ence and action of these fine faculties, in the attain- ments they here make, and the higher attainments for which they look, we have the prophecy that if their ex- istence continue in the Future, and if their opportuni- ties there are enlarged, with each extension of the range 114 THE HUMAN SOUL, of their action they shall gain fresh knowledge, till they find no truth too distant or too difficult to be explored and appropriated. No other power is im- aginable by us, as necessary to complete, or as pos- sible to be added to, this mental constitution. It is, in its nature, full-orbed and complete. So far as we have gone, then, in our survey of the Soul, an impression of the Goodness, the Wis- dom, and the Power of Him who formed it, — who planned it at the outset, and by whose power it now subsists, — can hardly, I think, have failed to be received by us. Both his character and his energy are exhibited more clearly than in all the structures of the outward creation, in this invisible, but living, inspecting, and "intellectual spirit, which scans His works, which investigates itself, and which seeks to comprehend and reproduce in its thought His plan of the universe. So far, at least, it bears His im- age; and higher than all other forces or things, within the compass of the terrestrial system, through its equipped frame it shows forth His glory ! But now we are further to consider this Soul, in its relation to Virtue, another great Good ; and to see how far it is constituted for that; with what facul- ties and aptitudes, preparing it to attain that, it is fur- nished by its author. Here another test is offered of the character and the competence of Him who ere- ENDOWED FOR VIRTUE. 115 ated it ; and another exhibition of His perfections may be sought. The description of Virtue is simply this : Intelli- gent AND VOLUNTARY OBEDIENCE TO THE PERFECT MORAL Law ordained by the Divine Author for his spiritual CREATION. How great a good it is, then, for each, for all, will be apparent as we contemplate it. There is a system of laws in the physical creation, established by its Maker to guide and govern this outward frame of things. It becomes apparent the moment we regard this, and in obedience to it all moves in order. It is divided and sub-divided into many details, which it is the office of Science to explore and express in their inter-connected and complex developement. Yet all these details are harmonious with each other, and the system which combines them is evidently one. It exists in its perfection, and governs with absolute and unvaried control, at every point of the outward creation which we visit or inspect ; and we infer by induction, with a certainty not less than if we were taught it by instant observation, that with a ubiquitous authority like its Author's, which instantly connects it with His omni- present and perfect mind, it extends every whither, and in some of its main requirements at least is as valid and controlling throughout the universe as on our globe. The law of gravitation, for example, or that 116 ' THE HUMAN SOUL, of cohesive attraction, must evidently extend through- out all realms of organized matter; encompassing and upholding the distant nebulse which no telescope has yet resolved into suns, as well as our planet; governing even the comet in its flights, and bringing it back, punctual as the seasons, at the hour appointed. The laws of chemical affinity and combination, the laws of electricity, of the motion of fluids, of the relations of colors, of the distribution of sounds, the laws of light, its movement and its effects, the laws of heat, its propagation and its influence, the laws which regulate muscular action, which govern the growths of the vegetable world, or which limit and uphold the vital sensibiHty; — all these we meet at every turn, in the system which we occupy, and of which the body forms a prominent part. And we know that everywhere on the earth they obtain ; that no shore is so distant, no peak so high, no tribe of men so rude or so refined, that there as here these Laws are not supreme. And; in obedience to this system of organizing laws, to this orderly and authoritative constitution of the creation, the phenomena which we observe continually arise. Colors brighten, dews descend, the fire burns, the cold congeals, the light irradiates land and sea, the Earth wheels silent and calm beneath us, germs develope, clouds dissolve, seasons return, in steady procession the tides are lifted along the billowy surface ENDOWED FOR VIRTUE. 117 of the deep, beneath their constant and perfect com- mand. The sun, the planets, their rings and satellites, and all the component parts of each, are held upon their poise — more distant worlds, even, beyond our sight, beyond the reach of telescopic survey, are kept upon their path, moving with neither rest nor haste nor jar, from age to age — because the same laws there prevail; while every frail and tiny flower that blossoms in the woods reveals them as really, one might almost say as vividly, as the infinite cope; and winds and storms, as they whirl and gyrate along the impetuous zigzag of their career, are as perfectly at each instant obedient to these as any wave that breaks upon the beach, as any Iris arching the cataract. Imperious, irresistible, are these physical laws. They operate with a self-executive energy, derived indeed from the will of the Supreme, but independent of any creature. We must accept them, or we must be crushed by them. We cannot alter, by one hair's breadth, their definite lines. We cannot restrain their controlling operation. — Such is the system of forces and ordinances which God has interwrought with the physical creation, by which it is inwardly locked together, is founded and furnished, and made a home for spiritual beings. And now in the spiritual world there is also a Law^ or a constitution of laws, appropriate to its different and higher forms of being, and adapted to work out, 118 THE HUMAN SOUL, SO far as they are obeyed, a moral order akin to but vastly superior to that which is produced throughout matter by those which I have mentioned. These laws show resemblances, correspondences, at many points with those w^hich prevail in the physical world. They run parallel with those, though on a higher plane. The analogies between them are so frequent and so striking as almost of themselves to demonstrate the origin of the two related but separate systems in the same ordaining and uncontrolled Mind. Yet the latter differ widely, even radically, from the former, in the mode of their operation, as applying to another departs ment of being, and as having a loftier purpose to subserve. Expressing the eternal principles of Right, embodying these in statutes and rules, and enforcing them by penalties, these moral laws stiU apply for consent to those whom they address. Acting not on passive materials and elements, but on spiritual beings, they are inhibited by their nature from exercising or claiming an irresistible control. Their subjects may accept and incorporate them, if they will. They do not by force control and direct those, as the laws of the earth do. Thus Love is, in the spiritual world, what the powers of attraction, resulting in beautiful harmonies of combination and inter-relation, are seen to be in the physical. But the subject of the law which claims ENDOWED FOR VIRTUE. 119 Love from moral beings must freely accept its benefi- cent rule; while the crystal cannot choose another finish for its angles, or the star select for itself a rule which will square it instead of rounding it. Humility in the heart is likened by the poets, with an instinctive sense of the fitness of the simile, to those delicate forces, those modest influences, which are shown in the almost personal beauty of the violet, or the ane- mone. But the youth, or the maiden, must freely accept, and personally realize, the law which requires humility in the heart; while the violet, with its delicate and appealing beauty, is built up under laws exterior to itself, concerning which it has no liberty of election. So, everywhere, the laws which are im- pressed by the Divine Mind on the spiritual creation, and which properly are termed by us Moral laws, are different from those which uphold or govern in the physical constitution. They do not invoke an involuntary obedience. They ask always the assent of the subjects whom they address. These may obey them ; or they may, if they choose, neglect and reject them. In accepting and reahzing them, with intelli- gent, free and patient fidelity, is the essence of Virtue. In neglecting or rejecting them, is the element of Unrighteousness. This Virtue is therefore intrinsically a Good ; a good for each, a good for all; a good that is greater, and 120 THE HUMAN SOUL, in its nature more admirable, not only than all material acquisition, which is perishable and gross, which even a fine and highly developed esthetic taste declares itself repulsed from as a goal of endeavour, but greater than enjoyment, or even than knowledge. It lays its demand on higher powers. As realized by any being it contributes more directly to the true advancement and well-being of the Universe, confirm- ing its order, and helping it to work out its real and supreme ends. It brings one nearer the soul of God, and makes him not only a subject but a child of that eternal and righteous Mind which forever hath loved Virtue with an infinite enthusiasm, which reared the worlds to be its realm, which fills the starry courts with its glory, and which ever puts on it the highest honor. It is the grandest accomplishment attainable by any living and thoughtful being! And so, for substance, all nations have adjudged it. Virtue has been honored, if not by the popular and vitiated taste, at least by the earnest and elevated thoughts of all calm and wise thinkers, as among the noblest of human Ideals; the most high and precious achievement of man. As men have sought it more earnestly, and have realized it more successfully, the world, if not their own local tribe, the ages of History, if not their own years, have honored them more truly, and rewarded them more royally. When the moralist ENDOWED FOR VIRTUE. 121 inculcates the severe discipline of inward purity, and holds up to emulation the austere glory of a virtuous self-control, his words have a charm for the ear of the centuries which the most refined wit, the most elaborate scholarship, or the most ornate and urgent eloquence, if administering to license, never attains. His immediate contemporaries may not hear or heed him; but other lands, and after generg^tions, shall preserve and revere his quickening words, and his name shall be reckoned among the great harbingers who have heralded the advances of true social well-being. When the patriot or the philanthropist, like John Hampden or Granville Sharpe, or like our own Win- throp, Washington, or John Jay, rises out of the immediate suggestions of the hour, becomes superior to its flattering invitations, and dedicates himself to an unselfish Virtue, promoting the welfare of a people through righteousness, he accomplishes a victory over the hearts of mankind which the most brilliant cam- paigns of successful ambition cannot parallel and cannot shadow. Men retreat to his name as to a shelter against temptation. They mark the highest attain- ment he has made, to inspire their own zeal. The reverence of centuries surrounds his memory, and enshrines it like a temple. So when the disciples of any truth die for it, not in a passionate spirit of combat, but in a supreme 122 THE HUMAN SOUL, fidelity to their conviction, in a love for the truth which no temptation turns aside and no violence overbears ; when sacrificing all comfort and ease for that truth, they spread it by voice, and life, and suffering, on land and sea; when any patient and long-tried sufferer, amid seclusion, poverty, and neg- lect, retains unabated his cheerful love for God and truth, maintains a spirit of generous charity, and is as eager for others' welfare as if the frame were full of force and lapped in peace; — in all these instances, and the others that are like them, we recognize a dignity, an authority of example, which power could not give, and which it cannot invade ; which genius itself, dissevered from such a spirit, can never replace, but in celebrating which that achieves its highest works. Disinterestedness, in its simplest and most familiar exhibition, is felt to be grander than mental accom- plishments; as the diamond which one wears upon a ring or a pin, or sets upon a brooch, surpasses in value the whole mountain side against which it rests. It is other in nature ; of a quality incomparable. The mind that has been smit with the poetic extasy excites our admiration. The heart that has been touched with inspirations to Virtue, draws out spontaneously our reverence and homage. The man who enlightens and enlarges human thought — pursuing • some vein of scientific exploration to the treasures which it leads ENDOWED FOR VIRTUE. 123 to, discoursing instructively of the problems of Philos- ophy, or unrolling the majestic developements of History for our quickening and instruction — deserves well of his age, and takes rank with its benefactors. But the man who is loosed of the dominion of selfish- ness, who accepts as his rule of character and action the pure law of goodness, who with free dedication devotes himself to that, and heroically reduces its precepts to practice, translating into Life the law of Love — ^he reveals not power and diligence merely, which any man may show, but a property of soul peculiar to himself, which enhances and sublimes every other acquisition. It is not Religion, alone, it is Philosophy as well, which recognises in him, in that application and developement of his force, assimi- lation to His character who founded the sentient and intelligent creation, impressing upon it the law of Righteousness, and whom the pure forever worship as the Supreme Excellence. The few august imperial names, along the march of civilization, whose spotless standards never fail, whose place of authority never is questioned, have been those of this order; who have not succumbed to the government of selfishness, but have realized approximately the law of Virtue ! What powers, then, has the Soul for this highest attainment ? If furnished for it by Him who created it, it shows us yet again, in still brighter exhibition. 124 both His Power, His Wisdom, and the Goodness which guides them. If not thus furnished, the highest demonstration of these attributes in Him which has thus far been sought, must be admitted to be wanting. I. For one thing, then, which is clear and indis- putable, the Soul has A Moral Sense, innate and indestructible ; a faculty, that is, which intuitively per- ceives the reality of Virtue^ its dignity and beauty, and its proper authority over human action ; a faculty which makes Man the proper subject of virtuous appeals, and upon which, as a basis, all moral instruction and cultivation may go forward. This Moral Sense, as it has been properly styled, holds somewhat the same relation to virtue in con- duct and character, which the sense of hearing holds to harmony in sounds ; or, more exactly, the same which that inner sensibility to the Beautiful, which certainly does subsist in the soul, holds to the rela- tion of forms and colors, or the melody of voices, in the outward creation. It shows itself readily, and is familiar to us all. When an instance of undeniable and exemplary goodness is presented to it, it recog- nizes that immediately, instinctively ; and feels it a proper and noble subject for analysis and contem- plation. A moral . approbation, even, is experienced toward it, quite different from, though nowise op- posed to, the esthetic approbation experienced by the ENDOWED FOR VIRTUE. 125 Taste in the presence of beauty. It differs entirely, this moral approbation, from any admiration of the intelKgence or the daring expressed in the act. It fastens on the goodness, the virtuousness of that act, and shows the soul to be inwardly gratified with its ethical harmonies. And correspondingly opposite, though equally immediate, is its attitude toward vice. Intuitively this sense recognizes, instinctively it rep- robates, — by its very constitution condemning when it sees, — an evident and intended violation of equity, for selfish gain. It discerns it as naturally as the eye discerns deformity in figures. It repulses it as the Taste repels grossness of outline, or a coarse and oifensive disharmony in colors. Of course I speak now of this Moral Sense in the earliest and most pure exhibition of its force. It is undoubtedly possible, by a course of wrong- doing,* or even by habitual contemplation and advo- cacy of wrong propositions, in ethics or politics, in philosophy or in practical life, greatly to darken, though not wholly to obliterate, its intrinsic convic- tion of the rightfulness of Virtue, and of its unique majesty; just as it is possible, by never educating the Taste, by systematically on the other hand ne- glecting or perverting it, to diminish very greatly the promptness and justness of its fine action, and al- most to destroy the sensibility itself. But the fact that 126 the Taste in one man acts wrongly, while in another it acts purely, with a normal developement of its na- tive tendencies, — -the fact that entirely arbitrary stand- ards are sometimes formed, and are oftener obeyed by it, so that one prefers the pinched foot, another the cramped waist, another the artificially darkened nails and eyebrows, another the immense ascending piles of the Elizabethan coiffure, instead of the free and wavy grace, the natural ease and purity of as- pect, which gave their glory to the statuary of Greece, — so that one prefers trees artificially clipped, to represent grenadiers, balloons, or temples, while another can see in such invasions of nature only a ribald mockery of her charms — this certainly does not show, it is accepted by no one as sufficient to dem- onstrate, that there is in man no instinct of Taste, or even that such is not universal. On the other hand, the very perversion of the faculty declares its reality, and through all these ridiculous and unnair ural exhibitions its activity is revealed. And so in the Moral constitution of man, which makes him appropriately the subject of Moral Law, the disciple of Virtue. There is at the basis a sense of Virtue, which sees its nobleness, and its spiritual beauty, and which recognizes intuitively its instant authority. This may be perverted, but it never can be destroyed; and sometimes in the utmost disad- ENDOWED FOR VIRTUE. 127 vantage of position, with every thing to embarrass it, it exhibits itself with the most signal energy. — It is im- possible, unless we accept this as true, to account for the fact already brought to view, and which is cer- tainly indisputable, that all nations, so far as history can trace them, have had a conception of what was RIGHT IN ITSELF, in distinction from what was inviting and expedient; and that they have honored their ad- mirable characters not merely or mainly because ad- vantage and strength have accrued to the State from their endeavors, but because those endeavors were noble in themselves, and the character which they revealed was worthy of honor. It is not simply successful patriotis*n that has challenged man's rever- ence. The unsuccessful, which was self-devoted, has sometimes been sung more loftily and sweetly. Is it not this, in fact, which gives their theme, which imparts their pathos and their sublimest significance, to the two great poems, the Grecian and the Ro- man, which the Old World sends to our Civiliza- tion ? Generosity has never been held so admirable, so truly worthy of zealous emulation and of ever- lasting honor, as when transcending the limitations of prudence, and rising to entire affectionate self-sacri- fice. And every virtue has been reckoned more rare, as men have calmly and steadily thought of it, m proportion as it has been interiorly dissevered 128 from all relations of interest, has been practised and obeyed because right in itself. Herein then we find, apparent, self-evidencing, revealed through all the obscurities of History as ^ hurtless light' through the parted clouds, this sense in the soul, universal as the race, of the reality and the authority of the law of Virtue. Amid the confusions and perplexities of politics, over all the combinations and the antagonisms of States, the violence of their rulers, and the clamor of their peoples, this sense has declared ii> self; as the pure and perfect musical tone is declared over all the uproar of tongues. The actions which it celebrates are the centres of History ; and the names which it presents as worthy of^ remembrance, are the names which the world never ceases to revere. We may trace the operation of this same innate sense in any child ; we may see it in our conscious- ness. The child learns first what is smooth or is rough to the physical touch ; what is pleasant or disagreeable to the hearing or the taste ; what attracts or repulses the sense of sight. He begins then, as I said in the preceding Lecture, to separate and divide these, the one from the other ; putting forth thus, un- consciously, the action of a power which looks toward scientific analysis and arrangement, and which will not be satisfied till nature is investigated, and the laws of the physical creation are evolved. By degrees he be- ENDOWED FOR VIRTUE. 129 eomes sensible of the relation of the action of others to himself; and then there is shown in him — not bom in him then, but then for the first time exhibited in liim, as the hidden writing is drawn out from parch- ment by the contact of heat. — the sense of the rad- ical and authoritative Right, distinguished from the Wrong. He is injured maliciously. It is not simply the sense of loss, the regret for a misfortune, which then stirs within him; as if a door, blown to by the wind, had struck his hand, or a storm of hail had overtaken him in the woods. Commingled with this, and superior to it, — ^an electric sense^ in the midst of the slower operations of the judgment, anticipating the tardy computations of prudfenoe, and stringing every faculty as mere reasoning never does — there flashes into his mind a keen indignation at the Wrong that has been done him; a reprehension of the wickedness which has violated Right, in order to assail him. This may not come out in full force at the first. Men often, children oftener, feel more than they can utter; and our sense of the rightful, like our sense of the beautiful, needs responses from other minds to eclaircise and confirm it. But let such a response be given to it, let another voice say, ' It was wrong to do that!' and how quickly and fully, with how vivid an emphasis,, the chUd's mind accords ! The conscious- 130 THE HUMAN SOUL, ' ness of Right, of its reality, its authority, its ines- timable beauty, becomes articulate. The harmonious laws of the moral world are shown to have been recognized, in their validity and majesty, not less truly though less evidently than the laws of the ma- terial, by that undeveloped but full-formed soul. What would have been regret, had the injury been natural, becomes indignation and moral condemnation, when the injury is moral. The necessity of repentance on the one hand, and of forgiveness on the other, in order to the re-establishment of normal relations be- tween the offender and the sufferer, is intuitively recognized. And, in the expected absence of such repentance, the soul runs on with instinctive celerity, and affirms the certainty of a punishment to follow. So the consciousness of the child gives witness to the Law which the eye hath not seen, which the ear with its delicate conformation hath not caught, but which is around us every where in the universe, and which the sensitive soul of man, by the testimony of this its inner moral faculty, knows to be valid. That innate sense, thus clearly shown, survives our youth and lives in manhood. The child in this is * Father of the Man.' Ail language expresses it. It is familiar to our experience. — Remorse, or peni- tence, is centrally different from disappointment, or regret Abhorrence of guUt, is not the same thing ENDOWED FOR VIRTUE. 131 wiiii dread of disaster. We do not shrink from the shock of the earthquake, from the explosion of gun- powder, from the downfall of the meteor, as we shrink from the traitor who has betrayed great in- terests. We lock up or kill the wild beast, from expediency; because we would not have life destroyed, or property wasted. In the punishment of the crim- inal, is a something higher than expediency-: even a % moral Retribution, and a protest against wickedness. This gives to all just Law its sacredness, making it truly reverend and august. This ordains it an edu- cating power in the State ; a grander teacher than arts or letters. This makes a bad statute not injurious only, but blasphemous, even ; a harlot, not a bride, which hath forgotten righteousness, and turned aside equity for purposes of gain. The rudest language as well as the most cultivated, the lowest forms of a barbarian democracy as well as the highest and most elaborate processes of a national jurisprudence, include terms, represent mental states, are based upon con- victions, are regulated by precepts, which demonstrate the sense of Right in the soul ; as differenced from the judgment of what is expedient, or the sense of what is civilly appropriate and comely. • This is innate in the soul, and therefore universal. Education could not have implanted it where it was not ; but the attempt was not needful. In every 132 THE HUMAN SOUL, man, by virtue of his humanity, as part of his orig- inal spiritual endowment, is lodged this sense of the reality of Virtue, of the permanent and universal validity of its law. This needs to be preserved, to be cherished, to be educated, like any other part or power we possess. But it is ours, by birthright. To be born without it were to be divorced from the Race, to be morally an idiot. And in the native possession of this, we find the first element of the fitness of the soul for attainments in Virtue. This sense of its authority, this faculty for intuitively recognizing its claims, is prophetic of much. II. But this is not alone, in that living and per- sonal complex of powers which we name the Soul. With this innate Moral Sense, which recognizes intuitively the validity of Hight, and the permanence and supremacy of its spiritual law, is combined the feculty of Analysis, and Moral Judgment ; the power, that is, of discerning to what the law of Righteousness applies, and of learning from instruction, if not of dis- covering hy our own induction, its total and exact extent. The mental faculties, which have previously been discussed, come in here to supplement the moral sensibiHty, supplying what it needs for the develope- ment of general ethical principles, and the construc- tion of an adequate rule of life. The Moral Sense, like the senses which are physical, perceives the ENDOWED FOR VIRTUE. 133 phenomenal, the palpahle and outstanding. It sees the evident violations of equity; the undeniable acts of heroic goodness. It remains for the judgment, the analyzing and constructive power in the soul, which every where builds up its systems of Science, to evolve from the impressions thus immediately re- ceived, its more refined rules ; and it is left for the Keason, which apprehends truth by direct intuition, to discern the great plan in which aU particular statutes are embraced ; the universal and permanent Law, whose one great ordinance they variously ex- press. And these are competent to the office. They make the perfect Law of Virtue attainable by the soul. Thus Murder, for example, the unprovoked destruc- tion of another's life in malice, or for gain: this has never been held innocent among any people. Some mode of retribution has always been provided, where this has appeared; and the murderer himself, except in the cases where long use has hardened him, has shrunk conscience-smitten from the scene of his crime. * The word Judgment,' has always '• bred a kind of Re- morse in him,' as in the murderer of Clarence ; the blood has clung to his conscious hands ; and the spec- tre of his victim has seemed to haunt his after path. The same is true of Treachery : the intentional vio- lation of a private or public trust, in an impulse of m 134 THE HUMAN SOUL, greed, or of irritated passion. No varnish of success has ever been able to hide from men s minds the real badness of this action. The traitor himself has car- ried a perpetual unrest within him; and History, amid whose liquid medium all actions and characters tend to take their position, as the wrecks in the ocean gravitate to an equipoise, has opened for him her low- est deep. So, Lying, Robbery, Adultery, Slander, are always recognized, unless in the lowest and most loathsome community, and even there, except at in- tervals or in particular cases, as wrong and criminal ; violations of the Law which surrounds every person. If this recognition is not direct, it is incidental, and so sometimes the more emphatic. In certain parts of Hindostan, for example, it is said there is a festival recurring once a year, the theory of which is that there this Law which the Gods have enjoined is loosed from the people, and that every man, for the one ' devil's-day, may do what he will. And there the vices which I have named, swarm out at once to monstrous exhibition; with others besides, too hideous and strange to be objects of thought. It is, assur- edly, a frightful fact; showing how near that society stands at every moment to the bloodiest dissolution. And yet it is a fact most suggestive and memorable, because it demonstrates the reality and the depth of the sense of the wickedness inhering in such actions, 4^ m ENDOWED FOR VIRTUE. 135 even among the most debased. It shows, as in a panorama of human nature, with all its secrets for once unveiled, how instant is the impression of the evilness of such deeds; of their direct contrariety to the Law invisible, which men ought to obey. No man is without this. Even long continued habits of vice cannot altogether expel it from his soul. But now the moment this is admitted, there follows by necessary sequence the admission of the power of the soul to discern a higher and more complete rule, than that which forbids such exaggerated crimes. For the Judgment takes the instance of murder, for ex- ample, and examining that as it examines the crystal, the plant or the animal, in the outward creation, it instantly discovers that the knife or the axe which inflicted the blow was not to blame for the death which followed ; nor was the hand, or the arm, which held this, considered as a fabric of muscle and of bone, coursed by the veins and covered by the flesh. It was the Will, which lay behind these, which gave to them their deadly onset. It is to that, beneath all instruments, within all incidents, that the crime is to be traced. The Will, obeying passion rather than love, yielding to malice or to avaricious lust, and strik- ing the blow in the impulse of that — there stands the Assassin ! And to get at this riotous Will and punish it, not at aU to wreak vengeance on the muscle or the 136 THE HUMAN SOUL, flesh, men cut off the head, or lift the frame upon the gibbet. To the voluntary action of the soul within, then, and not simply to the muscular motion of the arm exhibiting this, extends the searching law of Virtue. To the inward state of feeling, affection, upon which that voluntary action is conditioned, and by which it is determined, applies its just and imperative rule. This cannot but be seen the moment man earn- estly, and with serious attention, investigates an act declared by the moral sense to be criminal and con- demned. The Law which makes that action wicked, as distinguished from the mechanical violence of storms, from the devastations of fire, or the fall of an aerolite, of necessity declares the criminality to lodge, not in any contraction or play of the muscles, but in the passion of the heart, and the wrong and iniquitous adtion of the Will. And so as we follow this analysis still further, em- ploying our faculty of abstraction and construction here as upon nature, yet taking counsel at every step of that moral sensibility which grows ever more refined as well as more controlling as it is oftener consulted, and especially applying the intuitive Reason which aflSrms the Invisible as superior to the phenomenal, involving all particulars in a universal principle, and supplying the ground and the verity of experience — as we thus go forward, and thus ascend upward, from the ENDOWED FOR VIRTUE. 137 action to th« motive, from the motive which is wrong to its contrary which is right, from the particular motive of the hour or the occasion to the general motive- state in which that is grounded, the state which should properly regulate our life — ^we come, and we must come, at the end of our process, to disinterested AND PERFECT iDYE, as the ultimate and authoritative Law of Virtue ; a Love to every being, according to his perceived desert, and according to our relations to him. This Love should be intelligent, personal, per- manent. It should fill and pervade our total life; controlling man, with immediate and spontaneous force, in each of the four distinct relations which he sustains ; toward God ; toward men ; towards animals and things, in the material creation; and finally towards himself. He should exercise tozva?^ds every related and hnovm heing benevolent affection. This is the ultimate philosophical formula for complete Goodness. It excludes nothing that is graceful in character, or generous in action, but embraces all such details, and interprets them by its principle. It allows of nothing that is selfish or un- chaste, but supplants all such by its perfect plan. When realized by any one, his character becomes spotless. He achieves a thorough and symmetrical excellence. He becomes a fit object for world-wide reverence. In this rule, the Judgment is perfectly satisfied; for every detail of specific morality is har- 138 monized and founded in its spiritual unity. Science, indeed, distinctly accepts and celebrates this Law as kindred in its domain with that rule of physical attraction in matter, which keeps each star secure upon its centre, peaceful upon its route, because each particle is attracted to all others in proportion to their mass and to its nearness to them. The law of Virtue, itself invisible, seems almost reflected from this wise and serene ordination of nature, as the sunshine gleams back from a golden surface. In this rule of right- eousness the Reason can rest; for its most clear and sublime intuitions can discern nothing higher. . The Moral Sense is satisfied by it; for that discovers no righteous act, no deed of shame, it takes on all its capacious sensibility no single impression, which may not be explained and be classified by this rule. All the faculties of the soul which are concerned with this theme, point instantly toward this rule as the summit of their discoveries, and having attained it are at rest in its perfection. They cannot rest, outside of or beneath it. And Ethics and E-eligion, the moral sys- tems of man in their highest attainment, the system of God in its constant requirement, are at one in exhibiting and enforcing this Rule. The Soul has by birthright all the faculties which are necessary in or- der to attain it. And when this absolute Law of Virtue is thus ascer- ENDOWED FOR VIRTUE. 139 tained and affirmed by the soul, the application of its principles to the details of life is a matter simply for the practical judgment, assisted and inspired by the conscientious instinct. That one act is right and another act is wrong, that one course is obligatory and another is forbidden, will be evident without diffi- culty to the man who perceives, and who seeks with sincere endeavor to apply, this perfect and supreme formative rule. Each detail of conduct becomes located by it, and clearly interpreted. As the sun over matter, it casts light over life; or, rather, as he who takes for his axiom the centrality of the sun in our planetary system, and its relative stability, can calculate from that the orbit, the mass, and the relation to the sun of every star that circulates around it, so he who has ftiUy accepted this rule of Benevolent Love as the essence of Virtue, can calculate with easy and accu- rate analysis the nature, the extent, and the relative importance, of all particular and subordinate duties. Applying his mind with an unbiassed purpose to this investigation, he will readily ascertain what relations, what actions, are inconsistent with virtue, and what it permits or what it enjoins. Each act will show its quality to him, as the insect shows its structure to the practised entomologist. It will seem morally deformed, or morally appropriate, as the incorrect outline, or the perfect color, to the eye of the artist. 140 THE HUMAN SOUL, , A complete system of practical Ethics, to state it in a word, is within the compass of the powers of the soul. If men do not attain that, it is because they do not use the faculties they possess ; because, with the fearful proclivity to indulgence which is shown in their action, they prefer to obey the impulse of the moment, instead of the rational and conscien- tious conviction. Without themselves being always aware of it, they decline to form systems so pure and complete as continually to rebuke them. They may form such if they will. Revelation is made neces- sary, so far as it instructs us in daily conduct, by a wrong use of man's powers ; not at all by an orig- inal defect in those powers. It comes to enlighten, and to change our moral state ; not at all to incor- porate in the frame of our faculties one unpossessed before. And no man, it seems to me, who atten- tively considers this, can help being satisfied that whatever have been the errors of the Past', and how many soever its moral delusions, the perfect and com- prehensive law of Virtue, as applied to daily life, is attainable with the powers which God implants in the soul. Confucius announced the essence of it in China, before Christ had published to men the Golden Hule. Plato and Seneca had clear apprehensions of its main features. And many moralists have seized strongly, and applied justly, the chief requirements ENDOWED FOR VIRTUE. 