OVER-SOUL (1841)
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
But
souls that of his own good life partake,
He
loves as his own self; dear as his eye
They
are to Him: He'll never them forsake:
When
they shall die, then God himself shall die:
They
live, they live in blest eternity.
- Henry More.
There is a difference between one
and another hour of life in their authority and subsequent effect. Our faith
comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief
moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other
experiences. For this reason the argument which is always forthcoming to
silence those who conceive extraordinary hopes of man, namely the appeal to
experience, is for ever invalid and vain. A mightier hope abolishes despair. We
give up the past to the objector, and yet we hope. He must explain this hope.
We grant that human life is mean, but how did we find out that it was mean?
What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent? What is
the universal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine innuendo by which the
great soul makes it enormous claim? Why do men feel that the natural history of
man has never been written, but always he is leaving behind what you have said
of him, and it becomes old, and books of metaphysics worthless? The philosophy
of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul.
In its experiments there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum
it could not resolve. Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Always our being
is descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has no
prescience that somewhat incalculable may not baulk the very next moment. I am
constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the
will I call mine.
As with events, so is it with
thoughts. When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see not,
pours for a season its streams into me, - I see that I am a pensioner, - not a
cause but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look
up and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the
visions come.
The Supreme Critic on all the errors
of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is
that great nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the
atmosphere; that Unity, that Over -soul, within which every man's particular
being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart of which all
sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission;
that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains
every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character and not from
his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand and
become wisdom and virtue and power and beauty. We live in succession, in
division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole;
the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally
related; the eternal One. And this deep power in which we exist and whose
beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self - sufficing and perfect in
every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen the seer and the
spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by
piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which
these are the shining parts, is the soul. Only by the vision of that Wisdom can
the horoscope of the ages be read, and by falling back on our better thoughts,
by yielding to the spirit of prophecy which is innate in every man that we can
know what it saith. Every man's words who speaks from that life must sound vain
to those who do not dwell in the same thought on their own part. I dare not
speak for it. My words do not carry its august sense; they fall short and cold.
Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold! their speech shall be
lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the rising of the wind. Yet I desire, even
by profane words, if sacred I may not use, to indicate the heaven of this deity
and to report what hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity and
energy of the Highest Law.
If we consider what happens in
conversation, in reveries, in remorse, in times of passion, in surprises, in
the instructions of dreams, wherein often we see ourselves in masquerade, - the
droll disguises only magnifying and enhancing a real element and forcing it on
our distinct notice, - we shall catch many hints that will broaden and lighten
into knowledge of the secret of nature. All goes to show that the soul in man
is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function,
like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, - but uses these as
hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the
will, but the master of the intellect and the will; - is the vast background of
our being, in which they lie, - an immensity not possessed and that cannot be
possessed. From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things
and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all. A man is the
facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide. What we commonly call
man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him,
represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the
soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make
our knees bend. When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it
breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection,
it is love. And the blindness of the intellect begins when it would be
something of itself. The weakness of the will begins when the individual would
be something of himself. All reform aims in some one particular to let the
great soul have its way through us; in other words, to engage us to obey.
Of this pure nature every man is at
some time sensible. Language cannot paint it with his colors. It is too subtle.
It is undefinable, unmeasurable; but we know that it pervades and contains us.
We know that all spiritual being is in man. A wise old proverb says, "God
comes to see us without bell:" that, is, as there is no screen or ceiling
between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the
soul, where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are
taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to all
the attributes of God. Justice we see and know, Love, Freedom, Power. These
natures no man ever got above, but always they tower over us, and most in the
moment when our interests tempt us to wound them.
The sovereignty of this nature
whereof we speak is made known by its independency of those limitations which
circumscribe us on every hand. The soul circumscribeth all things. As I have
said, it contradicts all experience. In like manner it abolishes time and
space. The influence of the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to that
degree that the walls of time and space have come to look solid, real and
insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the
sign of insanity. Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of
the soul. A man is capable of abolishing them both. The spirit sports with time
-
Can
crowd eternity into an hour,
Or
stretch an hour to eternity.
We are often made to feel that there
is another youth and age than that which is measured from the year of our
natural birth. Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a
thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty. Every man parts from
that contemplation with the feeling that it rather belongs to ages than to
mortal life. The least activity of the intellectual powers redeems us in a
degree from the influences of time. In sickness, in languor, give us a strain
of poetry or a profound sentence, and we are refreshed; or produce a volume of
Plato or Shakspeare, or remind us of their names, and instantly we come into a
feeling of longevity. See how the deep divine thought demolishes centuries and
millenniums, and makes itself present through all ages. Is the teaching of
Christ less effective now than it was when first his mouth was opened? The
emphasis of facts and persons to my soul has nothing to do with time. And so
always the soul's scale is one; the scale of the senses and the understanding
is another. Before the great revelations of the soul, Time, Space and Nature
shrink away. In common speech we refer all things to time, as we habitually
refer the immensely sundered stars to one concave sphere. And so we say that
the Judgment is distant or near, that the Millennium approaches, that a day of
certain political, moral, social reforms is at hand, and the like, when we mean
that in the nature of things one of the facts we contemplate is external and
fugitive, and the other is permanent and connate with the soul. The things we
now esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach themselves like ripe fruit from our
experience, and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows whither. The
landscape, the figures, Boston, London, are facts as fugitive as any
institution past, or any whiff of mist or smoke, and so is society, and so is
the world. The soul looketh steadily forwards, creating a world always before
her, leaving worlds always behind her. She has no dates, nor rites, nor
persons, nor specialties, nor men. The soul knows only the soul; all else is
idle weeds for her wearing.
After its own law and not by
arithmetic is the rate of its progress to be computed. The soul's advances are
not made by gradation, such as can be represented by motion in a straight line,
but rather by ascension of state, such as can be represented by metamorphosis,
- from the egg to the worm, from the worm to the fly. The growths of genius are
of a certain total character, that does not advance the elect individual first
over John, then Adam, then Richard, and give to each the pain of discovered
inferiority, but by every throe of growth the man expands there where he works,
passing at each pulsation, classes, populations, of men. With each divine
impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and finite, and comes out
into eternity, and inspires and expires its air. It converses with truths that
have always been spoken in the world and becomes conscious of a closer sympathy
with Zeno and Arrian than with the persons in the house.
This is the law of moral and of
mental gain. The simple rise as by specific levity not into a particular
virtue, but into the region of all the virtues. They are in the spirit which
contains them all. The soul is superior to all the particulars of merit. The
soul requires purity, but purity is not it; requires justice, but justice is
not that; requires beneficence, but is somewhat better: so that there is a kind
of descent and accommodation felt when we leave speaking of moral nature to
urge a virtue which it enjoins. For, to the soul in her pure action all the
virtues are natural, and not painfully acquired. Speak to his heart, and the
man becomes suddenly virtuous.
Within the same sentiment is the
germ of intellectual growth, which obeys the same law. Those who are capable of
humility, of justice, of love, of aspiration, are already on a platform that
commands the sciences and arts, speech and poetry, action and grace. For whose
dwells in this moral beatitude does already anticipate those special powers
which men prize so highly; just as love does justice to all the gifts of the
object beloved. The lover has no talent, no skill, which passes for quite
nothing with his enamored maiden, however little she may possess of related
faculty; and the heart which abandons itself to the Supreme Mind finds itself
related to all its works, and will travel a royal road to particular knowledges
and powers. For in ascending to this primary and aboriginal sentiment we have
come from our remote station on the circumference instantaneously to the centre
of the world, where, as in the closet of God, we see causes, and anticipate the
universe, which is but a slow effect.
One mode of the divine teaching is
the incarnation of the spirit in a form, - in forms, like my own. I live in
society; with persons who answer to thoughts in my own mind, or outwardly
express a certain obedience to the great instincts to which I live. I see its
presence to them. I am certified of a common nature; and so these other souls,
these separated selves, draw me as nothing else can. They stir in me the new
emotions we call passion; of love, hatred, fear, admiration, pity; thence come
conversation, competition, persuasion, cities and war. Persons are
supplementary to the primary teaching of the soul. In youth we are mad for
persons. Childhood and youth see all the world in them. But the larger
experience of man discovers the identical nature appearing through them all.
Persons themselves acquaint us with the impersonal. In all conversation between
two persons tacit reference is made, as to a third party, to a common nature.