141 which it lays upon man. If half the patient and assiduous thought had been given to this which has been given to the science of matter among men, the science of morals would have been as firmly- founded, as fairly reared, as solidly compacted, as clearly enlightened, as that which interprets the ma- terial heavens, or arranges and reconciles the so va- rious phenomena in the physical world. — The sense of the majesty and authority of Virtue is innate in the heart. Every soul has the faculties for attaining and perceiving its perfect Law. III. But God has further, in the third place, en- dowed us with A NATIVE SENSIBILITY TO THE MoTIVES TO Virtue ; with the power of apprehending, and the desire of possessing, those spiritual goods ivhich only Virtue can bring us. And so He presses the soul toward that, by an impulse lodged at the centre of its being; and He never lets it rest until it gains it. This is important to be observed and pondered in this connection. An outward motive to Virtue is impossible. In seeking to encourage and confirm our obedience, it in fact would destroy that, and make it impossible. For disinterested Love, as has already been shown, is the high rule of Virtue ; and to be disinterested for the sake of our profit, benevolently to love others in or- der to gain by it, is a contradiction in terms. If a man sacrifices one object, to gain another which to 142 THE HUMAN SOUL, him is a greater, — ^if he sacrifices money, to gain in- fluence over men, or sacrifices his circumstances of personal comfort, to gain celebrity and a posthumous renown — then we recognize in him a more refined self-seeking, a more intellectual and far-sighted ambi- tion, but not a whit more of essential virtuousness than if he had followed the more customary path. He has sought one end of human desire, in preference to another : that is all we can say of him. . And we never think of making him an example, or of revering him as benevolent. We cannot buy self-sacrifice by rewards. It must be inherently superior to rewards, or it can not be real. The man who speaks truth for the sake of advantage, loves not the truth, but the advantage ; and in this is no Virtue. The gen- uine honesty is revealed when it stands unshaken by allurement, and unchanged by losses. The honesty which is practised because it is profitable, as a means to a good, and not itself the highest good, rings hollow to our touch. Humility, charity, filial affection, pious patience under sorrow, that large hu- manity which counts no interest of the State or of the Race an alien to its affection, or undeserving its effort, — the moment we conceive of these virtues as practised, for an outward emolument, that moment we conceive of them as intrinsically unreal. The man becomes a hypocrite, the instant his action is ENDOWED FOR VIRTUE. 143 thus properly described. The outward gloss and glimmer of his character cease to deceive us. We see that his goodness is apparent, not hearty ; simulated, not genuine. For Virtue is always superior to such inducements. It cannot be purchased, and it cannot be strengthened, by outward rewards. And yet there are motives to the culture of Virtue which are appropriate, and sufficient; in yielding to which no man loses the intimate righteousness of his character, but by which his Virtue may first be in- spired, and afterward be fortified. And these lie near to every soul. Whether consciously or not, it feels always their pressure reaching forth to affect it. It is so formed of God — ^and this shows His wisdom, and His infinite goodness — that it cannot escape the recog- nition of them. They environ and invest its first moral actions. We desire, constitutionally, by a law of our nature, satisfaction and peace ; a sense of harmony in ourselves, and toward others ; a tranquil freedom from mental alarms. Without this, all outward possessions are poor. The marble halls of Nero's palace, inclosing beneath their polished roofs, within their costly and tesselated walls, majestic trees, the rarest flowers, fountains and gardens, theatres and galleries ; crowded with furniture of ivory and of pearl, with exquisite statuary making the clear Italian air almost palpitate with delight, with 144 ' THE HUMAN SOUL^. sumptuous or delicate paintings in golden frames intoxicating the sense ; these halls, pervaded by con- stant music breathing witchingly forth from unseen bowers, and filled with the breath of tropical per- fumes, become a mere prison, of decorated gloom, to the mind internally harassed and unrestful. The eye refuses to be gratified with colors, while spir- itual darkness shadows its orb. The sense cannot enjoy rare melodies, while the soul is struggling with a secret self-reproach. We crave an inward rest and peace, as the prime condition of all true enjoyment. Unless we have this, our seeming motions and pauses of pleasure are but mimicry of real happiness. But the slightest experience of life demonstrates that an inward unrest is inseparable from vice. We can only attain the peace which we seek through obedience to Virtue. A sense of want, and yet of satiety — of satiety with what the outward affords, of the want of something higher — a sense of impurity, a consciousness of failing to realize our true end, occasional flashes of remorseful conviction or of anxious expectation, a dark recogni- tion of isolation, solitariness, and of exposedness through guilt; these come, inevitably, with the practice of wrong. No man can so strip himself of his moral con- stitution as to put them away from him. In the most 'successful' criminals, as the world has styled them, they sometimes have bjeen most fearfully exhibited. ENDOWED FOR VIRTUE. 145 And equally, on the other hand, repose of conscience, a sense of moral elevation and advancement, a cheerful apprehension of the favor of pure beings, an exulting assurance of the Divine complacency resting upon us, a sense of firmness, security, safeness, whatever may betide, a conviction of inward preparation for the Fu- ture — these come as inseparably with the obedience of Virtue. They cannot be divorced from it, by the axe of the executioner, or the fires of the stake. For they are not set artificially upon it, by mechanical addition, as the statue upon the pedestal ; they are folded within it, as the perfume in the petals, or the melody in the tone. And they never, therefore, by any means, can be dissociated from it. These constitute the fit motives, appropriate and powerful, to lead unto virtue, and to stimulate to its practice. The man who accepts them does not thereby become the less virtuous. His character is only con- firmed by their influence, and his action ennobled. The man who accepts and yields himself to them, becomes the patriot, the philanthropist, the martyr of truth ; whom the world could not buy, ' of whom the world was not worthy.' It is very significant, then, and important to be remembered, when we ponder the goodness, the wis- dom, and the power of God, as exhibited in adapt- ing the soul for Virtue — that this soul is so formed 10 146 THE HUMAN SOUL,*" that these motives which alone in the nature of things can be brought to aid Virtue, are developed and declared to it at the moment when its volun- tary action commences. The presentation of them is not left to be contingent, dependent upon circum- stances, or on the voluntary effort of others. It is made inevitable ; is certified and secured, by the won- drous frame of the spirit itself. That cannot once do wrong, without feeling a pain like the pressure of God's finger, arresting its course, and directing it backward. It cannot once do right, without feeling an impulse, again as from Him, propeUing it forward. As the finger feels the smart when it touches the flame that stands airily quivering in its golden in- vitation, so the will which first touches a Lie or a Lust is conscious of a pang. Not outward in the Word, but inward in its life, is this warning against vice. When afterwards it reads and meditates the Word, it finds symbols interpreted, precepts enforced, admonitions illumined, by this its prior inward expe- rience. And when it reads History, it sees therein only what it had seen before in its consciousness, that pain and unrest are inseparable from wrong; that the solid mental good, the exquisite satisfaction and the untroubled peace, the divine assimilation, the far- reaching hope, for which the soul instinctively pines, as more precious than wealth and more lofty than ENDOWED FOR VIRTUE. 147 thrones, are only to be realized through a virtuous obedience ! The motives to this, — as real as its life, as great as its capacity, and, afterwards it finds, as lasting as its being, — are therefore brought before it at the outset of its experience. In the beautiful wisdom and mystery of its constitution, they are made to press against it, with silent certainty, so soon as its moral activity commences. rV. Nor is this alone true. It is true also, fur- ther, that God in his structure of the Human Soul has founded in it certain positive Aptitudes for Affec- tion, which make Virtue in some particulars more easy than the opposite, and compel us as we say to 'go against nature' in refusing its rule. This also is evident, and is very important. The filial afiections are helpers to all Virtue. So are the parental and the conjugal affections ; the affec- tion of gratitude, when favors have been bestowed ; the affection of reverence, toward an eminent and pure character; the affection of patriotism, toward our home and our land. The filial affections, accord- ing to the Chinese moraKst and sage to whom I have before referred, are the quick and active germ of aU others. And all these are rooted, directly and natively, among the elements of our being. They spring up spontaneously, their conditions being pre- 148 sented, with the free and unbiassed developement of our powers. They grow if let alone. The struggle must rather be to ehminate than to evolve them. And though they require education and training to unfold them aright^ and to bring them to perfection, they arise almost as readily in the sensitive and sane soul, which temptation has not drugged, which pas- sion has not blighted, as the climbing tendrils of the clematis, or the purple clusters of the wistaria wav- ing their loyal tribute on the air, from seeds im- planted in fruitful soil. We say of the man who does not show these, not, 'He is no Morahst,' or ' He is no Christian ;' but, ' He is no Man !' He wants an inward assimilation to his race. He is far more thoroughly and widely divorced from it, by the ruin he has brought on these fine instincts, than he could be by any mutilation of members, by any political or so- cial disabilities, or even by ignorance. Revelation as- sists, refines, and nurtures, these various affections. But it is not requisite to implant or produce them, and they often have flourished where it was not known. And though these are not in themselves chief vir- tues, they are, in their proper place and relations, particular expressions of the one supreme law which describes human Goodness; and the history of the race, as well as the experience of individuals and of families, declares how intimate are their relations ENDOWED FOR VIRTUE. 149 to all others. The filial affection which holds up a tottering Father on its arms, or which wears the name of a Mother departed as an amulet against vice, it does not of necessity lead up to or involve true piety toward God ; hut when the soul, in which this lives, has been fully enlightened with the clear exhi- bition of His character and glory, of His more than paternal kindness and watchfulness, of the infinite tenderness and fulness of ffis love, this opens an easy way to piety, and becomes a natural auxiliary to that. The gratitude and reverence which are felt toward a friend, may terminate there, and dispose to notliing higher; but they may become vastly exalted and intensified, as experienced toward God, until they lift the soul in which they dwell to a consummate virtue. And the one self-denial, in the impulse of affection, which leads to the 3delding of a coveted ad- vantage for the good of another, may unfold to a habit of continuous self-sacrifice, to which heroisms shall be familiar, and privations delights. So, step by step, the ideal of personal excellence may be realized, if we yield to these impulses which are bedded in our being; and the soul which cannot find rest else- where, shall find and secure it in a perfected Vir- tue. God not only has surrounded us with the motives to that, and has placed those motives prox- imate to our consciousness, but He has opened an easy 150 path, through these delicate and permanent instincts of the soul, for its progress to the attainment of an absolute rectitude. y. It only remains to be remarked, then, in the fifth place, in completing the discussion, that while the soul possesses this sense, innate and central, of the reality of Virtue and the authority of its law, and while it has the power of unfolding or ascertaining the rule of righteousness in its principle and in its details, and while it is so formed that the motives to virtue and the dissuasives from vice lie close to its being, and press against its consciousness the moment its moral activity begins, and that instincts to particular virtues are strong in it — ^it is also endowed with the faculty of Free Will : with the power, that is, of originating and determining its oivn moral action ; of yielding to motives, or refusing to yield to them ; of choosing one end and working for that, or choosing another, and making all else subordinate to this. By this it is fitted consti- tutionally, always, ibr taking Virtue as its good, and the law of Righteousness as its supreme rule. And in this God's wisdom and power in framing it, with fit- nesses for Virtue, become finally manifest. All Virtue must be free, a matter of personal election and accomplishment, not imposed by another, in order to be real. For it essentially consists, as I said at the outset, in the personal acceptance, by him who is its ENDOWED FOR VIRTUE. 151 subject, of that moral Law which is enjoined by our Creator, which is perfectly adapted to our powers and our relations, but which may be accepted or re- jected as we please. It is peculiar to this Law, among the ordinances of God, that it asks our assent ; and then only is fulfilled when we freely embrace, and persis- tently accomplish it. A concreated virtue in the soul, is therefore inconceivable. There may be an admirable symmetry of its powers, a perfect completeness of its constitutional fitness for the exercise of virtue. But this in itself is not personal virtue ; any more than the color of the ruby is goodness, or the radiating brilliance which is lodged in the diamond is an element of fancy and genius to the stone. No exquisite proportion and equipoise of our faculties, preparing us for pure action; no adjustment of tastes, sensibilities, and powers, in- clining us to do right ; is of itself virtuous, or can ever be so described except in the extremest liberty of speech. The utmost that can be done for man to fit him for the practice and the culture of virtue, is to give him the sense of its beauty and authority, to give him the knowledge of its righteous law, or the power of gaining that, and to make him capable of directing his own course; of putting forth voluntary and self- determined operation ; of originating and of changing his personal movement; so that he may conform him- self to righteousness and its rules if he will to do that. 152 THE HUMAN SOUL, or may neglect and reject tliem in the exercise of the same indefeasible sovereignty. And this power, in substance, God has given to man, in endowing him with that faculty which in ordinary speech we describe as The Will. By this he is enabled to choose or refuse Right ; to devote himself to the attainment and the exercise of Virtue, resisting all motives opposed to its law, or to take for himself a course of indulgence, and pursue that regardless of moral distinctions. In this, the divine equipment of the soul, with reference to this good, is brought to its completeness ; and the character and the power of our Author are revealed. That may possesses this native power of originating and directing, of choosing and of changing, his own course of action, our consciousness declares, and all experience demonstrates. The general sense of the world proclaims it. Outward motives to action, as we inaccurately style them, even those which are nearest and most' attractive, cannot constrain or debar this free movement. They are the occasions, the incentives to our action ; they are not its masters. They do not compel it, and they do not forbid it. Men overleap them often, and set them utterly at defiance. The martyr chooses the rack and the cross, or the more refined torture of a life-long imprisonment, he calmly fronts the flaming sword that plays back and forth ENDOWED FOR VIRTUE. 153 across his path, he steps into the chasm that opens beneath him, a living grave more terrible than the sepul- chre — against all enticements of luxury and of ease, against entreaties of friends, and the pleadings of a household, because duty persuades him ; and he pre- fers, in the exercise of his uncontrolled sovereignty of will, to yield to that, instead of the transient allure- ments that oppose it. The soldier, in a chivalrous attachment to his leader, or a higher attachment to the cause of his country, lays bare his breast to the rush of the javelin or the blast of the death-bolt, and falls exulting to have sheathed in his life that eager stroke which was aimed at the leader, and through him at the State. Or, to take a far lower, but more fami- liar illustration, the artist, the scholar, the student of any science, turns away from the showy acquisitions of trade, from the prizes of power, preferment and rank — which most attract the effort of men, and to which he acknowledges strong impulses in himself — in order to gratify that inner desire, for beauty and for knowledge, which hath upon it, to his^ purged eye, a more divine charm. , Where other men yield to an outward motive, there he resists. What to other men is simply a dream or a fantasy, that he accepts as the mistress of his life. He makes his own motive, and freely yields to it. The power of the outward, therefore, which furnishes 154 THEHUMANSOUL, the conditions and the occasions of actions, does evi- dently not extend to the limiting or destroying of the freedom of the will. The soul may harness its spirit- ual forces to physical pleasure, and material gain ; but inwardly it transcends these. In the royalty of its nature, it may put them all aside. And sometimes, when higher admonitions have inspired it, it does toss them all from it, or bend them all under it, as the wind treads the shrubbery under its march, or catches the spray from the cresting wave, and flings that forth in glittering showers. Persuasives to action, the out- ward world furnishes. But it has no power, in all its range, to take from the spirit its liberty of choice, or to shut it up with compulsory detention to any speci- fied course. Nor do even the inclinations, the predispositions, which are natural to it and habitual within it, restrain or determine, by a necessitating force, its voluntary movement. Against these, as against their exterior objects, the soul has power to originate new action; and often it expresses this, with a singular energy. The miser, in whom some taint of sordidness was ap- parent from his infancy, whose earliest action showed a tendency to greed, and who for years has been painfully cherishing this, until it has become what men describe as his ' master-passion,' convinced by the truth of a better rule than this, finding misery ENDOWED FOR VIRTUE. 155 and contempt his only present reward, and seeking for a higher and more satisfying good than his coffers afford, turns back upon his very inclination, and arrests it. By personal effort, because he so elects, he reforms and expels this destroying passion; turn- ing the sand-waste into a garden, and making himself philanthropic and generous. The man addicted to licentious indulgence, or long enslaved by an appe- tite for stimulants, tears off the glowing links that have bound him, and reasserts his original freedom. In order to gain this higher good, with the personal muscle and energy of the will, he stifles his passion, and makes self-restraint and temperance his law. The monarch retires from the throne to the cloister, and rejecting the splendid ambitions that have ruled him, passing out from the pomp and chivalry of courts, overcoming the dispositions and the habits of a life-time, devotes himself like Charles the Fifth to mechanical invention, and celebrates in his own per- son, with shroud of serge and penitential psalms, his coming obsequies. It is not a force exterior to it- self which compels the soul to act thus. ' Because I choose,' is the answer it gives to every interrogatory. It elects for itself; is controlled by no other; and yields to one motive in preference to another, because its own state or its voluntary act has invested the former with a higher attraction. So it shows its an- 156 THEHUMANSOUL, thority over habit and inclination, as well as over outward incentives to action. It can change, by ap- propriate efforts and means, its own dispositions; and not even the inclinations which it brings from its birth, can master or arrest the supremacy of its Will. And God interposes no barrier to this, by His sovereign decree. He makes us personal in our pri- mary constitution. He leaves us personal in our subsequent action. And while his plans — it is the mystery of Omniscience ! it is the problem insoluble of His eternal supremacy ! — ^invest our own, and even involve them, and are what they are because it is foreseen that ours will be what they afterward prove to be, the latter are left as free and untram- meled as if there were no such Being above us ; no all-including and perfect purposes, outrunning ours, and carrying them forward. So every day's experi- ence demonstrates. So human law and government imply. We know that we are free in crossing yon- der threshold, though every step as it strikes upon the floor completes a motion foreseen of God before our birth. We know that we are free, in entering a profession, in choosing a friend, in yielding to a motive, in resisting an appeal, as free as if our soul at first had planned the creation and locked its wondrous energies together, though the rhythm and the order of our own life and of others, of the his- ENDOWED FOR VIRTUE. 157 tory of the world, show one great Plan sweeping on- ward from the Eternities, preconceiving all results, never failing to secure them. Wherever the Infinite touches the finite, there, of necessity, to our bounded minds, mystery begins. ' Dark, with excess of bright' God's glory is, at every point where man discerns it. But the free and un- controlled operation of the Will, in selecting and de- termining its own course of action, in originating its movement and setting the limits to it, is an axiom in morals, in politics, and in practice; and the utmost conviction of the sovereignty of God's plan neither militates against this, nor avails for a moment in any man to overbear it. — The soul is free, as against outward ' motives,' to choose between them, to disregard one and take up another, to make the most slight and insignificant its own, in preference to that which is splendid and high. It is free, as against its own innate tendencies, or its cherished inclinations, to arrest dnd override them, and put others in the place of them. It is free, I will not say as against God's plan, but because of that plan, by virtue of its existence, to act with as truly a self-chosen movement as if God's pur- pose concerned no being nearer us than the sun, or lower than the angels. It is free to obey the Law of Virtue. It is free to take indulgence as its 158 THEHUMANSOUL, good. Each one of us to-night is free and self- guided ; and we are responsible for more than the plant is, for more than the star is, because we have this final freedom — the fragrant fruitage of all our powers; the very crown of our being! In this is completed the endowment of the Soul as related to Virtue. It has the innate sense of its reahty, and of the majesty of its law. It has the power of ascertaining that law, and of applying it to life, to interpret the details of each hour's action. The motives that conspire to prompt it to virtue, lie near its consciousness, and make themselves felt by it when action commences. It has certain specific and permanent aptitudes for the virtues which concern social life and relations, implanted within it. It has the power, against all outward incitements or oppo- sitions, against all inward inclinations and tendencies, to select its own course, to arrange or to change its own forms of action. It has personal liberty, that finite omnipotence f the liberty of decision, and of moral operation; the liberty of self-government. And by these comprehensive and interlocked powers, the soul becomes capable, intrinsically, of Virtue ; able to understand it ; able to embrace it ; able to realize this good supreme, which all the wealth of the world cannot rival, which no intellectual accomplishment ENDOWED FOR VIRTUE. 159 equals. It is full-formed for this; with each faculty fit; with each power in its place. Why, then, does it not realize it? How comes it that so few men, outside of the sweep of Divine Rev- elation, have ever desired or tried to be virtuous ? that so few, comparatively, within that circle, have attained this good ? The question confronts us, and challenges an answer. The answer is as plain as the thunderous storm-cloud, brooding in the air. It is, that men do not use the powers which they possess; that being born amid circumstances which tempt to indulgence, instead of inspiring to an austere virtue, they yield to these influences, and freely go astray ; that being born with congenital inclinations to lower good rather than the higher, to " the seen and the Temporal," not the "unseen and Eternal," they obey these in their conduct, and take them for their law. We tread at this point on the edges of a fact which can never be properly omitted from view in an ethical discussion ; the fact that man has pro- clivities to wrong doing, innate in his being, and dis- astrously prevalent over his conduct. That this is a fact, it seems to me no observer of history, no careful student of the experience of society, no earnest ex- plorer of his own moral state, can intelligently ques- tion. It comes, I believe, in developement of that special economy of God — the whole fruition of which, 160 THE HUMAN SOUL, as I said in the first Lecture, is yet to be waited for -^which interlinks generations, and sends each life transmitted to its possessor through parents and pre- decessors. From this it now comes to pass, as from this hereafter just the opposite shall result, that he who is born derives appetencies from his ancestry which seek Indulgence rather than Virtue; which make pleasure and power more attractive to the soul than that Moral Goodness whose law is self-denial, and whose rewards are unseen. But though these do in fact direct men's action, and prefigure their career, they do not compel or necessitate that action ; they do not destroy our capacity for Virtue. Upon that capacity our obligation is based. Upon the assump- tion of that capacity the whole law of God concern- ing us proceeds. It is indeed true, as Jouffroy has said, that "there is a great diiference between the destiny which man here actually attains, and that which is traced in plain characters on his nature." The confession of the Roman philosopher and poet is the plaint of humanity in aU the ages : Video mcliora, proboque ; Sed deteriora sequor. But the diamond unworn is still a diamond. And the power unused is not therefore less real, or less majestic. What men do, is by no means the measure ENDOWED FOR VIRTUE. 161 of what they might do, if they used with a rational energy their powers. And looking upon the soul of man, we cannot but see in it, in its conscience, in its judgment, in its moral sensibilities, in its faculty of free will, the native capacity for a triumphant Virtue ; a virtue, in fact, the more triumphant because it is ^a victory, won by struggles.' That very fact which looks darkest in our organ- ization becomes explicable, I think, it takes a new and illustrious meaning, when we think that the soul has authority over circumstances, can even arrest and resist dispositions, and change their course. Bec- carria is nobler, who converts a naturally ungenerous temper, severe and sour, into one yet more eminent for humanity and patience. The Jewish officer, whose bigoted zealotry would have crushed Christianity, wins all the more our love and homage, when, yield- ing to a voice that addresses his higher powers, he turns sharply upon his path, till courtesy, delicacy, the most tender generosity, the most winning humil- ity, the most undaunted self-sacrifice, become habitual with him, all founded in the permanence of a con- summate Love. And every soul which God hath formed, intelligent, conscientious, with liberty of choice, independent on motives, and supreme over ac- tion, may attain a more elevated and magnanimous virtue by reason of even the hindrances that sur- 11 162 round it ; and trampling beneath it the outward ob- stacles, triumphing over the inward propensity, may achieve g, moral victory to be chronicled in light, and celebrated in song, when the stars which are its platform shall have vanished as a cloud. Whether it will do this, untaught and unaided by spe- cial Divine provisions of grace, is another question, and a great one. Whether it can do it, in conformity with its native constitution, in developement of the forces which God has lodged in its being ; whether it has the original capacity to take righteousness for its law instead of expediency, and to choose the True and the Just as its ends, instead of the Agreeable ; — is a question by itself. And I see not how any can an- swer it in the negative. And so its character shall become the most noble. The spontaneous expression of a natural innocence shall not be comparable to that majestic and disciplined Virtue attained after mighty endeavor and struggle ; and the goodness, the wis- dom, and the power of God, so conspicuously mani- fested, as if written on the signet, in the intellect of man, shall be yet more impressively displayed in his moral constitution. Therein they shall gain the highest exhibition we yet have sought for them. I look upon the forms of material beauty, the sea, the azure, the light of flowers, the sheen of stars; I look upon the instinc- ENDOWETD FOR VIRTUE. 163 tive intelligence of animals, the art of the beaver, the cunning of the fox, the careful and instructed fidelity of the dog; and then I turn from all these classes, in all their development, to the great Soul of Man ; and it is from above, while they are of the earth. It hath celestial prophecies in it. It only is capable, through its spiritual faculty, of attaining that personal assimilation to the Divine, which Soc- rates describes as the goal of human effort. It only is formed for the exercise of Virtue. Whatever then of spiritual energy and mastery is expressed in the Reason, the Conscience, and the Will, aU this is declared to have residence forever in Him who formed these mighty powers. Whatever of goodness is demonstrated in the preference of vir- tue and its law over all other good, is shown to per- tain in an unlimited degree to that Supreme soul which framed our own to realize this end, which will not let it rest beneath this, which animates it to this by every appropriate incentive and motive, which takes it when it gains this to instant and perfect com- munion with itself! If the earth were one resplendent chrysolite, it could not rival in dignity and value one Virtuous Soul. And He who forms us capable of that, and who presses us toward it by such constant impulsions, transcends our speech, inhabits light, and hath His glory above the Heavens ! LECTURE IV. Ladies and Gentlemen : In the last Lecture of this course we consid- ered the Human Soul as formed by its Creator for the attainment of Virtue, and endeavored to unfold that equipment of faculties by which it is prepared for this eminent good. The Law of Righteousness is moral, spiritual, unlike the laws of the physical crea- tion. Conformity to it, which is the essence of Virtue, is the highest personal accomplishment of man; which makes his name venerable, and gives him a true intrinsic dignity, above aU comparison with titular rank; which assimilates him reaUy with the Divine mind itself. The relation sustained by the soul to this, is therefore a theme of eminent in- terest. It never properly can cease to attract us. And as we surveyed this, in the Lecture referred to, the ways of God were disclosed, and were justi- fied. In every soul is found implanted, as was then made apparent, the innate sense of the reality of Virtue, of the nobleness of its nature, and the author- ity of its law. Each possesses the power, — through 166 the aid of the judgment taking up and interpreting the impressions which are made on the moral sensi- bility, through the aid of the Reason apprehending the truth which is perfect and universal, — of ascer- taining, or certainly of recognizing when presented, the perfect and permanent law of virtue; and also of applying this law to life, and exhibiting its rela- tion to the details of conduct. Each soul is so formed, too, that those motives to virtue which alone can properly impel to its attainment, lie near its con- sciousness, and are developed and brought against it with the very commencement of rational life. The impulses to particular social virtues are natively fixed and strong in each. And each has the power of originating and determining its own moral move- ments, of choosing its own course, of acting in view of one motive or another, and so of conforming itself in action and in habit to the law of Righteousness. Through this special and sublime constitution of its forces, the soul of man becomes therefore in- teriorly adapted to Virtue. Neither ^motives,' as we call them, from the outward world, which are really only occasions of action, nor inward disposi- tions or innate inclinations, can with any supreme and necessitating force detain it from that. But in the use of its rare and high faculties it may real- ize a virtue, if true to itself, only the ^ more conspic- EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 167 nous and memorable for being wrought out against resistance and difficulty. • Its virtue shall be grander than a natural innocence ; as victory is sublimer than an easy success, and the attainment we make through the mastery of obstacles more noble than that to which we are bom. If the instances are few in which this has been gained, or has even been sought, by the self-guided soul, if Revelation is re- quired to incite us to this, and the Spirit of God to aid us to attain it, it is because man has not used his powers as he should have done, and not because his endowment of faculty is in any wise defective. A repository of personal and inteUigent Life, a fit subject of Knowledge, a fit subject of Virtue, the Soul has therefore already been declared to us; and the kindness, the power, and the wisdom of its Au- thor, I am sure have been shown in it as they are not exhibited in any most curious construction of matter, in any adjustment of its forces and laws. With all the rapidity and slightness of treatment to which the limits of these Lectures constrain me, I might here rest the question concerning the character and the greatness of our Creator, before your judg- ment, assured that your minds would give witness unto Him. They could not do otherwise without denying their own essential constitution ! But now we are further to investigate the Soul in 168 THE HUMAN SOUL, its fitness for Virtuous and Beneficent Operation, on the world around it, and on other beings ; to see how far it has been furnished for this ; with what tendencies it is stocked, with what faculties equipped, preparing it to realize this additional Good. Here another test is offered, another exhibition may prop- erly be sought, of both the quality and the energy of that Infinite Soul from which our own derives its being, and to which its marvellous and harmonious structure has thus far rendered its constant praise. If God has created us with reference to this, and has formed and endowed us especially for accomplishing it. He shows himself to us in another demonstration of His infinite perfections. It is evident that throughout the visible Creation the elements and forces which combine to complete it are ever inter-active, the one upon the other. The Sun is supreme, amid our part of this ; and the Sun is not left to an indolent splendor, folding up in his own circumference his light, and imparting no force to subordinate spheres. But with positive action, at each instant of his continuance, he emits and distributes of the glory which he hath, and the attraction which he holds, that the planetary system may be guided and irradiated ; that other suns, and the worlds which surround them, may be cognizant of this orb, bear- ing up in our skies his heavenly torch. To both the EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 169 Sun and the Moon, we are impelled to apply a per- sonal designation, by reason of this their perpetual operation. The one is the masculine, the other the feminine, not in poetry alone, but in ordinary speech, among the powers which rule our sphere. They meas- ure our time for us, a magnificent horologe. They distinguish our place for us, with micrometric exact- ness : telling the sailor where he is on the sea, or the traveller amid untrodden wastes. They keep the tides of the deep in motion, and affect yet more largely the currents of the atmosphere. They hold the Earth in its relative place, while sweeping with it through the untravelled ether; and they cover it with light, at morning and at evening, by day and by night, as if that light were a natural emanation from its own rugged surface. They are working on the world, at each instant of their being. The Earth, also, which responds to them, is not passive beneath the light ; but with fruitful enter- prise, replying to its appeal, she brings forth every where, from hid sources of life, the mossy and verd- urous herbage of the Spring, the fragrance of flow- ers and their delicate splendor, the bounteous strength and majesty of trees. The tree, in its sphere, is fruit-producing; or, if not so, inhaling and exhaling the invisible gases which make up the atmosphere, it purifies the air, and qualifies it to sustain and 170 THE HUMAN SOUL, nourish human life. The very flower looks up in its timid grace,, with an eye in every petal and a lung in every leaf, and even fulfils a spiritual office in ad- ministering to the taste, and cherishing the sensibility of him who bends over it. Not only does it work in developing the wise economy of its structure, in distributing its germs and reproducing its kind, but it breathes a sweeter aroma into Literature ; it re- flects its own grace upon the song that describes it, and so mediates a ' lesson of quickening beauty to many generations. Nay ; even the iron or rocky mass, inorganic in its structure, and only held together by cohesive attractions, exhibits the same tendency which we trace upward from it, in all the ascending grada- tions of life. Its very weight' denotes an activity, which permeates and enforces each passive particle. It binds other objects and forms of existence to it- self, and to the Earth. It cannot be conceived by us, apart from this rude yet real operation. And so, in its place, it is as constantly at work as any quick eye that glances over space, as any fleet and sinewy wing that winnows the air. It is thus characteristic of the creation around us that every thing in it acts on something other, and that aU are combined in perpetual operation. It il- lustrates the foresight, and the infinite force, of Him who framed all. It indicates, even, to the thought- EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 171 ful observer, the constant omnipresent activity of His will, which is now as in time past the source of all movement, the substance of all being, the fountain and the measure of all law in the universe. The ocean works, as well as the land; supplying the clouds with their watery burdens, affecting the tem- perature of different regions, invigorating the life of the tribes on its shores. Its currents are workmen. The harvests which it yields are harvests of heroism. The cavern works, as well as the mountain; opening the route to mineral deposites ; forming a tunnel for streams to flow through; hanging its arches with starry stalactites. And the triumphs of civilization are most evidently seen, not so much in the litera- tures or th« governments which man builds, the cities he founds or the empires he extends, as in the uses he developes from materials before counted worthless; the occult virtues, and powers of operation, which he shows to reside in the metal or the coal, in the herb or the earth, the shell or the bone. When we come to Man,- then, the personal crown of this terrestrial system, we anticipate Virtuous and Beneficent Operation as his mission and privilege. The plan which originated and which governs the sys- tem, would turn a sharp corner, would be reversed upon itself, if this were not so. And the more abun- dantly he is fitted for this, the more signal and evi- 172 dent will be the wisdom which has formed him. The intuitions of Reason accept such operation as one of the grand Ideals of humanity. It is not religion or poetry only, but philosophy as well, which says with the great German : " The end of Being is an Ac- tion, not a Thought, though that were the noblest." God finds in such operation His rest, and is con- stantly manifested as putting it forth. If the soul is prepared for it, it is kindred with His ! That the Body is prepared for effective operation, needs no demonstration. The proof of it is written on the front of the frame. The feature which strikes • us first in its conformation — the perfect mobility and liberty of the upper limbs, to operate backward, for- ward, upward, downward, for any effects which we ,may desire — this, of itself, sets the principle before us. And as we notice further the exquisite structure of the hands which complete these, their power, their pliancy, their capacity of opening and closing at will, their singular sensibility; as we notice the relation of the thumb to the hand, which a celebrated writer has called, you know, ' a second hand ;' as we remem- ber how all these are related to the eye, to the ear, to the brain, and how aU parts and members of the body converge to their free and various action ; — the inference seems inevitable, it becomes just as evident as the structure of these organs, that man was in- EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 173 tended, in his physical frame, especially for a Work- man. He might have experienced and enjoyed as much, in some other form of physical constitution. He could hardly have accomplished as much, in any other. And so this was given him. — But the ques- tion which now occupies us, concerns the preparation of the Soul for this ofl&ce ; and our business is to investigate the forces which show it ordained for this, and fitly equipped for it. K I mistake not, we shall find these to be both various and complete. I. In the first place, it has the central faculties of THE Will and the Judgment, wherewith to originate and to guide its operation. It can direct its own ac- tion, and it holds within itself the unfailing motor and governor of that action. The action of the star, as it moves through its orbit, is mere passive acquiescence in an impulse from without. An exterior force, impressed upon it, compels it mechanically to pursue its revolutions. This shoves it along the airy grooves, impalpable as thought, but binding as iron, that stretch through space ; and the moment this ceases, it pauses on its track, and drops from the circle of consenting worlds. The same is true, evidently, of all action and mo- tion in the material system; the same of aU the involuntary processes of animal life. The light is distributed every whither from the sun; the flower 174 grows up, and is clothed with its beauty ; the jewel emits its vivid lustre ; the waters stiffen, and are hardened into ice, or again with loosened foot and voice trip singing to the sea ; forests grow, oceans surge, or are pacified and stilled; millions of ani- mate forms are produced, are matured, and are left to dissolution ; all, under the action of exterior forces, to which their obedience is compulsory and physical. The whole operation which we notice in the sphere of matter and its laws, has its necessary origin in a power beyond. It is founded upon that poewr, is limited by it ; and when that ceases to oper- ate for it, it is instantly at an end. There is hardly another fact which so strikingly reveals to us the real helplessness of the creation ; its perfect and per- petual dependence for continuance on the one effi- cient Will above it! But the moment we enter the province of the Soul, we separate from this law ; we find there a representative of this higher and supreme Will; we meet the strange power, running parallel with God's, of originating action, and of freely and spontaneously carrying it forward. The soul depends on no out- ward impulsions, to commence, or afterward to sus- tain, its activity. In the exercise of its will it can choose not only how it will act, but that it will act, and when it will act. Unlike any piece of cu- EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 175 rious mechanism, which must first be set in motion, and then be kept in motion, by an influence from abroad, the soul once created supplies ever after- ward its own directing and administrative force. It commences and carries on, by the law of its con- stitution, its proper operation. It is a perpetual deep-centred spring, having its far head-waters indeed in the mind of the Most High, but supplying its own unfailing fountains with up-springing fulness, throughout its life. God has caused this to be so, by ordaining it with this signal prerogative of spon- taneity ; by taking it out of the sphere of mere na- ture, and allying it through its freedom with His own constitution. He thus gives it the power to set it- self in motion, and to keep itself in motion, inde- pendently of outward supports and auxiliaries ; and He shows it adapted for a working as permanent as the duration of its being. It cannot be holden, even by force, from the ex- ercise of this power. For the action of the soul is not conditioned upon circumstances, for its quality and nobility, nor always for its eifectiveness. It may be as noble, and as really effectual, when accomplished in the desert, or the solitary cell, as when ringing through the forum on the words of the orator, or moving by its brilliance the admiration of throngs. No outward pressure can therefore despoil the spirit 176 THE HUMAN SOUL, of this power, or even detain it from the exercise of this. It is the essence of Slavery, and a fact which exhibits it in plain antagonism to the system of God, that it seeks to do this ; to merge the free and motive will which works in one man, in that of his stronger or craftier neighbor. But even that can- not do this. It can only confine and shackle the body. It cannot touch, with its harsh limitations, the movement of the spirit. For the planning of an es- cape is as real an action as its subsequent accom- plishment; and the patience which cannot be broken by persecutions is more heroic, a nobler work, be- fore God's eye, than the splendid achievements of eminent Captains. Continuous, too, is this power of the soul to origi- nate and carry forward its own operations. Fatigue does not cause it to pause and cease; nor does the dissolution of the body destroy it. Fatigue hardly comes, indeed, in the mental constitution, with the use of this faculty. The body is wearied in a succes- sion of efforts ; and while the soul remains closely allied with that, it seems in some measure to share its weariness. But even here is often manifested, it sometimes is very remarkably exhibited, the rad- ical disparity between the soul and the body, the eminent and permanent supremacy of the former. In the midst of the decline and decay of the frame. EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 177 when every member seems tottering to its downfall, the unwearied spirit, its force unabated, works on as ever, its activity becoming only more imperious for the sluggishness of its instruments. If unmindful of the change from the earth which is before it, it plans new schemes, and enlists in new efforts, with a vivid enthusiasm which shows its vehement motive power, like the chariot-wheels in ancient races, rolling burning toward the goal. If contemplating the passage from the Present to the Future, with the faith of the Christian, it anticipates the grander activities of the Immortals, and waits with eager triumphant eye for winged robes and golden trumpets. In either case is declared the essential independence of the soul on the body; its capacity for continuous, stiU-aspiring activity. It is strictly discriminated from all objects in na- ture, it is shown in interior resemblance to God, by this constitution. It is fitted and fashioned, in the frame of its being, for a permanent, wide-reaching, and effective operation ; an operation to be prompted and sustained by itself, while guided by the Judg- ment, and directed to its ends. The mobility of the arms is no more clear an attestation of His plan who formed those arms to execute readily the purposes of the Will, than is the spontaneous activity of the Soul, its capacity for various and diversified movement, the proof that He who made it thus has fashioned it for 12 178 THE HUMAN SOUL, working. The active force is centrally lodged in it; and all the other related powers, the perceptive, the sympathetic, the conscientious, like shafts and valves, and pliant bands, of the assembled engine, are inter- locked with this main energy. All conspire with this to make man's work noble. II. But this is not all, nor is it the most import- ant of the facts to be observed. It is further apparent that the soul has, imbedded in its very constitution, such Impulses 'jlO Action, as make that action, we might almost say, a necessity ; producing it as naturally, wherever they are obeyed, as the force of the tree produces its blossoms, or as chemical changes produce diverse colors. — The fin of the fish does not more evi- dently convey the power, and betoken the function, of moving in the sea, or the wing of the bird that of sailing on the air, than do these quickening and propellant forces, inherent in man's being, proclaim him ordained for wide-reaching operation. Observe the va- riety and the energy of them ! Every force in our nature seeks action as its ele- ment. Decline and enfeeblement, with an inevitable unhappiness, come with the want of that. Confine a man from such action, by an injury or by imprison- ment, and even the physical frame shows the blight. It grows faded and sapless, like the flower or the shrub maturing amid darkness. Each muscle demands, EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 179 by the law of its constitution, the discipline and the culture of healthful use. The tenuous nerves which penetrate the system, and are concentred in the brain, run every way seeking their objects ; and if they do not find them, then, just as truly as if overloaded and fatigued with excitements, they vex the frame with their unoccupied activities. And so with the mental sensibilities and powers which are lodged behind these ; so with the wiU, which is the muscle of the soul ; with the faculty of thinking, which makes every nerve and each organ its minister. Each spiritual fac- ulty demands employment, in order to its true sanity and vigor ; in order that it may administer happiness, and may not become the occasion of pain. And if you deprive it of the opportunity of that, like the medicine which is poison when it stands in the sys- tem, it perturbs the whole. A constant spring is thus against every power — an elastic tendency, I should say more accurately, is intervolved with it, like a spring coiled up in a flexible fabric, — which makes passivity a matter of resistance ; which prompts con- tinuedly to forward working. We observe this in the child ; where self-discipline is imperfect, where habits and rules have not be- come fixed, and where therefore the instincts have their freshest exhibition. The power of observing, of remembering, of comparing, and finally of arrang- 180 ing the objects thus discerned, and even of consid- ering its own mental states, and combining with its thoughts the thoughts of others — in what ceaseless operation are these seen to be, in the mind of the child ! The very glory of art is achieved, is it not ? in expressing this phenomenon, which looks forth on us like a vision. There is no other canvass so precious among men as that on which is generously rendered this teeming, buoyant, and spontaneous force from the spirit of the child, irradiating his face like a uni- versal halo, suffusing with clear intellectual beauty his whole bright aspect. Sleep itself does not change him. It hardly can check his incessant activity. The very bed is canopied with dreams ; the wearied frame is despoiled of rest; the shackled tongue struggles beneath its bonds; the lips are parted in broken ejaculations ; before his alert and unwearying pow- ers, to which action is an instinct. Precisely the same tendency is observable in adult life, though there self-control has become more habitual. An enforced inertness is everywhere the condition of repining and want ; of a suffering as prolonged as the continuance of the durance. Even voluntary seclusion from active pursuits brings immediate unrest; and it cannot be maintained, without impairing the sound- ness of the whole mental frame. How disastrously EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 181 is this written in the history of monasteries ! It is shown not less clearly in more familiar instances. The man of wealth, retired from his active en- gagement in affairs, to rest in the mansion which his wealth has provided, is compelled, if he would be happy, to send his thoughts and purposes abroad on every hand ; to employ them continually, in some form of operation. He carefully builds and decorates his house ; lays out his grounds ; plants gardens and graperies; arranges the offices and subordinate out- buildings, with an eye to convenience and picturesque effect ; he sets out, trims, changes and re-trims his hedge-rows and shrubbery; he thins the grove of its superfluous trees, clears it of underbrush, and opens careful rifts in the foliage, through which the am- bient glory of the sunshine may fall in patches and flecks upon the sod ; he builds his gateway, of architectural device ; marks out his lawn, and grades and smooths it ; he makes the hard and gleaming roadway meander through it, in exact geometrical regularity of vagrancy; he crosses and interlaces it with the less distinct foot-paths; he opens the basin, for springs to pour their currents into ; he brings those springs from distant hills, to form a mirror, in this emerald setting, for the beautiful scene which his taste has created ; he makes a fountain throw up into the air its silvery sheaf, blossomed over and tas- 182 THE HUMAN SOUL, selled with crystal pendants ; he plans, and ornaments, and fills his Library ; cuts out queer niches in the walls on all sides, to accommodate the veriest whim- sies of his fancy ; puts busts along his hall, and dis- perses statues about his grounds, as if the wise had their haunts in the one, and the spirits of the Earth had leaped into form amid the beauty of the other ; he tries to make every part complete, to assemble all means of convenience and luxury, to contrive such accessories of comfort as others have not planned, and to give to his home an absolute material pro- portion and finish ; — ^and when all is done, and there is no more room for superfluous additions, he is rest- less as a robin confined in its cage. He has spent more thought on the scene of his repose, than it took to accumulate the fortune which has reared it. And exactly when men consider it complete, it has lost for him its chiefest attraction. He must then find employment and occupation abroad; as a citizen, in suggesting or superintending some new pubhc works ; as a philanthropist or a Christian, in devising and forwarding those movements of charity which shall inwardly quicken and bless society ; sometimes as an author ; sometimes as a politician; sometimes as a mere ofiicious intermeddler with all men's concerns. He cannot be content, in the absence of occupation. The trophies of the hero EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 183 would not let the young Greek sleep. The instincts of his nature, will not let him lie dormant. The instances are not rare in which men of this class, after a few months spent in that ^ elegant leisure' to which they had all their life looked forward as their crowning reward, have returned to their busi- ness as a necessary relief from its intolerable ennui. The instances are not unknown, in which they have rushed back, from the midst of their retirement, into the wildest and most daring speculations ; as if to compensate themselves, by such intemperate activity, for the too long restraint their faculties have suf- fered. Of course, something of this is attributable to habit; which cannot be suddenly interrupted without pain. But the habit itself presupposes and demonstrates an aptitude for it, within the constitution ; and it grew to be so fixed because nature tended towards it. In all walks of life we meet the same tendency. Each vi- tal power, each mental force, is instinct with aspi- rations for appropriate activity. The farmer, the mechanic, the merchant, the scholar, the prisoner in his cell, the sailor on the sea, all reveal the same law. A faculty for action, in the human constitution, brings desire after action, inseparably involved in it. And in the movements of private life, not less than the developements of historical enterprise, we discern 184 THE HUMAN SOUL, the same permanent condition underneath ; the innate thirst of our being for Work. God presses the soul to this by an immediate impulse from the centre of its hfe, before He attracts it by more special per- suasions. III. But such persuasions are never wanting. It is noticeable, further, in connection with the same theme, that the soul has many particular Desires, which equally prompt it to efficient and continuous operation on the world, or on other persons, as the only and necessary means of their accomplishment. While- it has the power for such operation, and the general instinct impelling to this, it holds a whole cir- cle of subordinate desires, which cannot be satisfied except through this means. We have the desire after Knowledge, for example ; what philosophers describe as the principle of Curios- ity; whereby we are moved not only to search out the truths which are abstract, or the facts which lie in the sphere of our consciousness, but also to dis- cover, to interpret into their meanings, and to classify in their harmonies, the elements of science, the facts of human life, the principles and the laws of social, political and rehgious developement. And this desire, which is native to the soul, and which grows and is intensified in proportion as it is gratified, can only be reaHzed by a strenuous activity, both in personal EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 185 study and in intercourse with others. It carries Humboldt in the morning of life to the subterranean galleries of Freyburg ; and afterwards, over the breadth of the Llanos, to the summit of Chimborazo, into the crumbling and perilous depths of volcanic craters, em- bosoming lakes of floating fire amid the expanse of unwasting snows; it urges him through thorny and poisonous forests of the tropics, up the tumultuous waters of unexplored rivers, across the rugged and frozen wastes of Northern Asia, to the cities of ice which make the perpetual prisons of the Czar ; in pursuit of new flowers, new metals and minerals, and new tribes of men. And it is only as all is patiently accomplished, that there forms in his mind that wealth of knowledge, more precious than veins of gold and jasper molten amid the earth by subter- ranean fires, which finds its splendid outburst in the " Cosmos." The same earnest thirst for the attainment of Truth, inspires each student in whom it exists to a similar endeavor, though humbler in its measure. There is no royal road to knowledge. No seminary can infuse it, w^hile the faculties are inert. Except one earn it, he shall not have it ; or if he gain it in outward semblance, it shall be in his hand Hke the casket of jewels the spring whereof he has forgotten how to touch. Visibly it is his ; its inward wealth 186 he cannot appropriate. From the study of hooks, from the study of nature, from the study of Man, this knowledge must he gathered. And so the Earth is encompassed hy its disciples ; the zones hecome to them airy lines; the changes of chmate, from the tropics to the poles, are reckoned hut as the mile- stones of their strenuous journey; the commonest earth is analysed in their crucibles ; the most com- plex statistics are gathered in their tables; and all societies and kindreds of men are explored, consid- ered, and mingled with, by them. And after all, Work is needed to confirm Knowledge. Not only by careful analysis and synthesis must one estimate and combine the elements thus acquired. By an earn- est consideration he must fully appropriate them. By experiment he must apply them, and work them as mingling warp and woof into the stuff of his per- sonal convictions, in order to incorporate them with his own mental stock, in order to make them in the truest sense Knowledge. So we have a desire, more general than this, for personal cultivation, refinement, and power ; an in- stinctive desire for society with others, the free com- panionship of those who are like us ; we have a desire for the good esteem of men, and that gen- eral acknowledgment of our powers and qualities which we feel them to deserve ; we have a desire EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 187 for influence over others, that we may impress our own feeling and force on their character and con- duct, that we may assign directions to their action. As our views become enlarged, and our moral state is elevated, we have a desire for the happiness of others, our kindred and friends ; then of those who are near us, or of those who are like us, and finally of all to whom we sustain any human relation. And just in proportion as Religion inspires us, and affec- tion for God becomes a part of our experience, we have a desire to accomplish ffis purposes, to extend His kingdom of righteousness and truth, to make His character revered by the world. All these desires are native to the soul, or are di- rectly implanted in it by the beneficent energy of God. And it is very instructive and important to ob- serve — what is only too plain to admit of illustration — that no one of all this wide-reaching circle of ap- propriate desires can be gratified, even partially, with- out patient and Adgorous operation on our part. We cannot have personal advancement and culture ; we cannot have society, with influence over others, and the good esteem of men; we cannot promote man's happiness, or God's honor; we cannot accomplish one impulse of our nature, which prompts to the attain- ment of such special goods ; without voluntary, intel- ligent and continuous Working. By this Virtue 188 THE HUMAN SOUL, comes; not that secluded and cloistered Virtue which Milton contemnedj which fears the heat and contest of the struggle, and slinks out of the race because the goal is too far off, but the clear, far-sighted, mag- nanimous Virtue, which values a principle above all interests, which estimates Truth as the Mistress of life, and is ready to endure for it as well as to en- deavour. *By this Happiness comes. It cannot be purchased by outward wealth. It cannot be imported by mansions and equipage. It comes as a subtle perennial fragrance, that rises from quick and vigorous faculties when they have been pressed against resist- ance and difficulty. It is the fine warmth that inly pervades and rejuvenates the soul, when it has been exercised in the gymnasium of effort. And every good which we seek to accomplish abroad in the world, that the memory and effect of it may come back to reward us, must likewise be born of the he- roical will, accepting and realizing in a strenuous ac- tion the high ideal. God impels the soul to work, then, in the use of its faculties of the judgment and the will, with re- markable precision and perfection of adjustment. The instincts which prompt to this, are sunken into our nature, as deeply and indelibly as the blue into the sea. They pervade our whole life. They could not be eliminated, except by an equal though a contrary EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 189 exertion of the power which has formed us. They leave us no alternative but efficient operation, or in- ward unhappiness; and they show most signally the mind and the heart of Him who has prepared the soul for this good. It is predestined to this, by the frame of its being; while the world all around says practically to it, ' These golden apples of thy desire are watched by the Hesperides, and guarded by the dragon. If thou wouldst have them, thou must conquer the way to them. And the picture of that battle, as of Hercules with Ladon, shall be suspended amid the stars !' As the clear and sensitive organ of the eye, which holds upon its tiny lens the masses of far stars and^ the mazes of their movement, was evidently made for this marvellous function; as the nerve of the ear, which takes eloquence, poetry, wit, applause, the tone of affection, the crash of the thunder-burst, the lively laugh of childish glee, and communicates each with instant fidelity to the spirit behind, was mani- festly formed for exactly this office ; so, just as clearly, the personal Soul, with its judgment and its will, with its deep-seated instincts, and its eager desires, with its unrest in indolence, and its thought that outruns at- tainment every instant, was made to realize its good by working. The date-tree in the desert is not more precisely pre-adjusted to its office ! And then God puts it on the sphere for such work. 190 THE HUMAN SOUL rV. It is important to notice fourthly, that the soul, which has these powers and instincts native within it, is so RELATED BY ITS MAKER TO THE WORLD AROUND IT, AND TO OTHER EQUAL SOULS, that the efficient operation which is prompted from within is equally and always demanded from without. It meets opportunity and invitation to this, the moment its personal forces are developed ; just such opportunity, and such invitation, as are fitted to call it forth. The fancy of the child represents to him the star which shines at evening on the front of the heavens, as an orb full of golden and luminous beauty ; where .crystal seas, in beds of pearl, with musical motion float ^ and sway ; where every mountain, if such there be upon that round enamelled surface, sparkles illustrious as a footstool of God, while each serene valley spreads downward its slopes, as a silver chalice filled with fra- grance and dew ; where all is naturally complete and re- warding, and there is no room for finite work. There enjoyment, as he conceives it, is the necessary con- dition of vital experience ; and the whole occupation is contemplation and love. But certainly not such is our environment ! This rough, untamed, dishev- elled Earth, cries out for work on every hand. These vehement elements, of air and water, demand to be wrestled with and patiently mastered, by the vigorous soul, in order that they may adminis- EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 191 ter to our happiness. There is the wax. In the soul is the seal, designed to impress it. There are the materials, upon which and with which the spirit is to operate. But no implements, even, are given it for its use. It must forge them, as it wants them. They are not found ready fashioned to the hand, as ornamental stones are, in the caverns and rock-rifts. They must be conceived by our skiU, and completed by our labor. But the moment we begin, all is ready for our progress. All has clearly been prepared by an Infinite Mind, adjusting its relations to the powers of the soul. For ages the iron, and the coal with which to fuse it, have been silently deposited, side by side in the earth. Between strata of rock, that sustain and then cover it, the fuel has been stored for innumerable ages. And before man was made, and sent upon the Earth, all these were thrown up by internal fires, the rock-strata broken, and the different metallic and min- eral substances heaved into the reach of his pene- trating mines. The woods are made to cover the earth, to grow up from its surface in perpendicular elevation, and continually to reproduce themselves as fast as they are cut, that there may be room for the dwellings of man, and scope for his industry, and yet an unfailing material for his use. The fields are spread in their roughness before him, that he may 192 THE HUMAN SOUL, clothe them with productions if he will, But that oth- erwise only grasses and weeds may spring from them. The ocean is stretched between its boundaries, to be fathomed and crossed by his enterprise and daring, or else to remain ' to him a terror forever. And so he is left to accomplish his mission. If he works, all things else work with him. With complete unanimity the whole series of natural forces and elements sur- rounds him with helpers. The very power that shows itself in the earthquake, as has lately been shown in a very suggestive and thoughtful little treatise, is the sub-terrene furnace, sending up to him his materials. Cotton and flax pre- sent their fleecy and tangled fibres, to be wrought into thread. The fire which frightens most animals from it, and which cannot be produced by them, becomes the splendid attendant of man, and his promptest servant. The atmosphere itself works for him every hour; giving nourishment to his plants; preventing the fruitfulness of the soil from exhaustion. Other planets work for him, keeping ours in its equipoise. Even birds are his ministers, watching over vegetation ; consuming its despoilers, and distributing its germs. The insects work with him, building coral and slate, and giving him their purple, their lac-dye, and their silk. And Man, with the help of all these, is to work, as their master and leader. By his endeavor, with EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 193 the blessing of God, is the swamp to be changed to the firm and fair glebe; the forest to be opened to habitations and cities ; the ocean to be made a liquid roadway for the commerce of nations, an im- mense mediator of international peace; the whole expanse of each civilized domain to be studded with homes and clustering viEages ; the very mountain- crest to be made to shake with the golden banners of the wheat-field on it ; and the beauteous and ma- jestic achievements of art to be wrought to encircle the earth with their cestus; — until this scarred and bloody orb which was silent so long, unvisited by souls, which has been ravaged so long by violence and wars, but which is reserved for such sublime destinies, shall be prepared for the dwelling of the Just; shall be robed and made ready for its coming coronation ! Thus does the Material world invite the soul to incessant operation. And not less does the Spirit- ual, which shows a singular sympathy with this, and matches it in the frequency and the urgency of its demands. Inequalities of condition, between those of the same race ; inequalities of races ; the different de- grees of culture and of force possessed by different nations and tribes ; the constant tendencies in human nature itself, which He behind oppression and error, scepticism and sorrow, and which are to be patiently 13 194 . THE HUMAN SOUL, struggled with and subdued; the occasions of phys- ical infirmity and want, on the part of those near us ; peculiarities of temper, in the household or the neigh- borhood; disasters experienced, or disasters in pros- pect ; the simple diversities in character and attain- ment, where no inferiority on either side is involved; the very presence, indeed, of other beings, toward whom our affections or our charity is due ; — all these make demand on our voluntary action. We are pressed toward this by interior impulses. We are urgently and continually called upon for it, by our outward relations. God not only has fashioned and furnished the soul in reference to it, but has placed it on a sphere where everything incites to it. And setting its constitution in the light of these rela- tions, that takes an instant and signal explica-' tion. God has fitted it for an operation, intelligent, and voluntary, as vital as its being, as noble as its powers, and as wide in its influence as its connec- tions with the world. But going forward still further in this view of the Soul we observe yet another fact which shows its adaptedness to useful Operation ; the goodness, the wisdom and the power of Him who has from the first prepared it for such. It is: V. That it has command, by virtue of its consti- tution, OF ALL THE FORCES AND INSTRUMENTS WHICH ARE EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 195 NEEDFUL FOR EFFICIENT AND BENEFICENT OPERATION, either physical or spiritual. They become its recognized property and equipment, as fast as its faculties mature and are unfolded. God likens it again to His own soul in this, and prepares it for the noblest actions and effects. The Forces which the soul is thus authorized to employ, in its manifold operations on the physical world, are those impalpable but inestimable powers which throng and press, as ordained of God, amid and throughout the natural system. Of these the soul has mastery by its birthright. The Instruments it may use, are all forms of invention, all mechanisms and engines, through which it subordinates these to its plans. Consider this more in detail : — The primary implements of impression on the world are the members and organs of the physical frame; and of these the soul has the absolute ownership, over them it asserts supreme authority, from the be- ginning of consciousness. Whatever then is fashioned by itself to aid these, becomes in like manner its property and its servant. It is constituted with pow- ers, as already has been shown, which enable it to fashion such with singular ease, and in marv*ellous va- riety. The types of such mechanisms, not less than the images of all forms of beauty portrayed by the painter, or the forethought of arguments and impas- fXTFITBrw. 