That third party or common nature is not social; it is impersonal; is God. And
so in groups where debate is earnest, and especially on great questions of
thought, the company become aware of their unity; aware that the thought rises
to an equal height in all bosoms, that all have a spiritual property in what
was said, as well as the sayer. They all wax wiser than they were. It arches
over them like a temple, this unity of thought in which every heart beats with
nobler sense of power and duty, and thinks and acts with unusual solemnity. All
are conscious of attaining to a higher self - possession. It shines for all.
There is a certain wisdom of humanity which is common to the greatest men with
the lowest, and which our ordinary education often labors to silence and
obstruct. The mind is one, and the best minds, who love truth for its own sake,
think much less of property in truth. Thankfully they accept it everywhere, and
do not label or stamp it with any man's name, for it is theirs long beforehand.
It is theirs from eternity. The learned and the studious of thought have no
monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in some degree disqualifies
them to think truly. We owe many valuable observations to people who are not
very acute or profound, and who say the thing without effort which we want and
have long been hunting in vain. The action of the soul is oftener in that which
is felt and left unsaid than in that which is said in any conversation. It
broods over every society, and they unconsciously seek for it in each other. We
know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same
time that we are much more. I feel the same truth how often in my trivial
conversation with my neighbors, that somewhat higher in each of us overlooks
this by - play, and Jove nods to Jove from behind each of us.
Men descend to meet. In their
habitual and mean service to the world, for which they forsake their native
nobleness, they resemble those Arabian sheiks who dwell in mean houses and
effect an external poverty, to escape the rapacity of the Pacha, and reserve
all their display of wealth for their interior and guarded retirements.
As it is present in all persons, so
it is in every period of life. It is adult already in the infant man. In my
dealing with my child, my Latin and Greek, my accomplishments and my money
stead me nothing. They are all lost on him: but as much soul as I have, avails.
If I am merely wilful, he gives me a Rowland for an Oliver, sets his will
against mine, one for one, and leaves me, if I please, the degradation of
beating him by my superiority of strength. But if I renounce my will and act
for the soul, setting that up as umpire between us two, out of his young eyes
looks the same soul; he reveres and loves with me.
The soul is the perceiver and
revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say
what they choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken what they do not
wish to hear, "How do you know it is truth, and not an error of your
own?" We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are
awake that we are awake. It was a grand sentence of Emanuel Swedenborg, which
would alone indicate the greatness of that man's perception, - "It is no
proof of a man's understanding to be able to affirm whatever he pleases; but to
be able to discern that what is true is true, and that what is false is false,
this is the mark and character of intelligence." In the book I read, the
good thought returns to me, as every truth will, the image of the whole soul.
To the bad thought which I find in it, the same soul becomes a discerning,
separating sword, and lops it away. We are wiser than we know. If we will not
interfere with our thought, but will act entirely, or see how the thing stands
in God, we know the particular thing, and every thing, and every man. For the
Maker of all things and all persons stands behind us and casts his dread
omniscience through us over
things.
But beyond this recognition of its
own in particular passages of the individual's experience, it also reveals
truth. And here we should seek to reinforce ourselves by its very presence, and
to speak with a worthier, loftier strain of that advent. For the soul's
communication of truth is the highest event in nature, for it then does not
give somewhat from itself, but it gives itself, or passes into and becomes that
man whom it enlightens; or, in proportion to that truth he receives, it takes
him to itself.
We distinguish the announcements of
the soul, its manifestations of its own nature, by the term Revelation. These
are always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For this communication is an
influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet
before the flowing surges of the sea of life. Every distinct apprehension of
this central commandment agitates men with awe and delight. A thrill passes
through all men at the reception of new truth, or at the performance of a great
action, which comes out of the heart of nature. In these communications the
power to see is not separated from the will to do, but the insight proceeds
from obedience, and the obedience proceeds from a joyful perception. Every
moment when the individual feels himself invaded by it, is memorable. Always, I
believe, by the necessity of our constitution a certain enthusiasm attends the
individual's consciousness of that divine presence. The character and duration
of this enthusiasm varies with the state of the individual, from an ecstasy and
trance and prophetic inspiration, - which is its rarer appearance, to the
faintest glow of virtuous emotion, in which form it warms, like our household fires,
all the families and associations of men, and makes society possible. A certain
tendency to insanity has always attended the opening of the religious sense in
men, as if "blasted with excess of light." The trances of Socrates;
the "union" of Plotinus; the vision of Porphyry; the conversion of
Paul; the aurora of Behmen; the convulsions of George Fox and his Quakers; the
illumination of Swedenborg, are of this kind. What was in the case of these
remarkable persons a ravishment, has, in innumerable instances in common life,
been exhibited in less striking manner. Everywhere the history of religion
betrays a tendency to enthusiasm. The rapture of the Moravian and Quietist; the
opening of the internal sense of the Word, in the language of the New Jerusalem
Church; the revival of the Calvinistic churches; the experiences of the
Methodists, are varying forms of that shudder of awe and delight with which the
individual soul always mingles with the universal soul.