196 THE HUMAN SOUL, sioned appeals, lie quickening in its nature ; and it scatters them on its path, as its faculties are devel- oped, and as general civilization carries it forward, as the bird scatters song through its arrowy flight. They are all auxiliary to the instruments which it first wields, the organs of the body; and being produced by it are entirely its own. The fork, the knife, the graver, the spade, they are merely steel fingers, iron hands, accumulating and prolonging the energy of those members. The rud- der which the hand holds, it is in effect that hand itself, enlarged, and shielded from the wash of the waves. The telescope, with its wondrous space-pene- trating power, the microscope, with its clear and searching lens, in which seems almost an image of Omniscience, are yet only adjutants and servitors to the eye, that more marvellous instrument which no hand can fashion. The soul of man, invisible itself, controls the eye. It creates the telescope, to be its assistant. The locomotive steam-engine, with its con- nected trains of cars, whose tread is like an earthquake traversing the surface, whose rush outruns in noise and power the plunge of the cataract, — the soul has created that as a servant to the body, to move this on its errands, and to carry its burdens. The steam- ship flashing through night and storm, trampHng the riotous waves beneath it, and drowning the strife and EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 197 uproar of the winds, by its more measured and peremp- tory stroke, is a similar instrument sent forth on the seas. Each began in a thought. Each was bom of the soul. And that which produced them has the power to work with them, for any effects. When thus we gather the mechanical arts in a group before us, and see how the Soul has created them all — ^being capacitated for this by its native constitution — ^we see their true meaning, and see how God has equipped it for action. One man digs the earth with his rude and weak shovel, hewn roughly out of wood from the branch of a tree ; and another per- forms on a gigantic scale the same essential mechan- ical operation, constructing carefully his iron apparatus, making every part contribute strength to every other, combining all in a common operation, putting the power of steam behind them, and compelling one engine to do the work of a thousand arms : — ^in the one case a rude soul, in the other a developed and cultivated mind, is asserting its supremacy over outward imple- ments. The Bengalese weaves with his rollers and treddles on the edge of the jungle, as his fathers did before him ages ago, and slowly and painfully the poor and coarse fabric comes forth from his loom, a very pariah among products; and the man of our times, and of our civilization, to whom Arkwright and Watt, and Whitney have ministered, sets in motion a 198 THE HUMAN SOUL, mechanism with a touch of his hand, which spins and weaves with unwearied activity, in his presence or his absence, by night or by day, unaffected by cli- mate, unaffected by seasons, rolling forth like waves of damascened silver the beautiful stuffs which our luxury demands; — and yet in each case, the Soul behind is the parent of the implement, has devised and has built it, and now uses it as its own. And its power to do this has been given it of God. The real marvel lies at that point where it touches and dominates the outward. How it plans the engine, is not so unsearchable as how it directs the muscle of the arm. But God has made it capable of both. He so has organized it, in his frame of its being, that it has every organ and member of the body its ready minister. And this being the fact, all imple- ments and apparatus auxiliary to these, come naturally in their time, as thought conceives and science plans them, and as human labor erects and completes them. And all, as they come, are the property of the Soul. The power to pick up, or the power to plan, one movable type; there is the germ. And that being given, the framing of the press, which puts a lever beneath the world to lift it nearer the throne of God, is not amazing. The power to lift, with intelligent effort, a drop of water ; there is the mystery. But that being granted, the power to frame and to build EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 199 the ship, to launch it on the seas, and hold it steady and even on its way while the winds whirl against it, — ^this comes with the other. An absolute author- ity over Instruments of action, is thus the native prerogative of the soul. God has given it lordship and dominion over such, by its regal constitution. But these are not the real Forces which it com- mands, and with which it may work. Those are the powers, too great for speech, which encompass us in the creation, and which God puts ever at the bidding of the soul. The mechanisms are only the gloves with which to grasp those; the flexible ring-armor in which to shield the body from their contact, while the spirit employs such prodigious assistants. Light, is one of these. With it the soul may oper- ate on the world, almost at its will. With it it does operate, in most various methods. Accumulating and concentering it, with an easy machinery, it makes it nurse plants to an extraordinary vigor. It prints shad- ows and lights with it, proportions and expressions, on the impassive steel. It even inflames the ignit- ible wood with it, and so compels it to convey to us fire in its innocuous and palpitating hand. Being fettered by the soul, and made to outstay the sun which is its source, it 'illuminates cities when the night darkens over them, and waves its tiny flaming scimeter at the door of each Eden of domestic feli- 200 THE HUMAN SOUL, city. When impurities have accumulated, and have been festering for years, making the crowded haunts of men the centres of pestilence and the seminaries of death, man takes down the casements, and sweeps the rooms with its silent pencils. He exhales into the air by its defecating power the seeds of miasma, and brings the hue of health again on the fevered and glaring face of pain. He makes the Light work for him, wherever he proceeds in the mastery of the earth; to cleanse the morass; to render forests inhabitable where a falling vegetation, decaying for ages, would otherwise lie under each prostrate trunk like a scorpion in its hole. He makes the Light work for him, to reveal every beauty which his thought has devised ; to cast every shadow which enriches his architecture ; to open his route to all discovery. He marries with it gases, which in darkness will not combine. He bleaches with it stuffs, or delicately colors them. He carries it with him to the depths of the earth, where the sapphire sparkles as an eye in the rock, where the gold gleams back its answering welcome to the ray which accosts it. He carries it down to the bottom of the sea, and lays open before it the secret wonders of coral-reef and cavern, the mysteries of the sea-bed, the terrors of the wreck. He is not content to em- ploy it in its integrity ; but even untwists its lumin- EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 201 ous strand, takes the violet from the green, and the orange from the red, and makes each separate fila- ment of the ray that looked indivisible, paint for him, enamel for him, or confess its incapacity. — This is one of his forces. Electricity is another. By it he decomposes aerial gases. By it he resolves the most difficult substances, making its searching analysis discover the invisible points and planes of union in what were esteemed the simple forms of matter. By it he pro- duces a light more intense than has heretofore been realized by any other means in the compass of science, a globule of which shall irradiate a square. By it he transfers and multiplies engravings ; plates baser metals with silver or with gold ; Hfts heavy weights ; combines metals and minerals before uncompounded ; makes substances oppositely electrized dance around him, like resuscitated Bacchantse. By it he minis- ters to those who are diseased ; to the nervously irritable ; to the asthmatic, the dyspeptic, the para- lytic, and the asphyxied. By it he sends messages over a continent with a speed that outruns the sun many hours, and makes the tidings familiar in regions a thousand miles from him, before the moment at which they transpired has there been reached. By it he designs to annihilate the ocean as a barrier of intel- ligence, a non-conductor of ideas ; to make continents 202 THE HUMAN SOUL, indivisible, and weave nations into one, in the instant and incessant reciprocities of thought ! Not a century has passed since Franklin first drew the Lightning from the skies ; and yet already man prints with it, paints with it, writes with it, engraves with it, talks with it, cures with it, and is ever finding out new uses for its strength. The cunning Hermes has himself come to earth, to run on errands for men, and no more for the gods. His travelling rod, enwreathed with serpents, is now a wire, transmitting thoughts. His golden sandals are sparks of lightning ; and he forwards our commerce, as he never could the' ancient. So the Water and the Wind are both servants of the Soul, made so by God's constitution of its life. It is ordained to have mastery over them. There is a real sublimity in the ease and the persist- ency with which it uses both. It makes them drive the wheels of factories; grind grain, spin, weave, and card the wool ; print, press, stamp, lift, carry bur- dens, propel ships, forge cannon, drill rocks, and take the place at a thousand points, with a might far greater, and a continuance more prolonged, of the muscle of the body. The Wind the soul makes its airy musician, to fill the house with -^olian melodies ; and, at the same time, it catches it on vans which do for man what a hundred working oxen could not. It is at once his mechanic and his minstrel. The EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 203 Water he makes do every tiling but think ! He is lord of the globe; and over no part of it does he assert a more absolute supremacy. Gravitation itself, which binds man, works for him; and that in no fancy or figure of speech, but with a patient continuance of operation which no more bright but transient force can ever rival. It is the great muscle in that compact of powers, of which Light is the eye, and the Lightning the nerve. It holds up and guards the structures he rears, with imperishable cement. He cannot himself hold his arm out unbent, though with nothing upon it, for a half hour together. But stone upon stone he piles his arches, and locks them together with the key-stone at the top, and then Gravitation, the meek minister of his will, will hold them there thousands of years without failing. The traveller to Rome passes now through the gateways through which Alaric rode, four- teen centuries ago. The Claudian aqueduct stiE rears its great masses, where war has not broken it, across the Campagna. And the arch of Titus shows now on its piers the table and the trumpets, the silver horns and the golden candlesticks, which were ravaged from the temple, as when the Jews first shuddered before it. The pyramids, flame-shaped as their name pictures them, date back to the ages that followed the Deluge ; and this unwearied and . silent power, to which 204 THEHUMANSOUL, they were entrusted, makes them wonders to this day, where they sentinel the desert. Over all these mighty material powers, the Soul for its uses has dominion, by its birthright. They smite us now and then into instant destruction to show us how great they are, when we cease to use them wisely. But they operate for us, with a force as unwearied and almost as omnipresent as the Divine Mind it- self, so long as we govern them. And in giving it the power to use these forces, which He created and energized at the beginning, — ^in giving it the ab- solute mastery over Instruments, and the power to pro- duce them, wherewith to grasp and subordinate these forces, — God fits the soul to operate with mighty ef- ficiency on the World. Its highest desire can seek no force more grand than these. Its highest thought can conceive none superior. Its equipment for work- ing becomes only less than that of its Creator ! But this is not the ultimate or the main department in which it is to work. It is to operate as well on the Spiritual system, of which it is a part. And for this it has an equivalent command of all the* neces- sary Forces and Instruments. The Forces here are Truth, and Righteousness ; the representation of what is, in existence ; and of what is just and appropriate, in conduct. The soul has power, as has previously been shown, to appro- EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 205 hend and express these, and with them it may oper- ate on all whom it reaches. Complete and primeval, in their nature and their authority, they appeal to the Race. The judgment and the conscience, all the moral and rational faculties of man, must render them their response. Nothing else can take the place of them, in their proper sphere, any more than of Gravitation in its department. They are purer than Light, and mightier than Lightning, and more unfail- ing than the atmosphere which embosoms us. And the Instruments with which one may wield these Forces, they are among the things most august on the earth ; and yet they are produced spontane- ously by the soul, and are ever its possession. It was created with powers prepared to produce them ; and has ownership of them by virtue of its nature. Take Language, for example, and the Literatures which it forms. These are among man's chiefest Instru- ments ; and yet so familiar that we hardly remember, until it is shown to us, how marvellous they are. The power of Language, — of embodying thought in articulate speech, and then of presenting it through written terms — in respect of its earliest and sub- tlest developement, has a mystery in it; like every thing else where the human and the Divine are brought into contact. It is quite impossible, with any analysis, to interpret fully the growth of any tongue. 206 THE HUMAN SOUL, We can only say that the Soul produces it, by a pro- cess so instant and so universal as to show it espe- cially prepared for the work. — It has sometimes been imagined that the terms and the grammatical forms of Language were an immediate gift, by supernatural revelation, from God to man. This clearly is not a sufficient explanation ; for even if true it would eclair- icise but one language, and that the original, the language of Eden ; and the languages of the race, now split and spHntered into such diverse dialects, would remain to be accounted for. The truth, rather, may be thus stated : that God has so formed the Human Soul that by its constitu- tion it struggles toward speech ; it cannot rest until it attains that ; and it comes at last, in the natural developement of its innate force, to realize and erect this vehicle of thought. At first, undoubtedly, cer- tain sounds were appropriated to indicate certain sensible objects, and to distinguish them from others; as, a chair, or a bench ; a horse, or a tree ; the moon in the sky, or the water on the beach. These sounds are arbitrary, having no esoteric fitnesses to their ob- jects, yet they become permanently associated with them. Then internal states are represented by such sounds, used figuratively, as we say, with a super- induced and secondary significance. The positions of such objects towards each other, and towards the EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 207 speaker, demand and secure certain terms to express them. And gradually, from these their relations and inter-action, as perceived by the eye and represented in sound, there grow up all forms of grammatical ar- rangement, until the Language is prepared continu- ously to proceed, with the further developement and cultivation of a people, toward entire, completeness. It comes at last to furnish an equivalent for every object ascertained to exist, in nature or in thought; to furnish representatives of the relations of these, and of aU the modes in which they limit or influence each other. So simple and obvious — ^the power being first given of making a wave of the air carry a thought, of charging its motion with the utterance of ideas — is the process of the formation of any most finished and powerful tongue, the developement of which de- clares and measures a civilization, and the relics of which remain through the ages, outlasting temples, and perpetuating thought. But how marvellous this essential faculty! What a light does it shed on the Wisdom that planned, on the kindly and infinite Power that framed, our mysterious constitution! and that made the earth, which stands around us, such a mirror of the soul, suggesting to it the elements of self-representation ! — No brute has any such power of Language. Some tribes of animals have the faculty 208 of designating by particular sounds particular objects. All animals, almost, have the power of emitting some sound from some organ, associated usually with fear or with pleasure. But none has this faculty of intellect- ual expression. No one can affix names to things, and then abstract the relations these sustain, and ap- ply them to fiie expression, and illustrate by them the mutual relations, of spiritual forces, whether as connected in the series of experience or in logical catenation. Herein is the very omnipotence of God, revealed in our structure ! Herein is His Wisdom, preparing the soul for a work not physical only, but spiritual ; a work transcendent in its nature, and wonderfully searching and far-reaching in its influ- ence ! Compare the golden oriole, swinging in the sun- shine, and filling the house with flashing melodies, with the infant, moaning in his as yet inarticulate speech, that lies beneath ! The bird was made for enjoyment first; for work, subordinately. The infant was created for an enjoyment to be realized through fervent operation. The bird has a beauty that reflects the very beauty of the Mind which created him. The gloss upon his breast, and the brilHance on his wings, were put there by God's pencil. His gushing song warbles a tribute to Him who gave him power to sing. But the child has a struggling capacity EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 209 within him, as much grander than this, as the spir- itual and Divine are always grander than the phys- ical. He hath in his being the germs of Speech. And speech can represent the most delicate feeling. It can set forth the mightiest process of thought. It can furnish an image for all that is conceived. It can take up and interpret the very thoughts of the Infinite, translating them into language for the immortals to hear. God himself hath put eminent honor upon speech; using it as the vehicle of his highest inspirations ; creating the worlds, we are told, ^by a word.' In it, the regal soul within asserts its absolute dominion over matter, causing the palpable pulses of the air, set in motion by the tongue, to carry its thought; transfiguring them, with a spiritual glory. More majestic than his palaces, than his con- quests of realms, than all his apparatus of material helps, is this Speech of man; the prerogative of the soul, and universal with the Race. What capacity does it give for the largest opera- tion ! Remember that poems are but speech in cer- tain forms ; where the impulse of a generous genius within has made all words its ' airy servitors,' has ar- ranged them as by magic in ever-new movement and musical combination, and has forced into them its pa- thos, wit, and intellectual fire. Remember that Elo-. quence. Philosophy, Legislation, Science, Religion, 210 THE HUMAN SOUL, History, take Language as their instrument. They could not exist among men without this. Through this they gain power to mould the Race 1 The thought that was spoken by Plato's lips, which bees from Hybla were hardly fabled to have touched, still lives for us, and shall never die. The progress of the nations ac- cepts and incorporates it, and will carry it forward till the globe is dissolved. The dialogues of Socrates, the arguments and appeals of Roman and Greek ora- tors, all sermons and treatises of great preachers and writers, the thought that floated calmly into the mind of the meditative, the conviction that was wrought out by a terrible experience, the knowledge that was gath- ered through patient years, the fancy that flashed on radiant wing before the poet, — all these survive, and they still aflect us. Those who ages ago were buried in Greek urns, or laid in Jewish or Christian sepulchres, still sit by our firesides, and recite to us their thought. All lands are united, the oceans are bridged, the centuries sing in concord as they pass, the unity of the Race is made a reality, the earth is allied with superior realms, through this mystery of Language ! It gives the soul the power to work on minds, not bodies ; on nations, not mountains ; on every Land, and every Time ! It makes it a majes- tic co-operator with God! Yet this is but one of the Instruments of the EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 211 soul, \yhereby it may operate on the Spiritual world. Music is another; in some respects even mightier than the former. Words sometimes deceive, and they vary with the ages. But a musical tone abides for- ever, a mathematical unity. It hath ubiquity. It speaks more piercingly, too, than the word ; as any one knows who has heard a child cry. The soul, therefore, which hath mastery over musical tones, may use them on its errands with a splendid supremacy it cannot claim over Language. It catches new im- pulse, the while it sings. The music, as a subtle and spiritual minister, intensifies the feeling, while it bears this abroad on swiftest wings. There are some of its compositions, therefore, wherein the whole life-force, so to speak, of the composer, his aroused personality, exalted by the vision of that which is Supreme, seems to pour itself forth with immediate fulness. With perfect range, it has perfect exactness and fit- ness in its mechanism. And so, with an energy well- nigh necromantic, it utters itself to others ; till, "Lifts the Eternal Shadow, The silence bursts apart, And the SouPs boundless Future Is present in the heart!" The power to use this, is not universal, as is the power over Language. But as a special gift, commu- 212 • THE HUMAN SOUL, nicated to some, it shows of how much the Soul is capable ; for what mighty operation God has or- dained it. And even this is but one of the harmonized arts over .which man has dominion as his Instruments. What this cannot do, that Sculpture may; with its peerless dignity, its severe and pure grace, or its immortal agony that seems frozen into the rock. What neither can do, that Architecture may; making each aspiring pile a throne, whose empire outlasts kings and peoples. Even Government, with its Laws, which are or which should be expressions of Justice, and witnesses of Truth, — is but another mechanism for the mind to create and then to employ ; and Religion is the highest of all in the series, expressing the ut- most attainment of the soul, or coming to us directly from the mind of the Most High ; with its doctrines and precepts, its instituted ministries, its recurring assemblies, its rites and its missions, and its perma- nent structures. ALL these are Instruments, whereby the soul, pos- sessing innately the power to use them, may operate widely on the Spiritual world, may spread the forces of Righteousness and Truth, and thus may realize its highest end ! God has fitted it for this with an in- finite skill, with a boundless and perfectly immeasur- able power, before which we can but bow and praise ! EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 213 He has fitted it especially for Virtuous Operation; not only giving it that equipment of faculty by which it becomes capable, as was shown in the last Lec- ture, of realizing Virtue, and of impressing this quality on its conduct, but urging it towards this with con- stant and central, although silent impulsions. He makes its own frame. He makes the whole course of human experience, a perpetual admonition to Virtuous, as distinguished from selfish and base action. He forbids it to attain the true goods which it seeks, except through this. The path of the ambition, which uses these won- drous forces and instruments for personal ends, is like the ascent of a mountain. There are brooks at the base, and swarded meadows ; the cool recesses, for quiet repose ; the ample domain, for fruitful labor. There is shelter from the storm, and a covert from the heat; and in the calm and leafy aisles the in- sects murmur, and the wild-birds sing. But as one ascends, step after step, with flushing cheek and pant- ing breast, the way is more rocky, and the scenery is more barren ; the flowers of the valley pass away and are lost ; the streams plunge down with hoarser clamor; the trees are no more fruit-producing. And when the summit is reached at last, rocky and icy, the adventurer pauses, bereaved of companionship by his very success, inhahng an air that tingles on his 214 THEHUMANSOUL, veins, an enforced anchoret because of his elevation, lifted up to isolation by his superlative selfishness ; without reward, and without further hope ! So expe- rience demonstrates. So our nature predicts. And History lifts her solemn witnesses, unhappy and soli- tary on their topmost attainments, to give warning of the fact. The man who will heed, then, the lessons within him, and read aright the instructions from without, who will use in selecting and pursuing his course the eminent faculties with which he is endowed, and will let the fine instincts implanted in his being decide his career, will need no other preparation or impulsion to make his Operation truly Beneficent ! The out- ward circumstances which meet him in life, will at- tract him from this. His inward dispositions will incline him to indulgence. But God has so made him that he never can be satisfied, till his nature is changed or his faculties obliterated, in any thing else than a Virtuous career. — Run your hand up the stalk of a vigorous shrub, every branchlet and twig aspir- ing toward the skies, and all moves easily, without effort or pain. No branch is dissevered from the stock that supports it. No leaf is disturbed on its airy pedestal. But run your hand downward, against all the tendencies inherent in that growth ; — ^you may bring it to the ground, but tender twigs are snapped EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 215 before it, and leaves and blossoms are brushed away by the violating contact. And so in the nature and frame of the Soul, which God hath created. The upward is the true method. K one's action corresponds with the tendency of his being, as God has ordained this, it is easy and beau- tiful. If it tends strongly earthward, it may press successfully against the ethereal resistances that meet it ; but graceful thoughts will drop before it, like leaves untimely shaken down, and delicate sensibihties will be broken in the movement, and bleed inwardly at the rupture. It is written in our own hieroglyphic con- stitution, as it is in experience, as it is in the Scrip- tures,, that the way of Purity, and of Heavenly Wis- dom, is the only sure way of pleasantness and peace ! With what wonderful perfection, then, and finish of adjustment, has God framed the Soul for Beneficent Operation ! Can there be any other exhibition of His character, any other demonstration of His infinite en- ergy, more remarkable than this, when we consider it ? This kingly soul is all His work ! It puts forth whatever of force is required, because He so framed it. It subordinates to itself aU auxiliary agencies, because he endowed it for just this office. And it forever stands back of all, giving shape to enterprise, giving impulse to discovery, giving method and effect to aU endeavor, because it is the personal represent- 216 ative of Him who works unseen, in incessant opera- tion, throughout all worlds ! In its intangible and invisible faculties, more impalpable than perfume, more imponderable than light, it holds the seeds of ' cities and governments, of institutes of learning, of great structures of charity ! By these are made to ride forth navies, curbing the seas as Canute could not. From these flow arts, legislations, literatures, the whole immense fabric of Society on the Earth. It wears as its mantle, this mighty Soul, all that man has accomplished ; all that visioned and high imagin- ations have conceived ; tragedy, poetry, eloquence, philosophy, war, sciences, governments ; the empires that have arisen, the reforms that have changed, the revolutions that have shaken them; all trophies of enterprise, and aU triumphs of discovery ! All these are embossed, as its magnificent decorations, on the robe of this spirit, as it marches through Time ! I think we need no other proof of the divinity of its origin, or the grandeur of its powers ! I think we need no other demonstration of the wisdom, the goodness, and the infinite might, of Him who cre- ated it ! We admire the cathedral, where every art has found its shrine; where the very apotheosis of the tastes and of the senses seems fitly celebrated. How marvellous, then, that Mind on high which formed the intelligence, subordinate to itself, one specimen of EQUIPPED FOR BENEFICENT OPERATION. 217 whose products is here shown to us ! We are awed and amazed, as the students of Literature, at the copiousness and breadth of learning and of thought, the splendor of fancy, the mental retentiveness en- compassing all knowledge, which there accost us. Conceive then the scope, the boundless magnificence, of that underived and eternal Intelligence which sends from its unwasted sun the power's that are shown in this affluent array ! We revere the great action of magnanimity and courage, which makes the nations pause and wonder, which founds an epoch in His- tory, as if a Divine Man had descended to the earth. Remember then the grandeur and the power of His Soul, before whom this act with all its sublimity is only one work, appropriate in its kind, of the creature whom He formed for expressly such works ! Consider the Soul, so wonderful and fearful; so full of life, so capable of action; creating implements by its free motion; controlling forces which it cannot comprehend ; selecting ends, subduing obstacles ; carv- ing the Earth into the likeness of its thought; giv- ing that thought perpetual spread among the equal souls of others : — consider the Soul, more marvellous than the stars, more lofty in its orbit, and larger in its influence : — and say if He who planned and made it, hath not shown in it a Wisdom like the azure, unlimited and pure; a Power like the laws which fill 218 THE HUMAN SOUL. that azure, silent and calm, but perfect in its scope; a Goodness and a Kindness that smile across these, as light falls beaming through the sky ! To such an one our homage is aU due ! Of such an one let us be each the reverent child! LECTURE V. Ladies and Gentlemen : In this Series of Lectures, as thus far pursued, we have considered the Human Soul, first, in the original constitution of its being; regarding it as en- dowed with a self-conscious Life, transmitted to each through the ministry of parents, yet really created in every one by the power of the Almighty, made sep- arate and personal in every one, and replete in each with the germs and foreshadowings of indefinite devel- opement ; — then, as adapted to the attainment of Knowledge ; furnished with the instincts, and equipped with the faculties, by which it is prepared to ascer- tain Truth, concerning the facts and forces around it, concerning itself, and concerning that ideal and invis- ible realm, of principles and their relations, which makes no appeal to any sense, which is not reached by the physical organs, but which the intuitive appre- hension of the soul declares to be as real as any thing outward, the very ground and source, in fact, of all verity in phenomena; — ^then, as adapted by its author for Virtue; prepared through its moral nature, including the Conscience, the Reason, the native apti- 220 THE HUMAN SOUL, tudes for social affection, the Free-Will which is cen- tral and governing among its powers, to realize this eminent spiritual good ; — and then, in the fourth Lecture, as capable equally of Virtuous Action ; de- signed and ordained by Him who created it, for be- neficent operation on the world around it, and on other minds. The last train of thought, we may briefly recaU : — An impulse toward action is native to each spirit- ual power which we possess; the faculty for this bringing instantly involved in it, by the soul's con- stitution, a tendency towards it. Each desire after relative and particular goods, incites to such action as the only and necessary means of* their attainment. The soul has power, as exhibited by its actual his- torical performance, for inventing the necessary instru- ments of action, whereby it may affect either nature or mankind; the implements of industry, with the great elementary forces which these wield, — Language and Music, with the spiritual powers which they may utter and impress, — being all made thus subserv- ient to it. And of course the same frame and ar- rangement of its powers by which it becomes capable of arising to Virtue, makes it capable of giving to the action which it puts forth a virtuous quahty, of in- vesting it with pure properties, and of rendering it illustrious through its tendencies to Beneficence. PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 221 So God has prepared the soul, in that organic con- stitution which he gives it, 4o be a free and noble Worker, exerting an influence not physical only, but spiritual as well, and co-operating with Him in the accomplishment of His plans. Through this capacity He enforces and sublimes it; and through this it be- comes in turn a fit and majestic witness for Him. Its highest works are then only fully or properly in- terpreted when considered as indices of the wisdom and the power of Him who created it. All eloquence and endurance, poems, legislations, religions, martyr- doms, the art that has enhanced the beauty of the earth, the triumphs of inventive and industrial skill that have developed, combined, and accumulated its resources, — all, are so many prophecies and represent- atives to us of that Divine and incomparable Mind from which the lesser minds exhibited in these works originally sprang. The fine and finished forms of beauty, as well as elevating moral appeals, the high and rare inspirations of genius, as well as the plans and heroic achievements of executive force, .with in- stant unanimity point us to Him by whom the pow- ers that are manifested in them were intrusted to His creatures, and who hath in Himself, unchangeably and forever, their perfect sum. If then, even here, we were to pause in our sur- vey of the Human Soul, and our analysis and com- 222 THE HUMAN SOUL, putation of the powers that inhere in it, would not the Wisdom, the Goodness, and the Greatness of Him who planned and then produced it, be made signally evident? More than in all things else on the Earth, or in the visible Heavens, more than in ' the precious fruits brought forth by the sun, or the precious things put forth by the moon, or the chief things of the ancient mountains, or the precious things of the lasting hills,' would there not be shown to us both the mind and the heart, and the omnific will, of Him who gave its every force to this capacious and regal spirit? But the argument which it is given to me to trace out, or rather which it is given to me to indicate, so that you may trace it out more minutely for your- selves, pursuing it into details which I cannot enter, and illustrating it by instances which I cannot cite — does not rest at this point. There still remain two important relations in the light of which we must study our spiritual nature ; two ideal Goods against which we must measure its mystic constitution, in order justly to estimate that, and really to gather all the lessons of its Author which it is fitted to bring us. The first of these is Happiness ; and the second is a grand and progressive Future Destiny. If we find the soul adequate and adapted to these, I need say nothing more to place it before you, a proof of PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 223 God's character, and a trophy of His power, unique and supreme among these lower .works. You will feel for yourselves that He who has formed it as He has, has shown therein an absolute energy, with a wisdom and goodness as boundless as his power; and that to a Being so illustrious and kind we never can prop- erly cease to bring our praises and our thanks. The adoration of our life is not too much to render to Him! In the present Lecture I propose to consider the Human Soul in the first of these relations ; as fitted for Happiness ; and to point out some of the forces and tendencies, constitutional within it, which show how God consulted this in creating it, and how with wise and careful skill He has endowed it for this» That true Happiness is a good, I need not argue, as if it were a point requiring proof. The intimate instincts of every mind declare it to be such. The arrangements of God, in his plan of the creation, clearly and fully exhibit it as such. Entomologists tell us that millions of insects, generations whose num- bers must be counted by myriads, are born and die within the compass of one summer's day. Perfected with the morning, they flutter through their sunny life ; and the evening, when it turns its shadow upon the earth, becomes to their animated and . tuneful be- ing a universal grave. It is impossible to understand 224 for what end this is done, unless we accept the hap- piness which these share, as a good in itself; a good so great, in the judgment of the Creator, and of those who look with Him on the creation, as to justify the expenditure of such wisdom and force on their deli- cate, harmonious, but ephemeral structure ; and to make this structure illustrative of His glory. Throughout the gradations of the animal kingdom we trace the same tendencies. We observe, as we examine, not only that the organs which these ani- mals possess are planned and adjusted with reference to use, but also that that use is fitted, and is evi- dently intelligently designed, to be the instrument of pleasure. Enjoyment comes as the natural. fruit of it; to be at once the reward of it as past, and the mo- tive to it in future. That quick, compact, and jew- elled form, which hovers like a decorated herald of the fairies, around the opening lips of the honey- suckle, or over the glowing bosom of the rose, seems to quiver and pulsate in the very intenseness of its eager enjoyment, as it wavers and darts amid the fluctuating air. The majestic swoop of the eagle through the air bears the sound of a kingly exulta- tion on its rush. And cattle browsing amid the pas- ture, or loitering homeward at evening in lowing files, the fish poising and playing in the brook, or flashing with arrowy speed through the pool, the PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 225 cricket chirping on the hearth, bees filling the air with busy murmur, the very terrapin sunning himself in lazy luxury above the ooze of silent swamps — ^all these, not less than the wild thrush and the linnet pouring to God through echoing skies their notes of praise, those " Invocations of bright birds that fling Life's sunny overflow from throat and wing,'' — attest the pleasure existence gives them, according to the kind ordination of the Creator. God every where shows us in his constitution of the animal kingdom, that the Happiness which is appropriate to the pow- ers of His creatures is a good which He recognizes, and would evermore foster; towards which He makes the plans of His creation systematically to con- verge. And every man knows instinctively, for himself, that true Happiness is a good as related to him. He seeks it by an impulse which anticipates any deduc- tion of the judgment. His natural aspiration, his readiest effort, is to realize it more perfectly. And he feels that whenever he shall fully accomplish this, when every capacity shall be filled with enjoyment, and every action bring this as its attendant, he shall be sweetly and fully at rest in that attainment. Knowledge, Virtue, the faculty and the* love of Virtu- 226 ous Action, all these are implied as conditions and means of this crowning result. But when through them this is finally reached, the end of man's being we know will be realized. He will be thenceforth a perfect expression, more perfect and luminous to the spiritual eye than the finest or the noblest material products, of the Wisdom, the Goodness, and the Power that have formed him. The conviction of this, as I have said, is instinct- ive. We perceive it intuitively; and no argument, to demonstrate it, is necessary or in place. The dan- ger is, not that men will not seek happiness suffi- ciently, with an ardor proportioned to its real worth, ,but that they will seek it too violently, ambitiously, with a rash precipitation, in the use of wrong means, at the sacrifice of Virtue, and not through its obedi- ence. Eeligion and Philosophy are both needed to restrain them in their effort to gain it; to guard this from becoming impetuous and idolatrous. But Re- ligion and Philosophy both agree with our instincts in affirming true Happiness as the proper goal and harbor of man ; the ' beauteous experience ' in which his faculties, and all his endeavors, shall find their fruition. The question, then. How far God has adapted the Soul to the attainment of Happiness ? must be recog- nized by all as legitimate to this discussion ; as fur* PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 227 nishing another opportunity of investigating both His character and His power. — But in considering this, it is clearly to be borne in mind that the question con- cerns our constitution, not our action; the possibili- ties of Happiness which our nature affords, not the actual attainment of it which we severally make. Man is not a machine, the parts of whose nature can be forced to yield happiness, as the lips of the loom are forced to emit the vari-colored fabrics while the mechanism behind pushes fold after fold irresisti- bly before it. He is not a passive and impersonal subject, through whom happiness can be poured, as the blush through the peach, or the green through the grass. The element of freedom is a central one in man, and so God intends it; and the costliest en- dowment may therefore be wasted, or utterly per- verted, by his carelessness or his crime. The question for us is : How far has God, in his creation of the Soul, adapted it for Happiness ? not, What will be the result of disregarding or traversing the plan of the Creator ? If our nature is shown to be receptive and capacious for the experience of en- joyment, and if, when acting according to and within its appropriate laws, it naturally secures that, then the wise and benevolent energy of God will be clearly declared in it; although it should be shown that through the disregard or violation of these laws, and 228 ' THE HUMAN SOUL, through the misuse of his fine and high powers, man fails even generally to secure and possess the highest felicity. Not what we gain, but what we may gain; not what we are, but what we might he ; — this is the measure, so long as we are free, of the wisdom and goodness of Him who creates us. I. If we thus consider the make of the Soul, we shall see for the first thing, which is really suggestive of all that follows, that The very Sense of Being, WHICH IS CENTRAL AND INNATE IN IT, IS A SOURCE OF EN- JOYMENT. — So curiously and beautifully organized is it, that with the powers which it possesses, and in the conditions which properly invest these, self-conscious- ness gives it Happiness. Aside from all particular delights, antecedent to their experience, surviving their departure, it holds, as a perennial fragrance, this pleasure-giving sense of a personal existence. We pass up at a step, as we contemplate this, from the material to the spiritual; from the merely organ- ific and unconscious life which is manifest in the plant, or the unreflective life which is evident in the animal, to that which is sensitive, intellectual, free, in the Human Soul. It lets us into a secret of God's heart; and shows us very evidently the im- measurable kindness, as well as the exquisite skill and foresight, and the incomparable power, which are lodged in His mind ! — Observe how independent of PREPABED FOR HAPPINESS. 229 circumstances it is; this intimate and permeating, though silent pleasure, which springs up in the soul from the very Sense of Being. It is not conditioned upon any particular mental attainments, though doubt- less it often increases and is confirmed as these are advanced. It is not conditioned on any particular exertions and successes of the executive faculties. It* lives in all ; and almost nothing can overthrow it, or separate men from it. You see it expressed, unconsciously, but only there- fore the more emphatically, by the child ; whose every motion and beaming feature, in the absence of course of disappointment and trouble, but equally in the absence of any special incitements to pleasurable emo- tion, betokens how pleasant it is to live ; what silent luxury is in the consciousness of Being. You may trace it thereafter, if you will, through his Hfe. Let that child grow up a sickly cripple; enfeebled and distorted, by disease or by casualty, compelled to carry with him, through his earthly career, the bur- den of constant debility and pain ; and still this inward unpurchasable pleasure, attending the very consciousness of existence, is not destroyed or over- borne. Let poverty be added to this physical in- firmity, and enforced alienation from home and its pleasures; let imprisonment, even, be added, shutting out the pleasant light of the sun and the skies, the 230 THE HUMAN SOUL, smile of the fields, the face of friendship, the sounds , of nature, and all the voices of kindly cheer ; — ^and still the sense, interior and enduring, of the good- ness of Life, and of the blessedness of possessing it, is not destroyed, or even silenced. Almost no imagin- able disaster, coming from without, can uproot or silence this. It is lost, if at all, only when inward unrest and pain, the fruit of ambitious plans distip- pointed, or of selfish hopes frustrated, or of sins the more terrible for their very successes, have smoth- ered and drowned its delicate sense. And then the exclamation, ^I had as lief die as live,' announces the surrender of the very citadel of the soul, the essential separation of the man from his kind. Common to all, except as thus sacrificed by their own impure action, is this sense of the beauty and dignity of existence, this joy in its experience. It becomes more refined, more elevated, and perhaps more evident, as the faculties are unfolded and the tastes are cherished, as the affections are exercised, and as the hope of the Future becomes firmer and more vivid. But all partake of it ; the savage in the woods, as well as the magnanimous statesman in the senate ; the barbarian islander, as well as the cultivated man or woman of our civilization. It makes all shrink from whatever threatens, or even re- sembles, the cessation of existence. And it is under- PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 231 neath the manifold particular enjoyments of life, as the low unaspiring harmony in music, which breathes be- neath the brilliant melodies, and interpenetrates the majestic anthem, not challenging a separate attention to itself, but adding to them a more copious charm, and supplying them all with its undulating basis. It is like the sweet sunshine, enveloping the earth, and fillhig the air. We do not notice this as much as we do the particular beauties, of the vase or the paint- ing, of verdure or of form, which it reveals. But this serene and unstartling glory, which floats silent in the air, and touches the earth like a smile of its maker, is that which gives their beauty to all those, and makes them meet to attract our thought. And so the primary permanent pleasure which the very constitution of our being affords us, which is brought to us afresh at each moment of conscious- ness, which sickness does not break, and which no- thing less than remorse overthrows, is that which makes all transient pleasures real or possible. With- out this other things could not gratify us at all. Through this, such minor and particular delights gain power to gladden. Consider, then, how easy it would have been for God, if malevolently directing His infinite power, to have made the very sense of vitality a pain, and thus to have made every motion of the will a fresh dis- 232 tinct pang; consider how easy to have made it indif- ferent, a mere negative base of sensation and thought, upon which special pleasures should be superinduced, but from which they should take no vivacity or ful- ness ;— and then see how he has made it, in, itself full of joy, the very sense of existence a perpetual feli- city, pervading the soul at each moment of its being as the lustre pervades the substance of the gem — and you notice His delicate and continual contemplation of man's Happiness as a good ; His assiduous plan- ning for it, in the very foundation and conception of our being. Such happiness is thus made native to the soul, and almost necessary. Our nature is framed for it, and involves it from the start. This demonstrates God's character, and it justifies our praise ! II. And so, as we go further in examining the Soul, it is equally apparent, in the second place, that such and so careful is the constitution God has given it that Each Motion of its faculties, while acting ac- cording TO THE LAW IMPRESSED ON THEM, BECOMES THE SOURCE OF A DISTINCT PLEASURE. — It is not Only pleas- ant to live ; it is pleasant to act, no matter what the form or the particular kind of the action may be, so long as it is put forth under that paramount law of Virtue which God has made supreme above us, and which he never consents to intermit. The bear- PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 233 ing of this fact, if such it is shown to be, on the theme before us, is instantly evident. A harp might conceivably be so framed by its maker that every string, though rightly tuned and rightly struck, according to the theory and design of the instrument, should emit when touched a separate discord. Or it may be so framed, as we know by ex- perience, that from it shall flow, when fitly swept by an educated hand, the concerted numbers of a noble music; inspiring the thoughts with their spir- itual force, or suffusing the very air around us with an audible glory, and making it drop benedictions upon us. If the latter be the case, we know that the instrument was made for such melodies, and we bless him who framed it. If the former be the case, it shows that that instrument was made without de- sign, or else was made with malicious intent, to mock with pain where it promised to please. Now God has so framed the Human Soul, in his wise and benevolent ordination of its powers, that each of these powers, as normally employed, according to His plan, gives a separate pleasm-e. K unhappiness comes from them, it is from their wrong use, not from their use ; from our perversion, and not from our just em- ployment of them. Take the power, for example, which the soul pos- sesses, to which in another connection your thoughts 234 have already been directed^ of using the material mech- anism of the Bodt/, and of operating through this upon the outward world. This is not only indispensable to its useful activity, while it lives surrounded by mat- ter and its forces; but it becomes to it a spring of perpetual pleasure, so long as the proper relations are maintained between the body and the soul,, and their reciprocal functions are healthfully fulfilled. In the constitution and combination of the five physical senses, — whereby the frame is made pervious to im- pressions, which pass through it from matter to the mind, or rather whereby the mind is rendered capa- ble of reaching out through the frame, of surveying nature, apprehending and measuring it, — we see this il- lustrated. An arrangement is here elaborately planned for the pleasure of the spirit ; and every movement and action of that spirit, justly avaihng itself of this arrangement, communicates enjoyment. Reflect on the consequences of that equally feasi- ble, of that seemingly more natural and feasible ar- rangement, by which the soul should have had but one avenue, of touch or of taste, of hearing or of sight, through which to attain and relatively appro- priate the outward world. What a comparative blank would its experience have been ! How immensely, at once, must its enjoyment have been lessened ! Now, lord of the body, through all its five ' imperial ways,' PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 235 by the golden gate of sight, or by the ivory gate of hearing, along the living causeways of the touch, or through those other pathways to the earth more hum- ble in their aspect, yet flower-lined and fruit-present- ing, it goes upon its missions; and each of these movements is in itself, aside from what it brings us, an appreciable pleasure. Observe the blind ; consider the deaf; remember the rare and exceptional in- stances in which men have had no sense of taste, or of touch, or of smell ; and be grateful to Him who has made these departures from His usual ap- pointment so rare, and almost solitary. Not merely in the number and the copious com- pleteness of this series of the Senses, over which the Soul by its constitution has supremacy, do we dis- cover the wise kindness of God ; but equally in the perfect constitution of each, and the fitnesses which exist between it and the mind. Consider the effects which are wrought by disease on either of these physical media of our action, interrupting the usual operations of the soul and suspending its suprem- acy, putting barriers between it and the world which is around it, and compelling it to act through a dis- ordered mechanism ; and then admire, in contrast with this, that delicate and careful adjustment of the body with reference to the soul which God has established, and which guUt only invades.' 236 In one of the most terrible of modern fictions is vividly pictured a disease of the eye, the result of the practice of licentious indulgences, through which that vital and crystalline orb becomes the medium, or rather the focus and radiating centre, of the most in- tense pain ; in which visions of fiery and torturing dis- tinctness seem originated in it, to throng backward upon the mind; and the latter having lost all the lordship which it asserts over the undefiled organ, becomes a prey to its terrors, and is lashed by its pangs. A parallel efiect is sometimes produced, by fever or by casualty, on the structure of the ear. It seems to be released from the dominion of the soul, to be dislocated from its proper relation of allegiance, and let loose for a separate, self-originated activity; and it so responds to each tone from without, that the soul meets each with a palpitating spasm. It is fe- vered and convulsed, not charmed or instructed, by the motions of its servant, now broken from its grasp and turning to rend it. Suppose, then, that this were the normal and usual relation of these organs to the sensitive spirit; what an evident diabolism would it argue in the Creator! Contrast with it that wise and benign adaptation, uni- versal except as man's sin interrupts it, directly or remotely, by which the mind, invisible itself, possesses and uses, without hindrance or let, these physical or- PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 237 gans ; — observe how each use of them, while they re- main unimpaired, gives it fresh satisfactions ; what constant pleasure is in the exercise of seeing, so that, as William Humboldt says in his Letters, "the mere sensation of light, quite abstracted from the percep- tion of objects, is always pleasing and delightful;" consider how the soul is pleased, in the absence of irritants, with the mere act of touch, the mere mo- tion of hearing ; — and you see how furnished it is for Happiness ! with what ^dgilant fidehty God so far at least has prepared it for this good. The world around is made the thronging seed-bed of its pleasures ; while the senses which it uses, to bring itself into connection with that, become each one a minister to its enjoyment, and every impression which it summons to itself, according to the foresight and plan of its author, comes marching to the measure of lutes and dulcimers. The same thing is as true of the power which the soul has of wielding the different members of the body, to accomplish its ends in executive action. The very act of moving the limb gives pleasure, if that be healthful and unfatigued. The mere use of the arm holds its own reward in it. It is not a' great or signal reward, but it is a real one ; and un- less it be overbalanced by subsequent disappointments, we recognize and feel it. Industry is a joy to us, 238 therefore, even when unsuccessful ; and it is literally true, as the Preacher instructs us, that ' in all labor there is profit.' The farmer who is not harassed by- anxiety, or oppressed with disaster, goes out to his morning work singing as he goes with a bhthe cheer that makes the fields re-echo with the strain. The labor itself, as well as the harvest, has invitations for him. You need not compassionate him, on that to you so unaccustomed toil ; for to him the very exercise is a pleasure, and the beaded sweat-drops on the brow are worth the price of many sheaves. So the blow of the ship-builder rings with the impulse of a superflu- ous strength; and the axe of the pioneer drives against the tree with a force which shows that the soul is interested, and not merely the muscle, in every stroke. The very use of the body, by the will which is within it and superior to it, gives a natural pleas- ure. It is one of the secrets of God's constitution that this should be so ; and it manifests His good- ness. He makes the body not a" prison to the soul, but a beautiful shrine of it ; not its tyrannous task- master, but its servitor and tributary. We are accustomed, indeed, to anticipate the time when released from this body, and perhaps clothed upon with a purer and more splendid celestial struc- ture, the Soul shall enter still new felicities, and vin- dicate more illustriously the mind and will of Him who PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 239 formed it. I am not here to invalidate this hope. On the contrary, I also and joyfully look to this, as not more a vision of poetry, or a thought of phi- losophy, than a truth of Religion ; as a fact made certain to all who are Christ's, hy the actual and re- corded ascension of their Master. We may gladly await that sublime consummation. But it becomes us to notice, and gratefully to recognize and appre- ciate the fact, that while the soul is conjoined as now with the physical frame, it derives from that connec- tion a sensible Happiuess ; every use which it makes of this, if appropriate and just, imparting a fresh pleasure. Not only do these members bring gifts and reports to it, of impressions which they have taken up from the world, or of works which they have wrought, and objects which they have gained in it. Their very obedient service is a joy, and in its use of them it finds a reward. But we need, of course, to get back to the inner spiritual activities, considered in themselves, and dis- sociated from all relations to the frame, to see this principle in its fullest application. There, too, it will be found, if we carefully examine, that every appro- priate movement of the Soul, in its voluntary action, is attended with pleasure. It not only may gain a reward ulterior to itself, but it holds in itself, aside from such gains, an intrinsic reward. A degree of 240 enjoyment is constitutionally involved in it, and there- fore is inseparable from it. Take the strictly mental action, for example, of the Taste, the Judgment, or the Imagination; and you can- not but notice that each of these faculties, while normally active, is productive of pleasure. Whatever may be the particular line of effort in which they are employed, the very use of them, so long as it is virtuous, is a pleasure; and he who uses them most legitimately, and most continuously, experiences there- for the truest enjoyment. The pleasures of the Taste — the pleasures, that is, which spontaneously arise from the intelligent percep- tion and measurement by the soul of what is out- wardly beautiful, — have been a favorite, ever-new experience, with the delicate and refined, since the earth with its mountains and its dew-mantled plains lay smiling and serene in primal light. In how many songs, of an exquisite grace, have these pleas- ures been celebrated ! Over how many hearts and households have they distilled their gentle baptism ! In how many souls, indeed, peculiarly endowed with this mental sensibility, have such pleasures had a charm which business, and friendship, and Religion itself, must avail themselves of, in order to urge their high- est appeal! The pure and beaming azure, standing as an eternal PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 241 dome, which God hath reared for his own glory ; the emerald and silver mosaic of land and sea, which spreads its vast and tesselated pavement beneath this roof; the manifold and innumerable particulars of beauty, with which this great Cathedral of the Earth is furnished by its builder ; rainbows, waving their splendid banners along its high and darkened nave ; forests, cresting like capitals its columnar heights ; flowers, smiling beneath these heights, like letters and signs of an illuminated page; fountains and streams, and ^ sunny spots of greenery,' brightening amid them, as very fonts of God for the cleansing of life ; all that which marks this visible scene an august Tem- ple; and all which art has done to match this, and set on arch, pillar and pinnacle, statues and finials; — as the soul, accustomed with its faculty of Taste to observe and to measure all this and these, reaches forth unto them, and applies to them those laws of beauty the intuition of which is inherent within it, what intimate pleasure penetrates its -frame ! What light and joy suffuse its experience ! This is not a pleasure of the senses alone. It is far more rich and deep than that, because more spir- itual. It comes directly from the action of the Soul, applying to that which the senses reveal to it, those ideas and laws, unseen but imperative, of which it is certified by its very constitution. According to the 16 242 THE HUMAN SOUL, nature which God has given it, it derives an imme- diate satisfaction from this. And all the pleasures which pertain to the body, of gratified appetite or of luxurious repose, are poor and coarse in comparison with this. This becomes, too, more clear, emphatic, and abounding, its ethereal influence pervades us more fully, as the mind is matured, and as its faculty of Taste is cultured and refined. It is noticeable, even, that when the object to which we apply these laws of beauty, in proportion or color, is itself entirely opposed to those laws, in its aspect and constitution — as when we view the ragged chasm where an earthquake has heaved two hills apart, or when we look on the solitary tree blasted and light- ning-smitten, when we pause above the whirlpool, or stand beneath the chalky and thunder-cleft precipice — still the very act of considering and adjudging the object, and of setting it in contrast with those which no such convulsion has rent, gives us natural pleasure. In other words, it is pleasant to use the faculty of Taste, though what we examine is inharmonious with its rules. The very exercise of the mind, in discrim- inating the fact, afibrds us a satisfaction. And if ev- ery thing around us were repulsive to us, we should evermore be moved to discover and report it. So subtly has Grod intertwined with the Taste the tend- ency to pleasure, making its very action a source of PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 243 this, while also He surrounds it with objects in ii^e earth adapted to afford it those secondary delights for which it is fitted, in copious measure. In the use of the Understanding, we discern the same tendency.' Indeed, the pleasures wliich flow from the exercise and employment of the Taste are not equal certainly, they hardly are comparable, to those de- rived from the use of this power — the analytic, con- structive, and harmonizing power, by which the products of invention are organized, by which sciences are elaborated, and arguments planned. This does not show so brightly at first as does the Taste. That shines like silver in the recesses of the mind, while the Judgment looks cold and dark, like iron. But the iron when heated gives out a lustre so splendid and intense that the glow of the silver, though equally heated, fades into an ashy pale whiteness before it. And so the Judgment, the analysing, comparing and administrative faculty, when keenly excited and pow- erfully active, gives out a pleasure that enlightens and kindles each part of the soul, and in comparison with which the pleasures of the Taste are superficial and dull. Archimedes, rushing naked from the bath to his instruments, because suddenly there had flashed on him, as he stepped into the water, the true mode of ascertaining the specific gravity of metals ; or the 244 THE HUMAN SOUL, same geometrician, so absorbed in what some have supposed to be an effort for the quadrature of the circle, as not to heed the flaming city, and not to know that Death approached him : — this is an in- stance which familiarly recurs to us to* illustrate this principle. And a bright and conspicuous instance it is ; hardly possible, in its particulars, except to that eager and intense Greek nature which rushed to each pursuit with a consecrating fervor. Yet many others have substantially reproduced it. Read those magnificent and inspiring words, alive in every syllable with an exulting enjoyment, with which Kepler introduced to the knowledge of the world his treatise of the highest astronomical laws ; remember what is told us by TuUy of himself, of his consuming delight and ardor in constructing his ora- tions ; what is told us of Pascal, as he meditated Euclid till night and day were dissolved together in his mental excitement ; nay, observe for yourself the exceeding enjoyment of any inventor perfecting his instruments, of any reasoner compacting his argu- ments that they may present undivided and complete their phalanx of appeal; consider how absorbing have been those hours in your own experience, in which some fact giving hint of a theory has been meditated by you, and made to render up its scientific mean- ings, or in which some plan, political or commercial, . PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 245 has been seized upon by you, its parts framed to- gether, and its applications developed, till you knew beforehand what its working would be, and could prophesy its success ; — consider these instances, and the others that are like them, and you see at once what an exquisite pleasure, often rising to enthusiasm and sometimes to extasy, is involved in the use of this customary faculty, which we name the • Understand- ing ! It comes from no rare inspkations of genius. It requires no singular attainments of knowledge. It comes interlocked, in inseparable connection, with the proper activity of that general power of dissection and construction which every man more or less fully pos- sesses. It cannot be divorced from that, any more than the heat-ray from the light-ray in the sunbeam. And any man who honestly and earnestly uses his Judgment, to develope a truth, or distinguish a right and useful course of action, gains this reward from it. To do a thing mechanically, may merely bring tedium. To do it intelligently, will always give pleasure. And the higher and more prolonged the exertion which the understanding puts forth — so it be not carried to that inordinate extreme where a re-action follows, to restore the mental balance — the more marked is this pleasure. A part of the interest which men take in politics, in commerce, in the legal profession, a great part of that 246 which they take in mechanics, and the arts of Inven- tion, is deriA^ed from this source. The very friction of the mind, if so we may express it, in its contact with difficult principles and themes, which might have been made the occasion of pain, becomes the occasion of a noble enjoyment, under God's constitution. The same law is observable, in yet higher and more conspicuous exhibition, in the use of the Imagination, on themes which are appropriate to it, and within the limits which are properly affixed to it. The very exer- cise of the faculty becomes, evermore, and all the more fully as it is developed more largely, the source of enjoyment. Not only for what it gains, but for what it contains, men delight in that exercise. If every outward good which it brings us were doomed to pass from us the moment it was realized, still they in whom the faculty is prominent would be moved to employ it, for the mere pleasure of its use. Watch the artist at his work — the really devoted and tri- umphant artist, to whom his art is not a mere means of daily subsistence, but a mistress and a queen, and who speaks through it great thoughts unto the world, or spreads before this the archetypal forms which each pause of thought brings vividly before him; — and you see that to him the weary labor of the day, the patient vigil of the night, are themselves more in- viting than worldly successes. 'He has eaten the PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 247 lotus/ men say, and has forgotten life's cares. Nay, but his art is more to him than the lotus ; its very labor a solace ; its exhausting applications an intoxi- cating pleasure. So remember how the poets have arisen as from a dream from that long reverie wherein the Imagina- tion has discoursed to them of islands populous with pure beings, of magnificent cities now swallowed up of Time, of deserts gleaming white around fountains and palm-trees, or of worlds overhead whose beauties are as yet inconceivable by us, where vast and swift cherubic armies marshal their squadrons, where pave- ments are impurpled with amaranthine wreaths, where crystal seas, 'mingled with fire,' roll up their praise in sweetest diapason ; and who then have poured forth these spiritual visions with an absolute utter- ance, self-possessed and supreme in their untroubled rapture and height of soul; — remember what great discoverers or reformers have exultingly experienced, as they have contemplated changes, and the results of them, to be wrought in society by their action and plans ; how they have delighted to look forward to these, till what to others were dreams became to them the only fixed and final certainties ; — remember how believers in every Religion have valued it in pro- portion as it has appealed to this spiritual faculty, and has opened sceneries, societies, occupations, in the 248 THE HUMAN SOUL, realms of the Future, amid whose shadowy lines and series the Imagination might roam with an unfettered freedom; — and you see how immediate, how signal and universal, is the pleasure which comes from the use of this power. It is not limited to individuals or a class. As the Imagination is developed among our earliest powers, and as all men in some degree possess it, so all may experience this enjoyment in the use of it. The pleasure which fairy-tales give to children, has its ori- gin here. The pleasure which men in after-life take in novels, in the drama, in even history and biogra- phy, is largely derived from the same rich source. Not only because the faculties are instructed, or the sympathies stirred by these, but also, and often mainly, because the Imagination is appealed to by them, and is brought into exercise, such works make a pow- erful address to the Race. All men are in some measure susceptible to this, while some are, of course, more exquisitely alive to it. Where the use of the Imagination is continuous and distinctive, the pleasure which it gives becomes surpassing, wonderful. It is then independent of all changes of fortune, and of aU outward circumstances. Beethoven, in his deafness, is glorified by it. The dusty garret becomes to him a temple; the broken harpsichord a shining lyre; while the soul dilates and PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 249 transportedly revels in those vast symphonies unrolling like chanted spiritual messages before his high impe- rial thought. Milton, in his blindness, is made insen- sible of mortal limitations by the same sublime power. And the student in his cloister, reading with dra- matic and interpreting eye the myriad entanglements and involutions of life; the missionary-martyr, con- templating truths ' which eye hath not seen,' and anticipating a Future which the seraphim shall cele- brate ; the philanthropist, going up in his thoughts unto God, and gathering around him in the lofty vis- ion of an aroused Imagination the wise and blessed of all the Past; — all, show the same source of free- dom and of joy ! The faculty of Imagination, in its natural use, secures to them a pleasure which adver- sity cannot waste, and which obloquy cannot break ; which is inward, transcendent, and independent of circumstance. It is important to observe, too, and therefore I re- peat it, that in regard to both these mental faculties of the Judgment and the Imagination, the simple bare use of them, aside from the results to which they may conduct us, affords us a pleasure. The very ac- tion of the Judgment, the mere exercise of the Im- agination, holds enjoyment in itself; and this is as evident, therefore, when the result of the action is only the severance of error from truth, as when it 250 is the fresh appropriation of the latter; it is as evident when the Imagination reaches what is not actual, and what never may be, as when it recalls historical events, or prophesies the future advance- ment of the State. The only pre-requisite is, that the powers be used honestly, and with faithful en- deavor, and be not intentionally perverted and mis- used. Then enjoyment follows as a matter of course. — So thorough and central are the tendencies to Hap- piness infolded in the soul ! As in the robe of cloth of gold, each crinkle of the folds reveals the bright- ness, so in this spiritual nature of ours, which God hath planned and carefully organized, each motion of the faculties, if healthful and sincere, gives a fresh sense of pleasure. Certain other more special arrangements and adapt- ations at the same time meet us in our mental con- stitution, which show how God provides for our Happi- ness. Upon these I can hardly enter here ; but one or two of them may be briefly noticed as examples of the rest. It is a curious and suggestive fact, for instance, that the Fancy, which presents to us the im- ages of things unrealized by us, communicates pleasure not only in connection with that which is beautiful or desirable to us, but equally with the contemplation of that which is terrible, and of that which applied to ourselves would be destructive. In our wakeful hours, PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 251 and in a healthful and natural mental state, the con- ception of the latter is not frequent with us. But even when it comes, it is attended with a grateful impression of relief;: because the danger which is seen to be possible has not become actual, and by the inner law of the soul we are impelled to put it from us. It is only in the dreams which have their birth in a distempered state of the body, or else amid the frenzy of a disordered mind, that we conceive of our- selves as crushed, torn in pieces, pursued by wild beasts, or devoured by the earthquake. In our usual mental state we can hardly force the volatile fancy to consider such possibilities ; but when it does, it is only to enhance our pleasurable sense of repose and secu- rity. Does not the maxim attributed to Rochefou- cault, that " there is something in the calamities of our best friends not altogether unpleasing to us," find here the explanation of aU that is true in it? We have no pleasure in the thought of the calamity ; but the more vivid and startling our conception of that, the more grateful is the sense of security which at- tends it. A similar adaptation is shown by the Memory. It is not only true that the very exercise of re- calling what is past in our experience, supposing the particulars to be themselves indifferent, is accompanied with pleasure ; but it is true, further, that the recol- 252 THE HUMAN SOUL, lection of a pleasure replaces that pleasure in our experience with almost all its original vividness : sometimes, indeed, with* a greater vividness and ful- ness than it had at the first. On the other hand, the recollection of a pain endured-^unless, indeed, it had an element of guilt in it, and so brought re- morse — does not replace that pain in our conscious- ness. It is accompanied rather, in subsequent life, when the pain has passed away, with the joyful sense of release and deliverance. And so, according to the Eastern proverb, that the odor of carrion turns to musk in the distance, the remembrance of our suffering, when this is over, becomes to us an ad- ditional enjoyment. — In these slight facts, and in others similar on which I will not pause, is exhib- ited really the whole benignant economy of God in the structure of the Soul. Its natural bent is to- ward enjoyment, not toward suffering. He gives it such an equipoise, such a dehcate but assured ad- justment of tendencies, that at the first and finest action it gravitates toward Happiness. Recurring now to the general principle, whose ap- plication in some of its particulars I have sketched, it is just as true of the Affectionate power, of the Will, of even the Conscience, as it is of the purely intellectual faculties, that so long as one acts with pure intent and within proper limits, according PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 253 to the law revealed in his constitution, their exercise brings an immediate pleasure ; a pleasure not out- wardly coupled with that exercise, as the train is me- chanically coupled with the engine, but inseparably involved in it, its essential concomitant. To love, with a purely unselfish attachment, with such love as the soul is made capable of experi- encing, — there is beauty and charm in this, before that love is made known to its object ! The very ex- ercise of Gratitude holds enjoyment in it. " When I revere a great character," says an eminent female Freilch writer, " I find I know not what of dehght in my heart. It is beautiful to worship !" And when the children in an asylum for the Deaf and the Dumb were asked to write upon their slates the name of that mental emotion or action which seemed to each the most delightful, while one wrote Hope, and another Gratitude, and another the Assurance of Love from others, a little girl, with subtler sense or a deeper experience than the others had had, wrote instantly Repentance ! No matter what it brings us, or whether it brings us nothing at all, when we have done wrong, to repent is delightful; and the deeper the emotion, the more perfect the action, the more complete is the joy. So to put forth the Will, for any high object, in the nath of any wise and just undertaking, is always 254 THE HUMAN SOUL, in itself a source of pleasure. Men have pleasure in endurance, which is resolute and firm, as well as in action ; and they often have not so much pleasure in the end, after that has been attained, as in the use of the means that tended toward it. Every exercise of the faculty, whether successful or unsuccessful as the world reckons that, holds this primary success in- folded in it ; and it cannot be severed from this inter- wrought reward. And so the application and use of the Conscience, in distinguishing right courses and condemning the wrong, — except when it scans and adjudges our own sins, and so brings remorse with it, — is the source of a noble spiritual pleasure. There is perhaps no pleasure, indeed, more positive than that which thus is brought us ; when the soul rests firmly on the principles of equity, and distinguishes clearly the course which contravenes these from that which accepts and consistently realizes them. Throughout the Soul the principle holds, not only that a sense of the pleasure of being is innate within it, but that every motion and act of its powers, while obeying the law which God designs for them, im- parts a distinct and appreciable pleasure. As the