The nature of these revelations is
always the same; they are perceptions of the absolute law. They are solutions
of the soul's own questions. They do not answer the questions which the
understanding asks. The soul answers never by words, but by the thing itself
that is inquired after.
Revelation is the disclosure of the
soul. The popular notion of a revelation, is, that it is a telling of fortunes.
In past oracles of the soul the understanding seeks to find answers to sensual
questions, and undertakes to tell from God how long men shall exist, what their
hands shall do and who shall be their company, adding even names and dates and
places. But we must pick no locks. We must check this low curiosity. An answer
in work is delusive; it is really no answer to the questions you ask. Do not
require a description of the countries towards which you sail. The description
does not describe them to you, and to - morrow you arrive there and know them
by inhabiting them. Man ask of the immortality of the soul, and the employments
of heaven, and the state of the sinner, and so forth. They even dream that
Jesus has left replies to precisely these interrogatories. Never a moment did
that sublime spirit speak in their patois. To truth, justice, love, the
attributes of the soul, the idea of immutableness in essentially associated. Jesus, living in these moral sentiments,
heedless of sensual fortunes, heeding only the manifestations of these, never
made the separation of the idea of duration from the essence of these
attributes, never uttered a syllable concerning the duration of the soul. It
was left to his disciples to sever duration from the moral elements, and to
teach the immortality of the soul as a doctrine, and maintain it by evidences.
The moment the doctrine of the immortality is separately taught, man is already
fallen. In the flowing of love, in the adoration of humility, there is no
question of continuance. No inspired man ever asks this question or condescends
to these evidences. For the soul is true to itself, and the man in whom it is
shed abroad cannot wander from the present, which is infinite, to a future
which would be finite.
These questions which we lust to ask
about the future are a confession of sin. God has no answer for them. No answer
in words can reply to a question of things. It is not in an arbitrary
"decree of God," but in the nature of man, that a veil shuts down on
the facts of to - morrow: for the soul will not have us read any other cipher
but that of cause and effect. By this veil which curtains events it instructs
the children of men to live in to - day. The only mode of obtaining an answer
to these questions of the senses is to forego all low curiosity, and, accepting
the tide of being which floats us into the secret of nature, work and live,
work and live, and all unawares the advancing soul has built and forged for
itself a new condition, and the question and the answer are one.
Thus is the soul the perceiver and
revealer of truth. By the same fire, serene, impersonal, perfect, which burns
until it shall dissolve all things into the waves and surges of an ocean of
light, - we see and know each other, and what spirit each is of. Who can tell
the grounds of his knowledge of the character of the several individuals in his
circle of friends? No man. Yet their acts and words do not disappoint him. In
that man, though he knew no ill of him, he put no trust. In that other, though
they had seldom met, authentic signs had yet passed, to signify that he might
be trusted as one who had an interest in his own character. We know each other
very well, - which of us has been just to himself and whether that which we
teach or behold is only an aspiration
or is our honest effort also.
We are all discerners of spirits.
That diagnosis lies aloft in our life or unconscious power, not in the
understanding. The whole intercourse of society, its trade, its religion, its
friendship, its quarrels, - is one wide judicial investigation of character. In
full court, or in small committee, or confronted face to face, accuser and
accused, men offer themselves to be judged. Against their will they exhibit
those decisive trifles by which character is read. But who judges? and what?
Not our understanding. We do not read them by learning or craft. No; the wisdom
of the wise man consists herein, that he does not judge them; he lets them
judge themselves and merely reads and records their own verdict.