sandal-wood gives forth its fragrance when pressed ; as the amber becomes attractive while we rub it; so all our forces, when set in motion, yield us true enjoy- ment. They quicken into pleasure, the moment they PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 255 are used. And yet Repose, when proportionate and timely, becomes in its turn an additional joy ; while by it our faculties are also refreshed for further use. Remember, then, that it is God who has so ordained us ; that we are tracing the Divine constitution, as we ponder this frame and arrangement of the soul; and there comes to us a new demonstration of His charac- ter. He makes this Happiness our appropriate state. No mechanism is so carefully adjusted for its end as the soul is for this. K we fail to attain it, our own error is in fault, and not His constitution. And plainly as the sunbeam manifests His skill, — ^plainly as the leaves, revolving around the flower-stem in pre- cisely the same relations of distance which the planets sustain to the central sun, declare His all-encompass- ing plan — does this reveal His kindness and wisdom ! III. A third fact remains to be considered, however, to set the whole truth concerning this before us. And that is : that the Natural Results of the soul's proper ACTION ARE ALL Pleasure-producing ; and that those WHICH are so most FREELY AND RICHLY LIE NEAREST ITS REACH, and are certainly attained by it whenever it acts aright. The bearing of this fact on our present course of thought is instantly evident. That it 2^ a fact, no one who carefully considers it, I think, will question. Material wealth cannot with absolute certainty be 256 attained, by those who pursue it. Aside from par- ticular providential impediments which may be inter- posed to hinder them from it, any one of a series of natural calamities, as fire, storm, an earthquake, or a pestilence, may wrest it from them, even when it had seemed secure in their grasp. The failure of an as- sociate, or the unfaithfulness of an agent, may build a barrier of seven-fold height between them and their object. Or commercial revulsions may sweep the very platform and basis from beneath them, upon which they were standing to accumulate a fortune. And so it often happens, — we see the illustrations of the fact around us, on every hand — that he who has planned and toiled for wealth, with youthful ardor and manly vigor, throughout his term of active life, finds it at the end like the golden spoil which the child pursued at the foot of the rainbow; as far from him as when he started, while the faculty to follow it has grown constantly weaker. Despondency succeeds to his early expectation ; and in a sense most sad, tragical, and admonitory, he ^ dies without the sight.' But the possession of wealth is not necessarily a good. It is made so, if at all, only by the arbitrary agreement of men. The worth of it is at best fac- titious and precarious ; and sometimes it becomes to him who has most of it the greatest of evils. He finds at last, when he has gained it, that he has been PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 257 but laboring to walk, for a little time, with pierced feet, on golden spikes. And if he could go back to the simple and satisfying joy of his childhood, he would gladly sacrifice all his wealth to repurchase that. The same is true, essentially, of all social advan- tages ; of an eminent position in civil affairs ; of any possession, which is outward and adventitious. Evi- dently, none of these are perennial goods, appropri- ate intrinsically to the soul which is spiritual, capable of administering true Happiness to it, of satisfying its wants, and of replenishing it with real pleasure. We share them, if we gain them, with the criminal adventurer; or with the half-idiotic, who was fortunately- born. They perish with the using, and do not abide. In our highest states of feeling — those which certify themselves, the moment we regard them, as most ap- propriate to our powers and our destinies — we spurn these from us as ends of our effort; as any thing more than subordinate means to the attainment of ends far grander than themselves. Men have some- times lived without any thing of them, in constant joy. They have often lived with them, in an unsuf- ferable pain. The true goods are internal, pertaining to the very state and frame of the soul, and fitted to afford it a permanent satisfaction. And the noticeable fact is that 'every one may attain these, in the just and legiti- 17 '* 268 mate use of his powers ; that each sincere operation of the soul involves tendencies towards them ; and that no calamities or convulsions of nature, no revul- sion in affairs, no assaults of society, can dissever one from them, or make them otherwise than pro- ductive of pleasure. Knowledge is one of these ; the perception, the in- telligent mastery and appropriation, of the principles of Truth. And the pleasure which this gives, while men must experience it to fully understand it, is so evident in life, so conspicuous in history, that none can overlook it. Galileo, condemned to the prisons of the Inquisition, and compelled to repeat, with bended knee and prostrate head, the penitential psalms of David, feels yet an inward pleasure and repose un- known in . the Vatican. The heavenly bodies, of whose motions he is certain, shed that music around him which the ancient listener on hills overhung by milder skies could not clearly hear. The moon, whose rough and jagged surface his eye has first scanned, walks nightly above his soul, lifting unto herself in peaceful sway his tides of thought. The pendulum, the thermometer, the magnet, the telescope, these, which he has invented or largely improved, and applied to their noblest and most renowned uses, come around him in his cell with a ministry of com- fort that cannot be expelled. And when blin'dness PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 259 and deafness, with an exquisite suffering loading each muscle, have made his days almost useless, and his nights almost sleepless, still the vigilant and unwea- ried activity of his mind, repeating those processes which no prison can confine and no pains disturb, is his unfailing rest. The certainty of truth, makes his soul invulnerable. The stability of truth is its immoveable shelter. E pur si muove^ he may say not only of the Earth, but of his conscious pleasure. When Augustine Thierry, having withdrawn him- self from the world and retired to his library, to investigate the origin, the causes and the effects, of the early and successive Germanic invasions, and, having passed six years ^in poring with the perti- nacity of a Benedictine monk over worm-eaten man- uscripts, and deciphering and comparing black-ktter texts,' had at last completed his magnificent '-'His- tory of the Conquest," the publication of which intro- duced a new era in French historical composition, he had lost his sight. The most precious of tli^e senses had been sacrificed to his zeal in literary research. The beauties of nature, and the records of scholar- ship, were thenceforth shut from him ; and he was compelled to use other hands, and other eyes, to as- sist his future efforts. Prodigious sacrifice ! And yet not such he thought it; for he said long after- ward, in a letter to a friend : " Were I to begin 26p THE HUMAN SOUL, my life over again, I would choose the road that has conducted me to where I now am. Blind and afflicted, without hope and without leisure, I can safely offer this testimony, the sincerity of which, coming from a man in my condition, cannot be called in question. There is something in this world worth more than pleasure, more than fortune, more than health itself; I mean devotion to science !" One of the most interesting passages in modern literary History, — a passage that will become more bright and impressive, as the glare of the material success and advance which now dazzle our land fades back into shadow — is that in which the great Ornithol- ogist of our time, Avhom Cuvier you know declared to have reared in his work on birds Hhe most mag- nificent monument ever yet raised by art in honor of nature,' met the sudden destruction, by the vora- city of rats, of the treasures he had accumulated in fifteen years of incessant exploration. At the shock of what seemed the irremediable disaster, he was thrown into a fever, which had well-nigh proved fa- tal. ^A burning heat,' as he described it, * rushed through my brain ; and my days were oblivion.' But as consciousness returned, and the rally of nature fought back the sudden incursion of disease, there Bang again through his wakening thoughts the wild- n^es he had heard in the bayous of Louisiana, the PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 261 everglades of Florida, the savannahs of the Carolinas, and the forests that fringe the sides of the Alle- ghanies. He saw again the Washington Eagle, as it soared and screamed from its far rocky eyrie. He startled again, from her perch on the firs, the brown warbler of Labrador. He traced in thought the magic hues on crest and wing that so often had shone before the dip of his rifle. And the passion for new expeditions and discoveries, arising afresh, was more to him than medicine. In three years more, passed far from home, he had filled once more the despoiled portfolios ; and at every step, as he told his biographer, ' it was not the desire of fame that prompted him: it was his exceeding enjoyment of Nature !* In what multitudes of histories has the same thing been illustrated ; the unfailing joy and reward of Knowledge ! Have not we ourselves felt it ? when some principle of science has been clearly set before us, in its nature and its relations, and has been with delight accepted by us, in a thorough conviction of its firmness and its value ? when a character in his- tory has been opened fully and brightly to our thoughts, and the events of an era have taken from that iQus- tration and a meaning? when the verities which Christ teaches have become to us certainties; the inmost certainties of experience and life, the highest 262 THE HUMAN SOUL, certainties of philosophy and of the Future ? A sense of advancement, of strength, and of dignity, an inward repose and happiness of soul, are inseparably connected with the attainment of Knowledge. And these are open to every man : since every man may attain such knowledge, in one department or another, if he will apply his faculty to the work. There is no uncer- tainty connected with the gain ; and when he has made it there is no insecurity. It is his in perma- nence. Nor is this the onl^ or the highest source of joy which is opened to the soul by the right and un- selfish employment of its powers ; which lies in fact so constantly near these, that each appropriate exer- cise of them brings them up to it again, and makes them partake it. The Esteem and Approbation of those who are virtuous, the Sympathetic Love of those who in constitution and in character are like it, are as directly and certainly attained by every Soul whose powers are used with frank sincerity, and with an honest reverence for Virtue. As the light is rayed back from the flower and the wave, from the rock and the roadside, from all objects in nature and all ornaments of art, no matter from what centre it emanated first, so the excel- lence of a character, when serenely and brightly ex- pressed through the life, attracts an immediate and PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 263 instinctive response, from all natures around it. This will vary in expression, according to the quality of these several natures; but it will not fail to be ren- dered by each one. And as the answer of the rose to the appeal of the light is one of clearest bloom and beauty, so the answer of the virtuous to the excel- lence of a character must be one of approval ; as the diamond kindles in its response to an intense bril- liance, so the souls that are subtle and sympathetically prepared for it show this general approval exchanged in themselves for a vivid and precious personal love. This is not accidental; a merely occasional or indi- vidual experience. It is made inevitable, and made universal, by the frame of our being. So that the generous use of our powers hath ahoays this reward, of the sympathy and approval of those whom we esteem ; and our personal qualities, when manifested appropriately toward those who are like us, bring naturally the return of their cordial affection. There is even an intimation afforded by Philoso- phy, — ^it becomes a distinct declaration and promise, you are aware, in Religion — that as there are exist- ences above us, created by the same author, and kin- dred with us; as there is one uncreated Existence, the maker of all others, who is Himself at once most holy and most sympathetic, — so the human approba- tion and love which we here meet, attracted by the 264 THE HUMAN SOUL, proper employment of our powers, is only the adum- bration of a similar experience, far higher in its kind, and eternal in its continuance, which awaits us in the Future. The love of other beings, the infinite, pure, unspeakable affection of the Deity himself, shall reply to such action, as there exhibited, with un- bounded fulness, and through endless duration. For in the immortal state, as in this mortal, it shall still be true that each pure action tends directly to this re- sult ; by the law of the souFs being, it secures this reward. And what returns of true pleasure are brought us by this reward, when fully attained, I need not set forth with any thing of detail. Prisons, brightened by its experience as by a true angelic presence; households, filled with the fragrance that steals as a perpetual blessing from its fine casket; our hearts, which all have known and felt it; — these are its wit- nesses ! It takes the pain from sore disaster. It gives a fresh and keener joy to all prosperity. It makes the cottage, secreted in the vines, a more than palace to the heart. It gives to every spot of ground where we have known it a hallowing memory. The charm of Earth, it still casts forward its light upon the Future, and makes the heavens shine lovelier than be- fore in promise of its renewal. There is no other joy more pure and stimulating, more vivid and more PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 265 rich, that penetrates the soul with more intimate power, that adds more vital vigor to it. And it is a signal demonstration of our Author, that this great good, which cannot be purchased by millions for the selfish, which no assault of power can control, which diplomacy cannot dispense, and which genius itself if malevolent cannot reach, is made to attend the right use of our powers, how humble so- ever, as the air attends the earth ! The spoils of ransacked cities cannot buy one human sympathy. The generous use of any faculty, though it be of the slave, though it be of the criminal, attracts such sym- pathies with immediate certainty, from all fine na- tures. No man can be sure that he shall gain any of the prizes of ambition, though he seek them with never so eager an endeavor. But every man may know, and every child, that if he live thoughtfully, purely, efficiently, according to the law which his Maker designed for him, devoting his powers to ends that are worthy, the approbation of all who are qual- ified to give that shall become his inheritance; the quick affection of those elect souls which are kindred with his, shall set its vivid crown upon him. Accord- ing to the truth and generosity of his spirit, far more than according to the greatness of his power, the world shall retain both his influence and his memory. And according to these, in constant proportion, shall 266 THE HUMAN SOUL, be that Love which is ^ bride of Virtue, and mother of Pleasure/ Nor is this the last source of true spiritual happi- ness, which is opened to the soul by its own pure action. Conscientious Satisfaction, and Self-Approval; the inward sense of security and peace ; come at least as directly from the earnest and just use of our spiritual powers. And the joy which these give, I need not describe. It is special to man, and to those who are above him ; for lower beings cannot attain it. But in man it is often developed to a degree that makes the experience most conspicuous and memorable. When Socrates, condemned by the vicious tribunal, and commanded to choose his own mode of destruc- tion, declared with untrembling and unhesitating voice that he merited rather to be honored as a benefactor than to be judged as a criminal, he showed this in- ward self-approval untroubled. What a lustre it sheds on that abrupt close, which Plato has commemorated with such tragic fidelity ! The sacred galley, whose return was to fix the limit of his life, paced not the glittering seas so lightly as he the floor of that coarse dungeon. Above the malice of enemies and the popular hatred, not needing even the support of the love of those who clung to him, with so settled a peace that the offer of deliverance could not dis- turb it, he makes the dungeon a pedestal grander PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 267 than architect ever builded, and draws the eyes of nations to him. And when he drank the fatal hem- lock, the sun himself, sinking just then behind Ci- thaeron, was not more full in his great orb of light and peace ! So Russell, Sidney, died in their time. So, with yet higher enthusiasm of joy, died Polycarp of Smyrna; died Chrysostom first, and Martyn after- wards, now sleeping side by side amid the rocky wastes of Tocat. Observe the unspeakable happiness and peace that brighten through the Past along the line of God's true workmen, that burst oftentimes to most glorious exhibition amid the very flames of mar- tyrdom; nay, note in yourself, in far humbler devel- opement, what an exquisite pleasure one good deed done, with effort and with sacrifice, sheds back upon the soul, how it seems to renew that with a joy that holds a second life; — and you see what must be the inestimable peace of a life all occupied, as one may be, with such ! The harmony of mechanism, made perfect in its parts, and working smoothly in every motion, fails to set this before us by even an image. That is passive. This is active, keen, self-conscious. It glows through the soul as the perfect experience of health through the frame. Calm, full, and pure, perennial in its movement, and mighty in its course, reflecting Heaven on its serene unshadowed wave — in i268 THE HUMAN SOUL, the perfect and noble description of the Bible, ^'it floweth like a river !" And this is a result inseparable, under God's con- stitution of the soul, from the exercise of our pow- ers in appropriate modes^ according to the paramount law of Virtue. Its clear mobility is not more native to the fluent stream, its glancing splendor to the flame, than is this peace to each pure Soul. — Con- template, then, again, God's arrangement for its Hap- piness ! He makes the very sense of existence a joy to it. He associates indissolubly, with « each exer- cise of its powers, an instant, fit, and inter-wrought pleasure. He makes the results of its appropriate ac- tion, the fruits which are reached by it, productive of pure and constant delight. On every side, He perfects it for Happiness ; re- quiring only the condition of Virtue to the .fullest attainment and possession of this. As the star is made for shining; as the wind-harp on the threshold for catching from the air its inaudible voices, and sending them forth to animate the house ; so the soul is constituted to receive and to utter the messages of ■joy. The cells which the bee builds, those miracles of masonry, are not more exactly adapted to their office, of receiving and storing their grateful burdens, than are the tubes and vatves and ducts of our spir- ^ itual nature for the ingathering of enjoyment. Every PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 269 virtuous success supplies this afresh, while endurance gives a joy often greater than success. As we gain more dignity and power of soul, still using it purely, we gain more happiness ; and the limit of this prog- ress is just as distant, and just as imperceptible, as the limit of our moral or rational developement. We know that it is not reached in this life. We believe that the cycles of the Future shall not bring it. Man is free, indeed, to use or to misuse the pow- ers which thus are given him ; to use them rightly or use them wrongly, or altogether to neglect them and leave them to idleness. For this very freedom is in- dispensable to his deepest and perfect enjoyment. He could not rise above animal pleasures, except for this. He may wreck therefore, if he will, as such multitudes do, every costliest hope, and dissolve the pearl of his finest sensibility in a stimulating indulg- ence, or a sour misanthropy. But he may also rise, as such multitudes have done, by a healthful and vir- tuous use of his powers, to this pleasure, interior, peaceful, perfect, as superior to all pleasures of mere animal existence as the spirit is better than the body which surrounds it. The only impediments which hinder or interrupt such a pleasurable career, come either from his own wrong employment of his powers, or else from the wrong acts of others which assail him, or else from 270 the sorrows inseparable from a state which is disci- plinary like this, and designed to prepare him for a higher existence. And neither of these, if he live aright, can overcome or break his joy. — He may tri- umph over outward impoverishment and wrong, how- ever malicious the blow that hurls them on him, in the beautiful mastery of a soul aroused by the very assault, and rising in native supremacy above it. He may triumph over sorrows which originate within him, by removing with patient fidelity their cause. And if he meets with cheerful submission the various providential visitations of trouble, if he does not con- front them with defiant resistance but takes them as clouded messengers from a Father, as a true love will prompt him, and transforms them by this accept- ance into helpers of his Virtue, he may gain by means of them a more lofty and copious spiritual happiness than was possible in Paradise. The stream is not marred, it is made only more beautiful, when broken by rocks, and sweeping through eddies, than when silently gliding through the sod- ded canal. And so the happiness which is found in a course passed amid the conditions that invest us in this life, may be only brighter, more full and more animated, for its very interruptions. The pleas- ure shall be more radiant than ever, when contrast- ing the darkness of an overpast sorrow. And the PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 271 infinite liberty, the matchless repose and tranquility of mind, which result from the cordial acquiescence of our wills in the Will of the Supreme, and which never are attained till we heartily feel this, shall a thousand-fold more than compensate the soul for all the disturbance that trouble has brought it. If one developes and uses aright, therefore, his various powers, according to the plan of Him who created them, his inheritance of Happiness shall be cer- tain, indefeasible, as well as signally opulent and free. Every sense shall be an almoner of enjoyment to him. The taste, the judgment, the imaginative power, affections, free will, the conscience itself, shall all and always replenish his pleasures. As he reaps the results of them, in knowledge, in the love and ap- proval of others, and in self-approbation, each one of these shall successively open in the soul, as fast as he gains it, like a flower filled full with perfume and with beauty. The s5ul shall be happy, throughout its powers, throughout, its continuance. And the World, subdued and employed, not obeyed by it, shall be a broader arena for that enjoyment, the hard bed of toil its more secure throne, than the garden with verdurous banks and bowers which bloomed to embosom an undisciplined innocence ! I have spoken not at all, you notice, in the course of this Lecture, of some parts of our nature which 272 THE HUMAN SOUL, might properly have been canvassed. I have not en- tered the region of the Desires. I have not touched upon the instinct of Hope ; which holds a joy within itself; which anticipates, accumulates, and prolongs the enjoyment derived from other goods. I have spo- ken not at all of the effect of the bright-eyed Fancy upon our pleasures ; making the simple and the usual charming, intensifying the familiar, and giving to the daily experience of life prismatic vivacity. I have not delineated any special constitution, in which cheerfulness, mirthfulness, or humor predominates, and where therefore we might look for a keener enjoy- ment. I have aimed to confine myself to the barest, most literal analysis of the soul, in those aptitudes and faculties which all will admit universal with in it. And yet it is clear that every soul hath fit- nesses for Happiness most subtle and complete. It is organized to gain that; and it cannot employ its faculties aright, it cannot develope the forces and the tendencies innate in its being, under the law of Vir- tuous Love, without reaching this success. It rises to this good, which all the world covets, which Po- etry celebrates, which the angels partake — ^it rises to this, when used aright, as natively as the sky-lark into his song ! Man makes his own sorrow, by the fever which he breeds at the heart of his being; by the courses PREPARED FOR HAPPINESS. 273 of indulgence and passion which he follows. But God has given him the faculty and capacity, and has opened to him the means, of a joy serene, independent of cir- cumstances, and enduring as life ; a joy so high that the utmost pleasure of his noblest hour shall be only the index of all its experience; a joy so permanent that the revolutions of the years shall not be reckoned beside it. This is only to be gained on condition of his Virtue ; for it could not otherwise manifest to us the Infinitely Pure. But on that condition it cer- tainly, freely, constantly comes, in accordance with man's constitution of being, and in perfect correspond- ence with its permanent fitnesses. In all that constitution, then, is not the mind of our Author revealed to us, in most vivid distinct- ness? I take the pleasure which the senses afford; I take the joy wliich the intellect brings us ; I add the delight of the social affections ; and superadd the peace of a conscience at rest; I think of knowledge, love, self-approval, aU realized by the Soul when it normally acts, and all communicating an unwasting pleasure; I remember that each of these several ex- periences is possible to the humblest; that the great Soul of Man has capacity for them, universally and by birthright, and wherever it is may certainly gain them ; and then I feel that the wisdom, the good- ness, and the power of Him who framed this Spirit, 18 274 THEHUMANSOUL. SO sensitive, so capacious, — which the Earth can de- light, which the Heavens cannot crowd — have here an exhibition in comparison of whose glory the suns grow dim. As in a glass, I read in this our won- drous frame that- perfect Mind, the touch of which irradiates the creation, and the vision of which makes the Seraphim sing! 'f LECTURE VI. Ladies and Gentlemen : In commencing the last preceding Lecture, I remarked that there stiU remained two ideal goods, by its relation to which we must measure and esti- mate the Human Soul, in order to gather all the lessons which it brings us concerning the character and the power of its Creator. The one of these was Happiness; and the other, an Exalted and Progress- ive Future Destiny. Having considered the soul in its spiritual life, invisible in each, yet personal and transcendent; in its constitutional capacity for Knowl- edge, for the exercise of Virtue, and for the putting forth of Virtuous and Beneficent Operation, on the world around it and on other persons; it was only needful further to consider it in these two aspects, to see from every side the illustrations which it gives of the greatness and the kindness of Him who hath formed it. If it be found not only naturally capa- cious of these goods, but interiorly prepared to pur- sue and to attain them, then the Mind which has planned it, and has given it its forces, is set before 276 THE HUMAN SOUL, US in clearest light, and the capital is put on the col- umn of our argument. In the former of these relations I therefore pre- sented this conscious Soul, in the Lecture referred to ; and endeavored to show you how God has wisely and patiently prepared it for the attainment of Happiness. He has made a subtle yet appreciable enjoyment in- separable from its inmost consciousness of being ; the mere sense of existence • bringing with it, involved in it, an intimate pleasure. He has so organized it that every motion and exercise of its powers, as long as .that is virtuous, produces a new pleasure, without reference to the secondary ends which it may gain; and thus the taste, the judgment, the imagination, the social affections, the very conscience itself, are made perpetual occasions and springs of enjoyment in every healthful and virtuous spirit. Their very use is their constant reward, so long as they are properly devel- oped and exercised ; while at times they give a hap- piness vivid and memorable, such as no successes of ambition can rival. All those results and fruits of its action, too, which are in the truest sense enjoyable and of value, lie within the reach of every soul. They stand next our powers, and are instantly and with certainty realized by us in the legitimate use of these. Among them are : the acquisition of knowledge ; the approbation CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 277 of the virtuous, with the personal love of those who in character as well as in constitution are sympathet- ically affined to us ; and that solid sense of eleva- tion and security, which Virtue imparts. — These are spiritual and indefeasible gains ; not dependent upon the accidents of position and circumstance, not liable to fail when we most require them, but certain at once, spontaneously, to accrue to all who use their powers aright, and certain to remain while such use continues ; of which the vigorous and virtuous soul can no more be deprived than the sunbeam of the heat which in the mysterious constitution of its- ray is inseparably inter-twisted with its illuminating power. And these are the sources, to those who possess them, of a Happiness pure, abounding, and perennial; a Happiness in comparison of which all the pleasures of sense, or of titular rank, or of accumulated wealths, are transient and imaginary. The servant may gain them, as well as the statesman. The widow in her loneliness has them often in a perfection which the conqueror, the discoverer, or the man of vast riches, knows nothing about. The most eminent and signal attainments in them have not been made by those most 'fortunate'. in inheritance and position, or most conspicuous in the annals of History. It is evident then, beyond denial I think, that the Soul is so organized by Him* who hath given it 278 life and force, that Happiness is a good accessible to its effort, and which in largest measure it may secure. With a singular wisdom He has fitted it to gain this ; requiring only, as the necessary condition, which His purity demands, and without which His wisdom that consults for the universe could not be satisfied, that it put forth its powers under the paramount law of Virtue. So long as it does this, true Happiness comes to it as a matter of course; as the blossom comes, and the fruit in its season, from the living energy of the fruit-bearing tree. It is only when God's consti- tution is traversed, when our powers are unused or else are perverted, that unhappiness prevails in our sensitive constitution. Outside of this experience, the trials that meet us by appointment of God are disci- plinary only; and if mastered as they may be, and rightly employed, in the spirit of virtuous submission and love, they shall by their contrasts but add to our pleasure ; as summer-showers, refracting light, make rainbows of the rays that else had glanced in imperceptible beauty unseen through the skies. Here then we see illustriously displayed both the goodness and the wisdom, and the infinite construct- ive spiritual force, of Him who hath formed us ! More brightly than in the blush of the rose; more musically than in the carol of the bird ; with more appealing and memorable emphasis than in the struct- CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 279 ure of mountains or continents, or in the eternal diapasons of the deep ; is exhibited in the living and personal soul, so receptive of Happiness, and so fitted to secure it, the perfection of its Author ! We are now to go forward, then, in this closing Lecture to- consider the one remaining topic, under the general theme which has engaged us ; — the ca- pacities of the Soul for a great Elevation and Ad- vancement IN the Future. Having trodden the round, in the range of our discussion, of the ideal goods presented to us in our present state of being, we are ready to project our thoughts into the Future, beyond the reach of present or recorded human experience, to conceive the attainments which are possible therein, and to consider the soul in its relation to those. Then the plan of these Lectures, as at the begin- ning it opened before us, will be measurably accom- plished ; and the course of our discussion will have come full-circle. That all who have thought of it, have conceived of a future and permanent existence, in a highly ad- vanced and refined state of being, as an eminent good, — that all who now consider the possibility of such an exalted and unlimited experience, must agree in this estimate, and accept that as grander than all other good, only too vast and high, in fact, to be fully comprehended or worthily celebrated in human 280 THE HUMAN SOUL, speech, — ^is simply too evident to admit of demonstra- tion. It is apparent at once, to our judgment and reason. We are each of us inly persuaded of it. And the echo of this conviction from the heart of the world comes rolling through the records of History, and the products of Literature, from first to -last. The facts upon which the conviction is based, and by which it is justified, are too near and too apparent to ad- mit elucidation. He who values any pleasure, or any spiritual pos- session, obtained in the present life, must conceive it a good to have that made perpetual; to have it pos- sessed in higher measure, by more alert and athletic powers ; and to have it surrounded, hke the opal set in a diamond circlet, by other more precious enjoy- ments to enhance it. It is not possible for such a point to need proof. One might as well argue that mil- lions of ingots are more than pennies, — that the mines of a mountain whose fruitful bosom pours forth at all veins the quicksilver and gold, and whose cav- erns are floored with starry stones each fitted to shine on the brow of a queen, are richer, and more to be prized and sought, than the scanty gains which the miser hoards in his stocking or his box, — as to ar- gue for this. An experience expanded over bound- less Futurities, and full of incalculable advancements and delights, as an object of desire, as a vast human CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 281 good, must instantly shadow and press out of sight all the hurried fruitions we can snatch in the Pres- ent. The immediate decision of the judgment affirms this. It takes no more time to consider and com- pute it, than it does to measure the tiny cloud, hurn- ished by the sun, and balancing a moment on airy pivots before its dissolution, against the infinite azure which includes it. The intuitive apprehension of the Race declares it. Each hopes to find that which for him is the best thing, eternized in the Future. The Indian looks for a boundless war-path, with victories ever-new over animals and men. The Mohammedan desh-es, as a good beyond all Avhich Earth can offer, the utmost reach of sensual pleasure ; where wines shall be quaffed from diamond cups, and the beauty of houris be en- joyed without stint ; where the soul shall be dissolved, yet forever rejuvenated, in the utmost attainable phys- ical luxury. The philosopher craves a Vision of Truth. And the artist looks for terraces of beauty and majes- tical structures ; where the pillars shall be worlds, and the pediments milky-ways ; where colors more bril- liant, lines more light, and proportions more perfect, than here have been imagined, shall forever surround and instruct the fine spirit. Each people, and each person, according to the different attainments of each, and theu' several char- 283 acteristics, delights to anticipate the possession in the Future of that special good which to each is supreme. And in nothing is the progress of refine- ment and virtue more evidently shown, than in the higher ideas which are entertained, in successive epochs and by different nations, of what may be thus aspired to and expected. Men differ in their estimate of the goods of the present life. But when they transfer that estimate to the Future, as it be- comes colossal and transcendent, so the differences between them, which are indicated and gauged by it, become most conspicuous. To us, instructed by the gradual progress of a finer civilization, instructed and elevated more than ,by any other one force or fact by the influence of a Religion which comes from above, and which the world is every where accepting as the highest intel- lectual and moral power now working upon mankind, the goods which are really intrinsic and valuable, above all others, are those to which in the course of these Lectures your attention has been drawn. They are : Knowledge, Virtue, the opportunities and the powers of Virtuous Operation, and the spiritual Happiness which comes from these possessions. And the question for us is ; — Having the faculties which inhere in the Soul, how far are we equipped, by Him who has created us, for higher attainments in the a CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 283 same grand goods, in any existence which may yet lie before us? — We have seen that the mind is made capable of them here. Is there reason to believe that it equally is capable of gaining and keeping them^ in more copious measure, when parted from the body, and made to inhabit another sphere of ' Being ? — The question is a grand one ; overtopping in fact, in the height of its importance, all those which have pre- ceded. The probability that such an existence is before ue, has already been adverted to in the first of these Lectures. An instinct of the Spirit itself affirms it; and the most careful scrutiny of the powers and apt- itudes involved in its being, the most exact measure- ment of its faculties and sensibilities against the attainments which are possible in the Present, con- 4 firms us in the presumption. As we think of its high and unsearchable forces, which disease does not waste nor difficulty daunt, which never are satis- fied with present acquisition, and which never are so expectant of a Future as when to the utmost degree developed by all the influences that here instruct tliem, — we are impelled, by a principle of reasoning which certifies itself to us the moment it meets us, to pro- ject the term of developement and attainment for this personal soul beyond the Present; to rejeci? the idea that the narrow walls of time final^^ limit it^, and 284 to open to it a realm, in a future state of being, where every power may find free range, and every pure and normal sensibility be answered by its .good. And the Angled involutions and contradictions of life, in human society as developed on the Earth ; where the wrong often tramples successfully on the light; where the very noblest life is often cut short as it approaches the zenith, while the criminal life is prolonged and seems prospered to a much remoter term; where lessons are taught men, and afflictions descend on them, for the fruit of whose teachings no leisure is given ; where the germs of plans are shown, and the elements of processes, that here have no ex- hibition or outcome ; — these manifold and inexplicable entanglements of life, inexplicable if here is the end of our being, demonstrate to him who admits a Prov- idence, watching over the Present and still ^ educing good from ill,' the existence of a coming and more complete state ; where seeming contradictions and dis- crepancies shall be harmonized; where virtues shall be crowned, and wrongs be redressed, in an ultimate result; where the drama of History shall close amid praises ! There is in fact no alternative to this infer- ence, except in the doctrine that Providence is a fiction, and God is not real ; that the earth grinds oni, with society upon it, under casual but still com- CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 285 pulsory forces, whose rule shows neither intelligence nor virtue, and whose highest result is a constant confusion. And so all nations have instinctively felt. And therefore among all, — unless we must ^cept certain fragments of tribes, whose life seems hardly uplifted from the level of brutal existence, and among whom barbarism has come to its midnight, — has been a deep sense and expectation of a Future. The prophecies of that are graven on the pyramids. Its symbols confront us, among the broken images and pillars ex- humed from the grass-covered ruins of Nineveh. In India and China, in Japan and in Borneo, all over the vast Archipelago of the Pacific, throughout the length and breadth of our continent, among the races who here had their dwelling before European prows had touched it, — we find the same. And we know from History that in the ages which preceded the coming of Christ, before by Him the gates of the Invisible had been opened to man, this sense, this ex- pectation, as constantly prevailed. Men did not know for what to look, as they do not now know aside from Revelation for what to look, amid the hereafter. But they expected such a hereafter. They looked for a mysterious Something, to round and close the histories of Time. And the theories of their philos- ophers, the songs of their poets, the intimations that 286 lurk amid the forms of their art, have all their point of union and resolution in this common foreshadow ing. They awaited a Future. We must apply to this agreement of mankind, then, the rule w^hich Cicero in his Tusculan Disputations instructs us to apply to their similar and intimately related agreement, concerning the existence and gov- ernment of God. " This does not proceed," he says, "from the conversation of men, or the agreement of philosophers. It is not an opinion established by in- stitutions, or by laws. But, no doubt, in every case, the consent of all nations is to be looked upon as A Law of Nature." It is an inference, as clear and as immediate from such spontaneous agreement of the Race as if it were drawn from the motion and op- eration of material forces in the system around us, that the principle which that points to is valid and fixed. And so we know that a Future Existence is held in store for us ; and that that existence shaU be more high and prolonged than the present, as be- fits the state which is to supplement and complete this. The soul of man, in all the centuries, has in- stinctively affirmed this ; and unless it is constituted with an intent to deceive us, we must accept its wit- ness as true. So far as this. Philosophy conducts us. But at the same time, as I hardly need remind you, what CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 287 philosophy thus infers and indicates, is demonstrated and made evident to the Christian believer by the doctrines, the promises, and the actual ascension into the skies, of Jesus his Lord. By Him, Immortality hath been ' brought to light ;' hath been literally illus- trated, and made to shine as a certainty before us. So that henceforth, year after year, as the race be- comes more refined and cultivated, and the influence of Christianity widens its range, the conviction of a Future shall become not more inseparably a part, but far more vitally and effectively a part, of the moral history and life of mankind. It is henceforth a fact assumed by all the great and kindling Teachers, — to deny which sets a man in opposition to the ages, and in contrast with his kind, — that after this life the soul shall continue; not exhaling like a breath when the body expires ; not pej ishing gradually, as the body does, in the grave; but passing to other spheres of exist- ence, and there retaining its personal life, and all its innate constitutional powers. The world will as soon be convinced that the ocean is cut sharply off by the ring of the horizon, where it seems to close down around every man's eye, as it will be that the spirit- ual life of the Soul is to terminate at the grave. But now assuming the soul to exist thus, in a fu- ture and more protracted state, how far is it prepared by its constitutional endowment to attain Good therein ? 288 a higher good than can be realized in the Present? Of course, the basis of any such fitness for future acquisition is to be sought in the present constitution of the soul. We do not suppose any faculty added to this. We do not suppose any faculty taken from it. But regarding it as it is, and looking neither to fancy nor yet to Revelation for any light they may cast on its possible transformations, how far is it prepared with the faculties it now holds, to attain in a future state the same great results to which we have seen it to be competent here ? Let it enter that state from a virtuous and happy career on earth, and what may it look to realize therein? In considering this, several facts are to be noticed. I. The first is this : that the powers which are native to the soul tend constantly to larger and more PERFECT DEVELOPEMENT, EXCEPT AS 3:HEY ARE CONSTRAINED BY THE INFIRMITIES OF THE BoDY. — Asidc from thosc in- terruptions and restraints, they reach upward ever- more to new fulness of growth, and are never satis- fied with any actual attainment. They thus point forward to a future experience, and are innately and evidently adapted to attain therein, in a higher degree, their appropriate goods. Take the Judgment, for example, and analyse its motions, and you see this to be true. This is, as I have said, the analytic, constructive, and scien- CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 289 tific power, by which ^arguments are framed and theo- ries elaborated, by which facts are resolved into the principles that pervade them, and these principles are compacted in a logical order. Our knowledge comes largely from the use of this power. It is also the source of a certain enjoyment, to every soul wherein it freely and healthfully works. And this tends con- stantly, with constitutional aptness, toward a larger developement. It is never to be satisfied with any acquisition or any result which already is realized, but moves toward one higher, more perfect and all-in- cluding. It says, as the Christian apostle exclaimed — when he could scarcely have been less than sixty years of age, and when the richness of his knowl- edge, not less than the vigor and the fervor of his powers, seems to us to have been complete, — ^Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect ; but / folloiv after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended.' His ideas had not ceased to surpass and contrast his grandest attainment; and he felt himself even then but a, be- ginner in his course. The same is profoundly true of every scientific man ; is true the more profoundly as his researches are more wide, careful, and successful. Newton said of himself, you know, in words whose majestic and beau- tiful humility has made them familiar, and has made 19 290 him beloved as well as revered, around the "World : ' I know not what I may appear to the world ; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy play- ing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me/ And yet these ^smoother pebbles' which he had found, were the laws of gravi- tation which hold the stars on their serene courses, standing as pillars of adamant underneath them; these 'prettier shells' were the method of Fluxions and the Binomial Theorem, a theory of colors established upon thousands of costly experiments, and laws of Light so subtle and beautiful that their imprint upon science seemed to give it a new and celestial illumination. When William Herschel, dissatisfied with the mu- sical profession to which he had been bred, deter- mined to devote himself to the study of the stars, and to the minute investigation of their motions and laws, he found no telescope that could answer the de- mands of his inquisitive and searching mind. He therefore determined to construct one for himself.; and after what seemed to others marvellous labors, he completed a reflector of five feet in length. But this was not sufficient; and speedily transcending it he turned from the heavens, and commenced the con- Btruction of another more adequate to his enlarged CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 291 wants, not ceasing from the effort till it was rewarded by the completion of an instrument seven feet in length, perhaps the most remarkable ^ optic glass' at that time possessed by any similar observer. But still this could not give him all the answers which he sought to his nightly inquiries ; so that the labors which had been for a little suspended were again resumed to construct another, now of ten feet; and yet a little while later, another still, of twenty feet in focal length. And it was not till at last he had planned and built that magnificent instrument erected at Slough, with its tube of forty feet in length, slung up amid pil- lars, braces, and beams, like a very mortar of observ- ations bombarding the skies, — with its speculum of almost fifty inches in superficial diameter, and with its magnifying power of 6,500 — that he was meas- urably satisfied with his apparatus for study. And even then, it is on record that this equipment did not fully meet his desires; and that nothing but what seemed the insuperable difficulties of the work at his age, prevented the erection of a still more stu- pendous instrument, before which the new nebulae which he had discovered should be resolved into suns, or be shown the misty seed-plot of worlds, and by whose continued micrometrical measurements of the rela- tions of the * fixed stars the elements of the paral- lax should at last be ascertained. 292 So always the scientific judgment in man is in- stinctively running forward, to new attainments, and a more complete mastery. It treats all instruments, the most elaborate and complete, as the traveller up the mountain treats the staff which he has cut in a hedge by the way-side; only using it as a helper, and throwing it away when the end has been gained, or retaining it as a memento of the course it has assisted. It will never pause satisfied, this faculty of the Judgment, with any result accessible in Time ; but conscious of capacities unexhausted by use, and superior to any defined acquirement, it will press still upward till the universe shall be scrutinized, and then only will rest when clearly and fully it has repro- duced by its analysis the thought of the Almighty. It is very instructive and impressive to observe, too, how age, in the absence of physical disease and of prostrating pain, does not oppose or retard this spon- taneous movement. The principle of Curiosity, as an intellectual principle, the desire for true and satisfy- ing knowledge, — and the power of the judgment to satisfy this desire, exploring and explaining what at- tracts its attention, — both grow as they are used, while that use is legitimate and fulfils God's plan ; and they are never so strong, unless sickness ex- hausts and shatters the frame, as when the studies already prosecuted have been largest and most pro- CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 293 found. To the end of his life, the student whose frame remains unshaken, writes on morals and history, on science and on fine art, and his inquiries in all the departments of nature are marked by as keen and strenuous an enthusiasm as when in his youth he traversed the hills and the valleys on foot. Each process becomes but a basis for higher ones ; and each successful and wide research but opens the path to new discoveries. As the skiff, which the boy builds, grows at last to the steamship, and the hut of the pioneer to the palace which the citizen rears and adorns, — ^while yet neither of these is felt to be final with him, or adequate to the highest conception he can form, — so the thought of the child expands and accumulates to the science of manhood, and still is admitted insufficient and transient. In this then we see, unmistakeably declared, the ca- pacity of the Soul for still higher attainments, through the use of its constructive and analytic power ex- amining Truth, when it passes from the present to a future state of being. The fact that it goes on still triumphing and enlarging as long as it here is prop- erly used, — unexhausted by its endeavors, yet still un- satisfied with any result, so far as we can follow or trace it, — seems the promise and the prophecy, if not the proof of the fact, that if its existence outlasts that of the body, a yet higher mission, on a more 294 THE HUMAN SOUL, noble sphere, may be hereafter given it to accomplish. Having looked at the stars from beneath and from afar, it may with superior and immediate vision look upon them from above, when treading on the pavement whose dust they are. Having caught the Light, and untwisted its strand, and interpreted its sweet influ- ence, as it flies from the sun, it may hereafter survey this more largely, and see it in more of its secret re- lations, when dwelling in realms where the element is perpetual, and hearing with finer, more spiritual sense, the rushing of its melodies as it flies through the ether ! And what is thus evidently true of the Judgment, is equally true of the Taste, the Imagination; is as really if not as apparently true of the reflective power, and the Memory. Disease may retard the ex- pression and the use of each mental faculty. But ex- cept as disease or violence invades these — ^invades, rather, the temporary physical mechanism which now mediates between them and the world which is with- out, — they become continually more vigorous with use, and aspire to a more comprehensive developement. Their innate tendency is to ascend, above all attained or assignable limits ; to gain a perfection, the antici- pation of which gives loftiness to thought, and majesty to song, but to which the records of past acquisition aflbrd no parallel. The embryo wing of the eaglet CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 295 in the egg no more certainly points to the consum- mate pinion that afterward shall sweep with an un- wearied flight over continents and seas, than do these nascent and germinating powers to realms and works as yet unattained. And the same is as true of the Will, and the Affections, which make us capable of Virtue and its action. The same is as true of every sensibility which becomes in its right use an inlet of pleasure. It is characteristic of the Human Soul, a fruit of its spirituality of being, a mark and note of its Divine origin, that all its powers grow ampler, stronger, and more comprehensive, as disciplined by use. They gain variety, vigor, proportion, according as they are exer- cised with a more faithful energy ; the feeble and stammering speech of infancy becoming eloquence that commands, becoming song that inspires ; the pen-and- ink sketch by the child in the cradle, or the paint- ings of birds made with a pencil clipped from the cat's fur, giving place in the end to the majestic de- lineation of Death on the Pale Horse, or of Christ the Redeemer healing the Sick; and all the efforts and successes of life, until its meridian, being chiefly important as conducting to the processes, and furnish- ing the means for them, which shall more enrich our later years. No natural limit is discoverable by us to this men- 296 THE HUMAN SOUL, tal progress. It is not till the body, like every ma- terial structure which we see, becomes tremulous and incapable with the progress of Time, that the light within even seems to be darkened. And then we do not feel that this seeming is real. The alabaster vase is clouded over. The spiritual flame, with its odor- ous clearness, we are impelled to beheve burns on per- petual. — Is there not then, herein, if I may not say the demonstration, certainly the clearest indication and foreshadowing of the fact, that this Soul whose powers are so ascendant and unexhausted, which is seeking continually new implements and suggestions, which is not satisfied with the knowledge it has gained, or the love it has attracted, or the works it has accomplished, but which ever longs for higher attainments and more eminent activities — will have capacity and fitness hereafter, if opportunity is given it, for a developement more noble, and a progress sub- limer! I see not how we can avoid the conclusion. The plan of our faculties does evidently take in a realm after the present. It contemplates a Future ; and is prophetical of that. And if we have here been virtuous and wise, we are adequately prepared, in the frame of our being, to realize there a more mighty advancement. Another feature, too, in the Soul's constitution may shed further light on the same inquiry : How far it CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 297 is fitted, in its natural constitution, for advancement in the Future ? II. This is : that not only does it constantly tend to a larger and more perfect developement of its powers, but it tends specifically, with an immediate impulse, TO SURPASS ITS CIRCUMSTANCES, TO MATCH ITS COMPANIONS, AND TO MAKE THEM CONTRIBUTE TO ITS HIGHER ADVANCE- MENT. — It does this in this life, to the end of its history. If it does it in another life, future to this, as it natively is fitted to, then it shows the foun- dation deeply laid in its constitution for vast progress therein. This is intimately connected, of course, with the fact we have just noticed. It springs from the same root, in the vital and vigorous constitution of the Soul. Yet in some respects it is different from the other; and as connected with the theme immediately before us, it demands and deserves a particular dis- cussion. — Whatever mans position and circumstances may be, in the present sphere of being, as long as he is virtuous and studious of self-culture he shows him- self above them, in the plenitude and dignity of his native force. However much the Race may advance, in all the apparatus of instruction and refinement, it still does not reach the requirements of the soul, and its last gains are no more an ultimate with this than was the first and rudest beginning. Who- 298 THE HUMAN SOUL, ever mans companions and teachers may be — how far soever removed from himself, in the affluence of their knowledge, and the elevation of their power — ^he seeks instinctively to equal their stature, and to par- allel their course ; and if he cannot repeat their ex- periences, he is able to realize, through his relations to them, a far higher good than would otherwise have been possible. The light which this fact casts on the capacity of the soul for advancement in the Future, will at once be evident to all who are thought- ful. That it is a fact, we shall need no lengthened argument to persuade us. It is by reason of this fact that the disciples of any Master, in ethics or in art, or in any form of science, though perhaps inferior to him in constitu- tional faculty, though confessedly inferior in attain- ment and culture, come rapidly to be like him ; and, appropriating the lessons of his thought and expe- rience, to minister to others as he has first ministered to their ardent souls. The youthful minds that muse and hearken beneath the groves of the Academy, are mating themselves with the great and princely spirit of the philosopher; are becoming re-enforced with its animating energy, and inwardly illumined with its vis- ions of Truth. And though they may not rival it, in endowment or acquirement, in any of those illustrious qualities which give it its command, they partake of CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 299 its treasures, they become sympathetically affiliated with it, and are prepared to bear the fair report of it abroad, and to be in after time the witnesses to the world of its sublime beauty. Some one of them, even, catching up its ideas, and imbibing its force, may set those ideas in new relations, or replace them by others, and so become the author of a sys- tem contrasting that by which he was disciplined, and exerting as wide an influence upon men. It is thus that every great man, who is also a good man, sends forth upon his times, through his simple daily living, a beneficent influence. It rays from him constantly ; sometimes with no more con- sciousness on his part than the sun shows of the light which it incessantly distributes. Men are try- ing continually to emulate his qualities ; according to a law inherent in their nature. And thus, by the silent attractions of his example, he is drawing them toward higher and more admirable attainments. Per- ugino trains Raphael to be a far greater master than himself. Erasmus and More, in their friendly con- verse, invigorate one another. And one great hero- ical or poetical soul, in any. era, diffuses an influence of grandeur or of softness over multitudes of lesser contemporary minds. — For the law of the Soul is, to emulate its leaders ; and to seek to gain resemblance, and even equality, with the noblest whom it meets. 300 THE HUMAN SOUL, Herein then is laid, in the nature of this Soul, the firm foundation for great possible advancements, for a vast exaltation, in a future state of being. If we suppose, with ancient sages, that in the realms which the spirit shall inhabit when ascending from a career of virtuous action, there shall be assembled all the wise, the virtuous, the magnanimous of earth, that their converse shall be on those themes of thought which now to us are so transcendant, and that their faculties shall all attain new dignity with this change in their position ; or if we accept the descriptions of the Scrip- tures, and believe that in the Future they who here have used their faculties earnestly, in the service of true virtue, shall be assembled not only with lawgiv- ers and prophets, and with eminent apostles, but with all who from the beginning of history have wrought righteousness on earth, and even with beings of other orders and higher ranks than yet are known to us, with the unfallen Seraphim, with the Virtues, Thrones and Princedoms of Milton ; if we believe that there the Creator himself shall be manifested to them in personal presence, that His glory shall ever irradi- ate their vision, and that they shall receive, by direct communication, of His knowledge and thought; — in either case we must see, in this tendency of the soul to match itself with its companions, and to equal their thought, the preparation for immense and immeasura- CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 301 ble advancements, when it passes to that superior state ! This tendency, or rather this property of the mind, which essentially characterizes it, and demon- strates its plastic spiritual force, seems especially de- signed to prepare it for the Future. And till that Future is opened to us, looking simply along the line of this tendency, ' it doth not appear what we may there become ! I see the child, continually mating its mind with the parent's, or with those of older children, and re- ceiving from this more instruction and culture than from all special studies ; I see the true man, pressing into the society of others more eminent, as that is gradually opened to him, and prompted thereby, and indeed directly aided, to a grander attainment than would otherwise have been possible ; his spirit quick- ened, his views enlarged, and his power to move others greatly increased ; I see that this tendency is innate and incessant in all who use their powers aright, that it goes on till death, and only then passes from the range of our notice ; — and then I know that in this aspiring assimilative constitution, which God has given us. He has made a provision for our nobler Hereafter! so that however strange and eminent the companionship may be to which we are there summoned, we shall still instinctively seek equality with it, and be never repelled by all its sub- 302 THE HUMAN SOUL, limity. Aside from the general tendency of our pow- ers to elevation and increase, of which I have spoken, in this particular aptitude and impulse we have the fruitful germ of an ascent, in knowledge, experience, and every power, that may fill the whole Future with its serene glory. I have referred, too, to the relation which the soul always holds, which b}^ its native constitution it must hold, to the Circumstances that surround it : for this has importance in connection with our theme. — Over all such circumstances the mind is supreme. There are none so humble that within them its powers may not vigorously act. There are none so august that the soul is surpassed or is satisfied by them ; is oth- erwise than stimulated to yet higher exertion. The swearing tinker' s-boy of Bedford, the vagrant and dissolute parUamentary soldier, reformed of his vices but confined in a dungeon, makes that a very throne of his royal imagination, and sends from it the embassadors of his thought to roam through every land and language, and turn the eyes of multitudes to the skies. The ardent political leader, immured in the fortress, and shut out from human companionship and aid, becomes the master there of the ancient and dif- ficult English tongue, and is fitted for a march of triumphal eloquence. The son of the Athenian midwife, unhappy at home, applies to social and re- ** CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 303 ligious discussion his practical, robust, and penetrating mind, and is thus made the suggestor of the highest philosophy, around whom gather the eminent minds that give renown to Grecian Literature. — ^Almost any cir- cumstances may be made propitious to itself by the soul; and as long as it is virtuous, and healthfully active, it can use any such for its fui-therance and up- building. There are none too low for it. There are none, either, too high and splendid to assist it. For ever, as its outward appliances increase, the spiritual power keeps continually before them, and asserts its innate supremacy over them. No change of civilization can surpass and outrun it. No grandest apparatus that can ever be acquired, can be more than subordinate and tributary to it. And in this fact is the sign of its indefinite capacity; the mark of its fitness for great progress in the Future; — supposing that state to be opened to it, and supposing it prepared, through a virtuous career, normally to enter that. Conceive well the diiferences between the first sav- age period in the history of Greece, or that pastoral period which early succeeded this on the beautiful peninsula, and that splendid age when Athens was crowned with its diadem of temples, when the val- leys Avere lighted with the exquisite beauty of stat- ues and of shrines, when the Doric, the Ionic and 304 the Corinthian orders, sustained on their coincident shafts the trophies of ages ; and when Sculpture, Painting, with a Poetry that seemed caught from the winds and the seas, and to echo their ethereal music, had combined to put the golden robe on the ivory statue of Athenian society ; — conceive the dif- ferences that had there been realized ! And yet the latter circumstances were no more ultimate to the Soul which had created them, and which still em- ployed them, than the former had been. So far as the intellectual faculty was concerned, it might have gone forward from that eminent point to one far beyond it; and from that to a higher one, in a still aspiring and culminating series. Athenian society decayed at last, not at all because its art- ists had reached the limit of human invention, or its philosophers the necessary term of human thought, but because the moral faculties and tastes which should have presided in that society were not de- veloped in proportion to the aesthetic and intellect- ual poAvers which added to it ornament. It was outwardly like the statue of Minerva in the Parthenon, o1r costly ivory, overlaid with gold ; but it was wood within ; and the wood rotted : that is all that can be said of it. Then the cunning of the ivory, and the splendor of the gold, fell and were broken, and the nations gathered the shining fragments. — Except for CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 305 this ethical depravation which consumed it, the spirit that wrought in the Grecian civilization might have taken its highest Periclean successes, and have made them but the step-stones to superior attainments ; the subordinate ornaments of more imperial achieve- ments. And so among us. Consider the differences, in the outward apparatus and equipment of society, between that age and the present ! We are heirs to the leg- acies of many successive intervening generations. While the ancient laws of proportion and color are as fresh to us as to those for whom Phidias and Praxi- teles wrought, we are ministered to by other minds than which theirs were not grander. Michael Angelo is not dead for us, with his sublime religious spirit; but still he speaks to us from St. Peter's and the Vatican, tiaraed with the arts, a more than Pope, and bearing to us a better evangel. Raphael, Rubens, Leonardo, Rembrandt, — how many have painted for us ! How many have philosophized ! How many have sung, in sweetest strains, those themes to which prose hath no faculty to ascend ! How many have gone ^ abroad upon the earth, have builded up empires, dis- covered continents, framed systems of legislation, elab- orated material instruments and mechanisms, made nature and thought all tributary to us ! Shakspeare is ours ; Lope ; Goethe ; the French and English pul- 20 306 pits ; the German Universities. The Civil Law has disciplined Europe ; the Gothic architecture has blos- somed into being, and filled the air with its magnifi- cent beauty ; great Institutes have been builded ; new methods of statesmanship have supplanted the older ; International Congresses, suspending wars, have become first a dream, then a plan, and now already a prophetic fact casting light along the Future ; — all, since the Grecian developement became historical. What to those who sought for novelties at Athens were only repel- lant and impenetrable forests, haunted by the gods of the thunder and the wind, are now the serene and broad domains of prosperous kingdoms. The sea which they dreaded is just one inlet of the oceans which we explore. And where they thought the earth was ended, we find that it begins ; and that other continents, unknown to the old world, are established amid the waves to hold the orb in its steady equi- poise. And still the march of invention and progress is swiftly forward. All art has now become winged and executive. It plunges into the earth, to pluck up from its bosom the ornaments and the furniture of our household life. It treads seas underneath it, and tramples the forests, and even the rock-ribbed moun- tains, in its path, as the very chaff of the summer threshing-floor. It penetrates the skies, pervades the CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 307 air, makes continents kindred, and startles with the thrill of its outrunning messages, anticipating light, the most distant populations. It is on every hand, this modern inventive and industrial art, a leveler and an up-builder, more powerful than parliaments, tri- umphant over kings. And powers are now in daily use, driving looms, carrying letters, performing the most ordinary offices of life, in comparison with which the enginery of Vulcan was not so vast, while the footsteps of Hebe were not more light. Consider the printing-press, the compass, the telescope, the steam-engine, the telegraph, the air-ship that may yet be — and you see to what an eminence, in all the equipment and the circumstances of life, the Ages have brought us ! And yet the personal Soul in man is superior to these circumstances. It adapts itself to them. It adapts them to it; and is constantly striving to bring them more nearly to that standard of requirement which it finds in itself, and which ever advances as they are accumulated. The progress of civiHzation is wrought in this way; the soul generating the instru- ments and the appliances which it needs, and then rising above them, and seeking to supplant them by others more adequate. And it is not possible, with our most prescient and comprehensive thought, to discern .any necessary limit to these advances. — Herein then we 308 THE HUMAN SOUL, see the capacity of this soul, if here rightly disci- plined, cultivated and used, when it enters that Fu- ture which is certainly before it, to realize in that sphere a still nobler good ! Whatever may there sur- round and meet it, the promise is shown in its his- tory on earth that if entering with virtuous aims the new scenes, and sustaining to them a normal relation, it shall still be superior to all those circumstances ; and instead of being crushed, or dazzled and con- founded, by that celestial environment, it shall be helped and advanced by it to a far nobler progress ! The poet desires, and the Christian anticipates, a scenery in the Future state so transcending the pres- ent that our poor terms, which are copies of nature, cannot fitly set it forth ; that we must take the very opposites of the Earth, and pile them together, in or- der to approach it ! There day without night, shall surround us with its splendors. There the very foun- dations and the battlements of the city shall be ' all manner of precious stones,' built up in belted layers of beauty ; a sea of glass, which shall be ' no more sea,' shall be the platform of the angelic worship ; the tree of life shall bear its wondrous fruit every month; and vivid and swift as the passage of the lightning shall be the forms and the orderly movement of those serene spirits who go on errands of mercy and of peace throughout the creation ! We cannot tell what CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 309 shall be there. And sometimes, as we think of it, it is to us like the vision of old to hiTn who saw it, *so high that it is dreadful!' And yet we are assured, by what now passes be- fore our eyes, that the Soul so circumstanced, un- less the presages of its history deceive us, shall be still supreme in the midst of these circumstances ; that with powers of motion in comparison of which the sunlight is not swifter, with powers of vision that shall leave no horizon within the ring of the uni- verse, it shall still use them all as subordinate aux- iliaries to its progress and its work ! — Who then shall measure the attainments to be there made, and con-* stantly to be carried forward to completion, through- out Immortality? Has not God prepared us for just such attainments ? May we not surely realize them, if only here we use as He would have us the powers He has given us, and enter as His children the realms yet invisible ? My Friends, this is so. We see in this constitution of the soul the promise of the future advances of Society, as existing on Earth ; of its more entire mastery over matter; of its more su- preme domination over thought; till perfected inven- tion shall make nature all active in the service of man ; till the choicest productions of genius and in- dustry shall be common, I had almost said as the water and the air, to the puiified Race; till the long 310 THE HUMAN SOUL, and troubled preparatory centuries shall have all been consummated in the luminous fulfilment of a last Golden Age ! But we see more than this ! Even the fitness of the Soul for a progress, before which all that Earth can hold is dim and poor, in those great ages when Death shall have loosed before its march the bars of Time ! III. It would be interesting and useful to dwell on a third point here, which also is intimately connected with this theme. It is, that not only has the Soul this constant tendency to developement and progress, and this native supremacy over all outward circum- stances, but it has the intuition of certain Ideas, WHICH IT CANNOT COMPREHEND AND MEASURE IN THE PRESENT WORLD, WHICH IT INSTINCTIVELY LOOKS TO INVESTIGATE IN THE Future ; and in the mastery of which must be high- est ENJOYMENT. Thus again we are capacitated for a future expe- rience, and our nature is made prophetical of such. The idea of God, an infinite Being ; of Eternity, an infinite ever-new existence ; of a government immacu- late, and extending through Eternity ; these, and the like, are native with us. Because music utters a hint of them sometimes, it shakes the soul with unsearch- able power. It seems to brood over us, a mystic ^ tone-speech,' throbbing with the pressure of unutter- able truths. Because some minds feel these more CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 311 deeply than others, or interpret them into terms with an easier felicity, they have a strange supremacy of power. And we never can be satisfied, unless anni- hilation closes our being, till we have some sphere in which to contemplate and unfold these ideas. No great object in nature, the volcano or the cataract, ever answers to our sense of what is unspeakable. The sunniest scene, or the most terrific thunder-burst, leaves the Infinite suggested but unrevealed. No work, determined by the conditions of Time, can meet this intimate longing of the soul. We must wait for a more exalted existence in which to unfold this part of our being. And if such an existence has been pre- pared for us, then we have in these ideas, not the promises only, but the rudiments and conditions, of at- tainments whose unmeasured height and scope no hu- man thought is yet adequate to compute ! IV. But passing from this point, with only this slight and incidental allusion, I come to another, which it is very important for us to consider in con- nection with our theme. It is that the Soul has power EVEN NOW TO ACT IN ENTIRE INDEPENDENCE OF THE BoDY ; and that usually, as its action becomes higher and more POWERFUL, IT becomes PROPORTIONABLY UNMINDFUL OF THE Body, and freed from conscious connection with this. The bearing of this fact on our present course of thought you will instantly discern. *• 312 THEHUMANSOUL, Admitting all that has been previously said, as to the innate tendency of the soul to realize an ever- new developement and ascension, as to its natural su- premacy over circumstances, and its possession of ideas that seem to prophesy a Future experience, and to prepare us for indefinite progress therein, — ^it may still be maintained that all these are characteristic of the soul while it is in the Body ; that they may be conditioned upon that connection; and that at any rate they give us no promise, considered by them- selves, as to what shall come to pass when this con- nection has been finally terminated, and the body, which was the house of the soul, has been dissolved from around it. It becomes therefore a fact of prime importance, in connection with our discussion, this which I have indicated : that the soul often now acts independently of the body; that its most splen- did activity is usually put forth when the body is no- wise helpful to it; and that just in proportion as its action is more concentrated and energetic, it forgets and overlooks the whole physical structure. — It thus shows itself fitted, by original organization, to act without and above the body. It gives an additional and an inspiring promise, if not that there is a Fu- ture before it, after the physical structure has de- cayed, at least than in such a Future, if that comes, it will be fitted to use its innate powers with CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTUPwE DESTINY. 