By virtue of this inevitable nature,
private will is overpowered, and, maugre our efforts or our imperfections, your
genius will speak from you, and mine from me. That which we are, we shall
teach, not voluntarily, but involuntarily. Thoughts come into our minds through
avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through
avenues which we never voluntarily opened. Character teaches over our head. The
infallible index of true progress is found in the tone the man takes. Neither
his age, nor his breeding, nor company, nor books, nor actions, nor talents,
nor all together can hinder him from being deferential to a higher spirit than
his own. If he have not found his home in God, his manners, his forms of
speech, the turn of his sentences, the build, shall I say, of all his opinions
will involuntarily confess it, let him brave it out how he will. If he have
found his centre, the Deity will shine through him, through all the disguises
of ignorance, of ungenial temperament, of unfavorable circumstance. The tone of
seeking is one, and the tone of having is another.
The great distinction between
teachers sacred or literary; between poets like Herbert, and poets like Pope;
between philosophers like Spinoza, Kant and Coleridge, - and philosophers like
Locke, Paley, Mackintosh and Stewart; between men of the world who are reckoned
accomplished talkers, and here and there a fervent mystic, prophesying half -
insane under the infinitude of his thought, is that one class speak from
within, or from experience, as parties and possessors of the fact; and the
other class from without, as spectators merely, or perhaps as acquainted with
the fact on the evidence of third persons. It is of no use to preach to me from
without. I can do that too easily myself. Jesus speaks always from within, and
in a degree that transcends all others. In that is the miracle. That includes
the miracle. My soul believes beforehand that it ought so to be. All men stand
continually in the expectation of the appearance of such a teacher. But if a
man do not speak from within the veil, where the word is one with that it tells
of, let him lowly confess it.
The same Omniscience flows into the
intellect and makes what we call genius. Much of the wisdom of the world is not
wisdom, and the most illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to literary
fame, and are not writers. Among the multitude of scholars and authors we feel
no hallowing presence; we are sensible of a knack and skill rather than of
inspiration; they have a light and know not whence it comes and call it their
own: their talent is some exaggerated faculty, some overgrown member, so that
their strength is a disease. In these instances the intellectual gifts do not
make the impression of virtue, but almost of vice; and we feel that a man's
talents stand in the way of his advancement in truth. But genius is religious.
It is a larger imbibing of the common heart. It is not anomalous, but more like
and not less like other men. There is in all great poets a wisdom of humanity
which is superior to any talents they exercise. The author, the wit, the
partisan, the fine gentleman, does not take place of the man. Humanity shines
in Homer, in Chaucer, in Spenser, in Shakespeare, in Milton. They are content
with truth. They use the positive degree. They seem frigid and phlegmatic to
those who have been spiced with the frantic passion and violent coloring of
inferior but popular writers. For, they are poets by the free course which they
allow to the informing soul, through their eyes beholdeth again and lesses the
things which it hath made. The soul is superior to its knowledge, wiser than
any of its works. The great poet makes us feel our own wealth, and then we think
less of his compositions. His greatest communication to our mind is to teach us
to despise all he has done. Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of
intelligent activity as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then
feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we
extol as a sort of self - existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature
than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which
uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day
for ever. Why then should I make account of Hamlet and Lear, as if we had not
the soul from which they fell as syllables from the tongue?
This energy does not descend into
individual life on any other condition than entire possession. It comes to the
lowly and simple; it comes to whomsoever will put off what is foreign and
proud; it comes as insight; it comes as serenity and grandeur. When we see
those whom it inhabits, we are apprised of new degrees of greatness. From that
inspiration the man comes back with a changed tone. He does not talk with men
with an eye to their opinion. He tries them. It requires of us to be plain and
true. The vain traveller attempts to embellish his life by quoting my Lord and
the Prince and the Countess, who thus said or did to him. The ambitious vulgar
show you their spoons and brooches and rings, and preserve their cards and
compliments. The more cultivated, in their account of their own experience,
cull out the pleasing, poetic circumstance; the visit to Rome, the man of
genius they saw; the brilliant friend they know; still further on perhaps the
gorgeous landscape, the mountain lights, the mountain thoughts they enjoyed
yesterday,- and so seek to throw a romantic color over their life. But the soul
that ascendeth to worship the great God is plain and true; has no rose color;
no fine friends; no chivalry; no adventures; does not want admiration; dwells
in the hour that now is, in the earnest experience of the common day, - by
reason of the present moment and the mere trifle having become porous to
thought and bibulous of the sea of light.