313 even unprecedented vigor and effect. And with the rapid expansion of this thought I shall close the dis- cussion. I could not go further, without looking out- side of the Constitution of the Soul, and calling to our assistance the positive declarations and promises of the Scriptures. To these I may refer you, but uppn them I cannot here properly enter. The phenomena of Dreams are important and sig- nificant in connection with this department of our subject. Of themselves, almost, they set before us the fact I have adverted to. Consider these phenomena! The body lies, in statue-like repose. Worn out with labors, and resting to gain fresh vigor for their re- newal, it is utterly unaware of all around it. . No one of the physical senses is open. The very capa- city of receiving impressions seems quite to have passed from the impassive frame. Strike it, pinch it, cut it, call to it, and still you do not alarm or arouse it. It lies as before, lethargic, numb. Except for the regular repeat of the pulses, and for that invol- untary action of the lungs which is not intermitted, you would say that it was dead. It will hardly be more impervious to impression than while this state lasts, more utterly prostrate and unresponsive, when it is laid in the grave. Its sleep is, indeed, as the an- cients described it, ' the brother of Death.' And yet the mind, unwearied and alert, not 314 THEHUMANSOUL, cramped or constrained by this dulness of the body, only let forth indeed to a more free excursiveness by the transient sealing up of each physical sense, roams out every whither, in its argument and its thought. It plans disquisitions, dramas, histories ; it grapples with and explicates the problems of geometry; it ap- plies, with an intuition which is sharper than induction, the mixed mathematics, in their diverse applications. It sings to itself, with a more ethereal and triumph- ant utterance than it ever could attain while con- scious of the body. Its invention is quick in plastic art. It feels such love for kindred and friends, for children, for the absent, as almost never inspired it before; a love so tremulous, eager, tearful, that it sometimes stirs and wakens the frame with its throb- bing pulsations. It goes out over seas, — this keen- eyed, liberated, exulting Soul, — and views before it, as in actual presence, the tropic islands, exuberant with their wealth of flowers and foliage, and rever- berating the roll of the surf on the coral-reef; or it hovers, with shivering and stimulated sense, through the auroral North, and traces the track of a disap- pearing chivalry as this pierces the ice-mountains in quest of the pole. There is no sphere of action, from the slave-ship to the throne-room, there is no sphere of life, on the earth or in the skies, that does not seem open to ♦ CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 315 the access of the Soul, when the body has been be- numbed by sleep, and the mind has been loosened to the ecstasy of dreams. The memory, the judgment, the imagination, the fancy, the affectionate sensibility, the conscience itself, become strangely exhilarated and energized in this state. And all that the soul wants, it would sometimes appear, is to have that state made perfect and permanent, to have its own activity en- tu'ely dissociated from that of the body, in order to gain the utmost inspiration, and an unlimited range. It is never so winged, so intuitive, so discursive, so surcharged with thought, so keenly alive to every passion, as when the body is passive and dumb, and altogether forgotten. It then vivifies the Past; in- corporates the ideal ; sets aU actual forces in new com- binations ; anticipates the Future ; and treads with fleet and noiseless foot aerial regions. It feels a rap- ture preluding Heaven. It is mastered by an an- guish which hath the element of HeU in it. The Universe melts before its view, and leaves it face to face with God ! I do not mean, of course, that this is universally the experience of the dreamer. But it sometimes is. And in every such instance is found unanswerable demonstration of the fact, that the action of the Soul is not conditioned, for its promptness, its power, or its intensity, on the conscious connection between it 316 and the body. It may act most vividly, while the body is utterly passive and insensible. It may leave this forgotten behind it, and be itself only freer in its range, and clearer in its outlook, when it has no longer to act through the senses. Nor are these the only admitted phenomena which set this principle evidently before us; which show how deep and radical is the diversity between the body and the spirit, and how possible it is for the latter to be triumphantly active while unaided by the former. There are cases in which disease strikes the frame, and prostrates all its physical forces, with- out interfering with the soul's operation. In catalepsy for instance, — the Seizing, as its Greek name de- scribes it, — there is a sudden suspension both of sensation and of voluntary motion. A universal spas- modic disease masters the organs of locomotion ; so that the arm or the limb wiU remain in any posture, however unnatural, in which it is placed. The senses are usually entirely sealed, of no more avail than if they were obliterated. And the continued pulsa- tion, with the warmth which this maintains in the system, are the only indications that life remains. Yet there have been authentic instances in which the mind, thus shrouded from sight, instead of being de- stroyed, impaired, or even limited, in its central force, has been stimulated to a more amazing activity, by CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 317 being thus crowded as it were into a comer of its realm ; and has feared and agonized, or has triumphed and exulted, with a vividness of experience altogether unaccustomed. A new and wondrous sensibility has been developed, in connection with this temporary severance of the soul from the members of the body; and the 'Dead-alive,' as such examples have been styled, have gained in these hours of the forcible sus- pension of the functions of the body what months of study could not have brought them. Most of you have heard undoubtedly of WiUiam Tennent, for many years of the last century a faith- ful and intelligent divine at Freehold, New Jersey ; and the narrative of his singular aflPection in early life may be so familiar to you as to save the neces- * sity of a full recital of it. What the origin of his dis- ease was, or what its precise pathology, it is not needful for us to inquire. I refer to it only as a psycholo- gical fact, in harmony with the class of facts upon which I am commenting, and shedding clear light on the point before us. And I take this, rather than others which are similar, because it is palpably and indisputably authentic, and because all the circimi- stances and experiences involved in it have been por- trayed by his own hand, with special minuteness and fulness of detail. It establishes the principle, I think, beyond denial, that the Soul may act independently 318 of the body, and may gain its utmost elevation of feeling, its highest pitch of spiritual vision, when that has ceased to render it assistance. By excessive devotion to theological studies, Mr. Tennent had well-nigh sacrificed his life ; his health had become frail, and his spirits depressed ; when sud- denly, in an instant, he seemed to expire. Apparently no sensibility or pulsation was left in the frame. The day was appointed, and had arrived, for his funeral; and the preparations for the service were nearly com- pleted, when a young physician, his intimate friend, who thought the death-cold not yet sufficiently marked upon the body, procured by his urgency a postpone- ment of the burial, till effort should be tried to pro- duce resuscitation. All possible means and appliances were employed, to revive the passive frame ; but none seemed in any degree to avail. And it was not till the very close of the interval which had been al- lowed, when again the funeral ceremonies were on the point of commencing, and the moment had al- most come for enclosing the body in its last earthly tenement, that signs of revival began to be perceived. Then the prostrate man suddenly opened his eyes, and spoke; and after further and strenuous exertions he was finally recovered from what for so many hours and days had seemed the very Sleep of Death. At first, his memory of what had transpired before CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 319 his seizure seemed to have vanished. It was months before he fully recovered, either in body or in mind, from the effect of this long and singular pause in the functions of the body. But when he did, he gave to a friend, by whom it was published, the fol- lowing account of what had occurred in his mental experience during this trance : — ^ While I was conversing with my brother,' said he, 'on the state of my soul, and the fears I had entertained for my future welfare, I found myself in an instant in another state of existence, under the direction of a superior Being, who ordered me to fol- low him. I was accordingly wafted along, I know not how, tiU I beheld at a distance an ineffable Glory; the impression of which on my soul it is im- possible to communicate to mortal mind. I immedi- ately reflected on my happy change, and thought : ' Well, blessed be God ! I am safe at last, not- withstanding aU my fears !' I saw an innumerable host of happy beings, surrounding the inexpressible Glory, in acts of adoration and joyous worship; but I did not see any bodily shape or representation, in the glorious appearance. I heard things unutterable. I heard their songs and hallelujahs, with unspeakable rapture. I felt joy unutterable, and full of glory. I then applied to my conductor, and requested leave to join the happy throng; on which he tapped on 320 my shoulder, and said : ^ You must return to the Earth!' This seemed like a sword through my heart. In an instant I recollect to have seen my brother standing before me, disputing with the doc- tor. The three days, through which I appeared life- less, seemed to me not more than twenty minutes. The idea of returning to this world of sorrow and trouble gave me such a shock that I fainted repeat- edly.' And afterwards he added : ' Such was the effect on my mind of what I had seen and heard, that if it be possible for a human being to live entirely above the world, and the things of it, I was that person. The ravishing sounds of the songs and hal- lelujahs that I had heard, and the very words that were uttered, were not out of my ears, when awake, for at least three years. * * * Every thing else appeared so .completely vain when compared to Heaven, that could I have had the world for stoop- ing down for it, I believe I should not have thought of doing it !' As I said at the commencement of this remarkable narrative, what the physical causes or nature of this trance may have been, is not important to our present purpose. That such a suspension of the powers of the body, and such an accompanying intense activity of the powers of the soul, did actually occur, no man CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 321 who values his credit for candor will venture to deny. And so much as this is demonstrated by it : that the Soul has capacity for the most exalted and vivid op- eration, when the help of the Body is utterly with- drawn from it. It may gain visions, hear voices, accomplish processes of thought and of utterance, be sensible of a rapturous and unspeakable joy, while the body is dumb, motionless, insensible, apparently only fit for the burial. And if it may do this in the cases where after all the body is revived, the soul appearing to come back to it after an absence, the presumption rises almost to certainty that it may do the same thing when the body is finally and beyond recall dis- solved; that after the Soul has been altogether re- leased and dislodged from this mortal frame, it may still retain and employ its powers, finding room for their further and swifter advancement, and matching them with more august companions and more glori- ous circumstances, in a Future state of being ! — I see no way of evading this conclusion. And I see not how any man, conscious of the dignity and the per- manence of his powers, should desire to evade it. But it may be said that such cases as these are rare and extraordinary, and that more or less of Dis- ease enters into them; so that they fail to justify a conclusion which shall be general and trustworthy. I cannot admit that this answer is pertinent; or that 21 322 the disease which affects the body partially, suspend- ing its usual functions for a season, is different in the relation which it sustains to the soul from that se- verer and completer disease which shall affect the body fully, and suspend forever its whole operation. Still, it may further assist and 'enlighten us, to con- sider what is also and as clearly true : that the Soul, *^ in its intensest activity, tends always to forget and OVERLOOK THE BODY, and to act in entire independence of it. — Precisely as it is more thoroughly occupied, more copiously and profoundly active, it becomes un- mindful of the physical structure. And when it is recalled to the recognition of that, the evidence is given us, in this very fact, that its first and highest impulse has abated. This demonstrates, does it not? that its connection with the body is only a present accident of the Soul, not essential to its substantial being or power ; and that it may act in the loftiest methods when altogether dissevered from that. The anecdote is a familiar one in the history of Painting, of the artist employed upon the frescoes of a dome, who stepped back to see from a better point of view the work which he had done, and became so absorbed in comparing the scenes which he had depicted with the forming idea as it lay in his mind, that still proceeding backward he had reached the edge of the lofty scaffolding, when a pupil, observing CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 323 his instant peril, and afraid even to shout to him, rushed forward and marred the figures with his trowel, so calling back and saving the Master. The mind, engrossed in its own operation, had forgotten the body, and was treating it as carelessly as the boy treats the chip which he tosses on the wave. It is another prized tradition of the art, that when Leonardo was painting that master-piece of the Last Supper which the art of the engraver has made fa- miliar in all our dwellings, and which has given to his name a kind of Christian consecration, he paused before attempting the head of the Saviour, unable clearly to present to his fancy his own ideal. But at last, at evening, amid the inspiring vesper-song of the chapel, while he sat "Immantled in ambrosial Dark," as voices and or^n conspired to pour their rapture on the air, his imagination was aroused to its highest activity, and a Divine head seemed to float before him in luminous glory. Then, hastening to his room, he transferred the majestic vision to the canvass. Unconscious of the hours, he wrought all night; and in the morning the work was done, done for all Time ! Whether the incident be or be not historically au- thenticated, is not important to our discussion. If it be not, then the fact ot the pr^ivalence. of such a tra- 824 THE HUMAN SOUL, dition, which no one will deny, bears yet more strongly on the progress of the argument. For it shows the impression, wide-spread and influential, cresting in this case into a definite historical rumor, that a work so great, involving the noblest operation of the soul, could only have been accomplished when the body was forgotten, and had ceased to assist it. So the long dream of Coleridge, a small fragment of which only is preserved to us in his works, in those lines familiar to all his readers, "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree," &c., came to him, you know, and bodied itself forth in a musical utterance, amid the keen exhilaration of mind induced by opium. ' All the images rose before him as things, with a parallel production of the corres- pondent expressions, without any sensation, or con- sciousness of effort.' Being afterward recalled to practical cares by the entrance of some one on an errand of business, he was never able to renew any part of it beyond the brief fragment which he had already written. The mind at work in voluntary op- eration, could not reproduce the height and the viv- idness of the vision which had been given it in its hour of excitement. Unmindful of the body, so long as its own exaltation lasted, when recalled to its CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 325 connection with the sensible organs it abandoned its pinnacle ! So have all of us, doubtless, observed the same thing, expressed with more or less fulness and force in our personal experience. The lawyer, the physi- cian, the inventor, the mathematician, — each one, when intent and absorbed upon his study, exploring with kindled and eager thought some element of knowl- edge essential to his success, becomes for the time forgetful of the body. Its wants cease to trouble him, its habits to arrest him, or its pleasures to please him. He is almost as careless of it as if already the ai'dent soul were disparted from it, and, inheriting the privilege of spirits disembodied, were freed from the bonds of space and of time. It is so, too, with the merchant, planning an enterprise which is intricate and complex, but which if carried out will enrich him with its rewards. It is so with every most eminent thinker, most successful explorer, or most careful cal- culator; in a word, with every one whose intellect or whose affections, on any theme, by any fact, are thor- oughly engaged. We have felt this ourselves, I cannot doubt; in our intense action, of hope or of dread, of delight or of agony ; as we have hung, with every faculty con- centred upon the sight, over the couch of the failing friend; as we have entered the supremest experience 326 THE HUMAN SOUL, of an unusual joy. The hours have then seemed moments to us, or the moments have seemed hours. We have ceased to reckon time by the hands on the clock-face. The conscious Soul has been its own hor- ologe. The long or the brief experience has been to it but one intense consuming Now ; that may have been minutes, that might have been ages. The soul has no more remembered the body, and has no more depended on it, in this uttermost grief, or this ecstasy of delight, than if the body had never per- tained to it, or were now in possession of some other mind. Independence on« the body has thus been shown its native prerogative. And the prophecy has been revealed, in this its own fearful and wonderful frame, of the period yet to come, when intensest self- consciousness and extremest activity shall be united in it with final separation from relations to matter ; when its spiritual forces, disconnected from any such physical structure, with native supremacy over all outward accidents, shall agonize or shall triumph as it never could before ! It is natural and fit, too, before closing this train of thought, to refer to those very remarkable in- stances, detailed by physiologists, in which the soul not only forgets and overlooks the body, but acts in positive disregard of it, and in what seems to us a direct violation of its usual laws. — I do not propose CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 327 to enter, of course, upon any discussion of doubtful instances of either magnetic or somnambulic action ; nor to assume, any further than I am warranted by the agreement of scientific men, any principles or the- ories concerning such instances as are fully authenti- cated. But it can hardly be doubted, I think, by any one who has given the subject a careful atten- tion, that there are certain cases — abnormal, if we elect to call them so, but actual still, and suggestive of possible forces and laws not yet revealed to us — in which the mind, by an exertion of its force to us marvelous and bewildering, surpasses and super- cedes the action of the body, and shows itself inde- pendent of the ordinary rules and media of vision. The body is not diseased ; but the soul is intensely, extra-naturally stimulated, either by an energy self- developing within it, like a geyser bursting out and boiling amid snows, or by the exertion of an extra- neous force descending upon it, until the eye becomes no longer a needed auxiliary to its discernment of matter, and even the presence of light upon the object is not required. In the instance of Jane Rider, for example, of whose remarkable exhibitions of this mental state a detailed account was published several years since, and to whom. Prof. Oliver particularly refers in his elaborate Lectures on Physiology, the eyes were 328 THE HUMAN SOUL, closed, and were covered with thick and impenetra- ble bandages. All lights were removed from the room, and the windows were so secured that no ob- ject was discernible. Yet her mind, through this oc- cult and startling power, discerned and read what she had never seen before, and what the eye of another in the room, though opened upon it, could not have seen. The soul made the body transparent before it, it made the darkness bright around it, by its . own strange illuminating power; so that the eminent phys- iologist I have referred to has truly said : " It is im- possible to doubt that in such cases [this, and the* like, where the eye is utterly covered up] they still en- joy the power of Vision." That such an unusual and amazing mental state can be reproduced at pleasure, that it is either usu- ally or frequently produced by the operators who pro- fess to exhibit it for gain, I have no idea. On the other hand, it cannot be doubted that in far the larger proportion of cases in which the existence of such a state is asserted — the feigned being to the real, perhaps, as thousands to one, — the pretence at exhibiting it is a conscious charlatanry, and the spec- tators are entertained by skilful gymnastics or by legerdemain, instead of being brought to instant prox- imity with this august power, which comes only as it is sent to the soul, but which when it comes seems CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 329 well-nigh supernal! But that such a power is some- times manifested, that the state of being which I have described is occasionally induced, by unexplained causes — induced, too, quite as often among the ilUter- ate as among the cultivated — cannot, I think, be rea- sonably doubted. And the judgment of the world •has set in this direction, within the last thirty years, with a steadiness and a strength which seem to give no promise of a re-action. The chief danger now is, that men will too lightly assume the presence of such a state, and be cheated by the tricks of those who simulate it, not that they will be moved to deny its possibility. And what light does this cast, and all these classes of cases which I have cited, on the power of the Soul to act hereafter in independence of the Body; and, after that has been dissolved, to still go forward in the grandest career! Ah, my friends, it seems to me that to doubt this power, and to reason against it, were like reasoning against the rings of Saturn because the unaided eye does not catch them; or like reasoning against the cartoons of Raphael be- cause our fingers are not competent to draw them! "Persons of very ordinary capacity," says the same author from whom I have just quoted, "seem to ac- quire by this influence a keenness of perception, a strength of judgment, and a vividness of imagination, 330 which forms a striking contrast with their usual me- diocrity of talent and temperament. Every thing is dignified and embellished by the power of their minds. They paint objects in the most brilliant col- ors, and they display a power of eloquence and a richness of language, wholly disproportioned to their ordinary ability and habit of mind." Who shall believe, then, that the soul is depend- ent for its power of action on connection with the body? Who shall doubt, that when all the senses and forces of the body have been finally sealed by the coming of Death, the Soul may still live, that by its constitution it is fitted to live, supreme and young, in that disembodied state? still putting forth its pow- ers, stiU discerning distant objects, and moving amid the new scenes opened to it with a grander scope and dignity of faculty, and an intenser self-conscious- ness, than it ever knew before ? — I trace the river, swelling out by degrees from the spring to a rill, from the rill to a brook, from the brook to a mill- stream, from the stream to a river, taking into itself all minor tributaries, and rolling on with a current that bears the ship and the steamboat with the ea- siest majesty, still cleaving its way through meadow and hill, through forest and mountain, untroubled to- ward the sea. Shall I believe, then, that when that river has rounded a promontory, beyond which, as CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 331 yet, I cannot follow it, it is all at once dissolved into mist ? or emptied into a cavern so deep and obscure that no trace of the stream re-appears upon the earth ? Nay, but I know, — though I have not seen the end, it is as certain to me as if already my vision embraced it, — that that river flows on continuous to the ocean, and mingles its wave with all the waters that gird the globe, and are drawn into the skies ! And so I know that the great Soul of Man, as- piring from its birth to a nobler developement, still matching its companions, still surpassing its circum- stances, with ideas within it which no Present can unfold, and with a deep self-centred force, to which the body is only an accident, will still go on when this body has decayed, and be only nobler and prince- lier in each power when mingling with that illustri- ous concourse of intelligent and pure beings who already have been gathered in the courts of the Fu- ture ! It were to reverse and violently over-ride every palpable probability, to deny or to doubt this ! Of course this Future, philosophy herself instructs us, shall not be one of progress and peace to the per- sonal Soul, unless this has here been prepared for such goods, by the right and appropriate use of its pow- ers ; by having gained Knowledge ; by having realized the precepts of Virtue, and been inspired with its Divine spirit; by having wrought the Works which 332 THE HUMAN SOUL, these indicate ; by having sought pure and spiritual Happiness, rather than physical indulgence or pleas- ure. The soul that has here been darkened by ig- norance, corrupted by vice, enfeebled by an inert waste of its powers, and passionately excited or sensu- ally intoxicated, not filled with spiritual gladness and peace — will find the Future, according to all the laws of its constitution, a realm of darkness, mingled with fire ! And its loss will be the greater, its failure more terrific, as the gain which contrasts this is more eminent and grand ! — But if the soul hath here em- ployed its powers aright, according to the law and design of its Maker, and is thus affectionately related to Him, and sympathetically allied with all pure Be- ings who are gathered around him, it is fitted, indis- putably, in the frame of its being, to realize a Destiny amid the cycles of the Future which the unassisted thought of man has never yet been able to grasp; which the harps of perfect and glorified spirits alone can utter ; and which Immortality shall not be too vast to unfold and augment! It was a vain and frivolous work to which Angelo was once put; to raise a statue of Snow! Not snow but Marble, that should last through the ages, preserv- ing his thought and representing his genius, was the fitting material for his magnificent mind. And the acclaim of ages approves his selection. No frivolous ^> CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 333 or short-sighted worker is God ! And when He builds, with such curious skill, with such infinite power, the statue of the Soul, and makes this live, as Angelo could not the marble which he carved, He does it for Eter- nity ! Those cycles, beside which our ages are min- utes, shall attest His wisdom ! — May we so live, while life here continues, that there at last we shall not only see, but ourselves exhibit, the wisdom of His choice 1 My Friends : The task I assumed is accomplished, and I stand now at the end. Relieved and glad, yet also regretful, I turn from the theme which so long has engaged us ; rejoicing to have done what I could to set it forth, amid many embarrassments ; regretting to have done this so hastily and imperfectly. To you, who have listened so patiently here; to the Di- rectors of this course, whose sympathy and interest have continually encouraged me ; I render my hearty and earnest thanks. To the theme itself, I offer again, as I now pass from it, the tribute of unfeigned admi- ration and love ! Indeed, it is a great one ! That which is highest in the terrestrial system ; that which surveys, governs, completes, all things around us ; that which has prophecies of a Future upon it; — this, it has been my office to exhibit, as the first in this series of Annual Lecturers. Many other 334 themes may be more novel than this, and more en- tertaining. No other, coming within the range of these Lectures, can be more high or more rewarding. None other can have a more instant and practical relation to ourselves. With all the defects which have marked my treat- ment of it, of which no other can be so keenly sen- sible as I am, certain great and important facts have been made, I think, to appear, in the progress of the discussion, concerning the Constitution of the Human Soul. — It is evident, that the Life which this innately unfolds, spiritual, personal, and progressive as it is, is itself the grandest force that meets us on the arena of the Earth; more mystic and august, more impossible of imitation, more truly transcending our analysis and our thought, than any other energy around us. — It is evident that the Soul, endowed with this Life, is wisely and kindly prepared to gain Knowledge ; being urged by the instincts, and furnished with the faculties, which point toward this, and which make its attainment, if we rightly and vigorously use our powers, a matter of certainty. — It is evident that the Soul is equally endowed with the powers and aptitudes which prepare it to gain Virtue, and to re- alize the absolute law of character which our Maker has expressed to us ; that if it does not in fact gain this then, its own perverse preferences, and not His CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 335 constitution of its spiritual forces, are chargeable with •the failure. It is evident, further, that the Virtuous and Benefi- cent Operation upon others, and upon the material structures around us, in which we know that another ideal good will be gained by us, is made possible to us. by our careful constitution ; that we have not only the impulses to this, but the spiritual powers with which to accomplish it, and a native command over all the necessary forces and instruments. — It is evi- dent that the Soul, thus equipped for other gains which are grand and intrinsic, is made constitution- ally capable of Happiness, and is fitted with marvel- ous precision and completeness, in the frame of its being, to reach this great and pure reward. — And now it is evident, as the closing fact, which adds a glory to all the others, and makes them reaUy wor- thy our study, that the Soul, so endowed for attain- ments in this life which all must admire, is made equally capable, by Him who ordains its forces and its laws, of reaching still higher possessions in the Future, and of fulfilling there a most exalted and illustrious Destiny. It may fail to do this, just as it may fail of accomplishing any subordinate good. For it is free ; and its destiny will be — so far as philosophy gives us any intimation — according to the use it here makes of its powers. But if it here Kves 336 THE HUMAN SOUL, wisely, purely, with love to God and love to man for its animating spirit, and a constant employment of its faculties for high ends as its self-chosen law, then, when the body has been dissolved from it, it shall enter an unbounded, ever-culminating progress, in the future spheres of being ; in which knowledge shall be Vision; in which Virtue shall be spontaneous and perfect ; in which it shall accomplish without ef- fort or weariness the great Works of heaven; in which its whole capacious sensibility shall be flooded with a Joy, each instant of which shall be rapturous and inspiring, and the limit of which Eternity doth not hold ! This is true, and all these several propositions are true, not of one soul only, or of ten, or of a million. They are true of each soul which God hath formed in the likeness of Himself. However humble its ancestry or its circumstances, however imperfect its culture and its training, it holds these powers, and is heir to these prospects. In regard to his personal spiritual nature, the king hath no innate supremacy over the peasant ; the slave and the master stand side by side. And that little boy whom you or I to-night passed on the street, — with his keen-faced want and his shivering nakedness contrasting our plenty, his un- lettered shrewdness our knowledge of books, per- haps his habit of greedy deception our habit of de- CONSTITUTED FOR A FUTURE DESTINY. 337 corous prudence and truth — that little boy, if the forces of his nature shall ever gain harmonious play, and the love of his Maker, the love of his kind, be inspired within him, may realize a destiny in yon far-flashing Future, before which yours and mine shall be, dim ! The Soul is that which holds the powers that I have named ; and others still, with dim foreshad- owings, mystic moods, inexplicable states, thoughts that ' do lie too deep for tears,' for their unsearchable won- drous fruit. And the Soul is the same, in its nature and immortality, in each human being! Is there not then herein, — I leave it for the judgment of each to answer ! — ^is there not found herein the no- blest manifestation we can look for in Nature of the Goodness, the Wisdom, and the Power of God ? Are not His character, and His infinite energy, so clearly revealed to us in this frame of our being, that other studies may confirm and illustrate, but can never overcome, our conviction of them ? Shall we not ren- der to Him our worship, of the heart, of the life, of the glad obedience of every power? Shall we not, if only for this our constitution, forever hereafter unite in His praise ? For myself, with deepest joy I feel, with an inti- mate persuasion that penetrates every thought do I know and feel, that He who hath formed us as He has is incomparably mighty, kind, and wise! that the 22 338 THE HUMAN SOUL. Kght is only the shadow of His smile, as the thun- der is only the whisper of His power ! that com- munion with Him shall be the supremest delight of Eternity! After this grandest proof of His power, and of the character which guides that, any other of his miracles becomes conceivable. It were easy to found the earth for the pavement of this kingly Soul. It were easy to rear the heavens for its pal- ace. Revelation becomes intrinsically probable, the occasion for it being granted, to instruct and cherish this Soul of Man. And no system of grace, though involving the mystery of Incarnation itself, can be too stupendous to build for this a pathway to the skies. Subliming the Earth by its presence upon it, encompass- ing the Past in the sweep of its thought, anticipating the Future in the flight of its desire, it overtops Time, and witnesses for God ! I trust that we all, my Friends, shall cherish as we ought the Soul within us ; that we shall use its powers aright ; that we shall reach its highest good ! I trust that we all shall then study it again, with still enlarged faculty, and with clarified insight, in the spheres that ere long, if we are pure, are to open to our ascending steps ! And thanking you again for your patient attention, I bid you, as gathered in this place for this purpose, my final Farewell ! 74^ Of THB ^ [TJHIVBESITYj 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subjea to immediate recall. • 'npc'58fii» rL 'JOJ J\/f pirCO V-D OEC - 2 w8 r^---;V~r5 DEC S 10% CIRGUi-/\Tioi^ UiEPT i 1 T.T> 91 A-t^Om Q '(^R General Library YC 30^7 r U. C.BERKELEY LIBRARIES CDS13S1757 S'C^'^U UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA UBRARY ^^ .■jtSi m fi ->\? ji