Converse with a mind that is grandly
simple, and literature looks like word - catching. The simplest utterances are
worthiest to be written, yet are they so cheap and so things of course, that in
the infinite riches of the soul it is like gathering a few pebbles off the
ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole
atmosphere are ours. The mere author in such society is like a pickpocket among
gentlemen, who has come in to steal a gold button or a pin. Nothing can pass
there, or make you one of the circle, but the casting aside your trappings and
dealing man to man in naked truth, plain confession and omniscient affirmation.
Souls such as these treat you as
gods would, walk as gods in the earth, accepting without any admiration your
wit, your bounty, your virtue even, say rather your act of duty, for your
virtue they own as their proper blood, royal as themselves, and overroyal, and
the father of the gods. But what rebuke their plain fraternal bearing casts on
the mutual flattery with which authors solace each other and wound themselves!
These flatter not. I do not wonder that these men go to see Cromwell and
Christina and Charles the II. and James I. and the Grand Turk. For they are, in
their own elevation, the fellows of kings, and must feel the servile tone of
conversation in the world. They must always be a godsend to princes, for they
confront them, a king to a king, without ducking or concession, and give a high
nature the refreshment and satisfaction of resistance, of plain humanity, of
even companionship and of new ideas. They leave them wiser and superior men.
Souls like these make us feel that sincerity is more excellent than flattery.
Deal so plainly with man and woman as to constrain the utmost sincerity and
destroy all hope of trifling with you. It is the highest compliment you can
pay. Their "highest praising," said Milton, "is not flattery, and
their plainest advice is a kind of praising."
Ineffable is the union of man and
God in every act of the soul. The simplest person who in his integrity worships
God, becomes God; yet for ever and ever the influx of this better and
universal self is new and unsearchable. Ever it inspires awe and astonishment.
How dear, how soothing to man, arises the idea of God, peopling the lonely
place, effacing the scars of our mistakes and disappointments! When we have
broken our god of tradition and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God
fire the heart with his presence. It is the doubling of the heart itself, nay,
the infinite enlargement of the heart with a power of growth to a new infinity
on every side. It inspires in man an infallible trust. He has not the
conviction, but the sight, that the best is the true, and may in that thought
easily dismiss all particular uncertainties and fears, and adjourn to the sure
revelation of time the solution of his private riddles. He is sure that his
welfare is dear to the heart of being. In the presence of law to his mind he is
overflowed with a reliance so universal that it sweeps away all cherished hopes
and the most stable projects of mortal condition in its flood. He believes that
he cannot escape from his good. The things that are really for thee gravitate
to thee. You are running to seek your friend. Let your feet run, but your mind
need not. If you do not find him, will you not acquiesce that it is best you
should not find him? for there is a power, which as it is in you, is in him also,
and could therefore very well bring you together, if it were for the best. You
are preparing with eagerness to go and render a service to which your talent
and your taste invite you, the love of men and the hope of fame. Has it not
occurred to you that you have no right to go, unless you are equally willing to
be prevented from going? O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is
spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine
ear. Every proverb, every book, every by - word that belongs to thee for aid or
comfort, shall surely come home through open or winding passages. Every friend
whom not thy fantastic will but the great and tender heart in thee craveth,
shall lock thee in his embrace. And this because the heart in thee is the heart
of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in
nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all
men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.
Let men then learn the revelation of
all nature and all thought to his heart; this, namely; that the Highest dwells
with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind, if the sentiment of
duty is there. But if he would know what the great God speaketh, he must
"go into his closet and shut the door," as Jesus said. God will not
make himself manifest to cowards. He must greatly listen to himself,
withdrawing himself from all the accents of other men's devotion. Their prayers
even are hurtful to him, until he have made his own. Our religion vulgary
stands on numbers of believers. Whenever the appeal is made, - no matter how
indirectly, - to numbers, proclamation is then
and there made that religion is not. He that finds God a sweet
enveloping thought to him never counts his company. When I sit in that
presence, who shall dare to come in? When I rest in perfect humility, when I
burn with pure love, what can Calvin or Swedenborg say?
It makes no difference whether the
appeal is to numbers or to one. The faith that stands on authority is not
faith. The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the
withdrawal of the soul. The position men have given to Jesus, now for many
centuries of history, is a position of authority. It characterizes themselves.
It cannot alter the eternal facts. Great is the soul, and plain. It is no
flatterer, it is no follower; it never appeals from itself. It always believes
in itself. Before the immense possibilities of man all mere experience, all
past biography, however spotless and sainted, shrinks away. Before that holy
heaven which our presentiments foreshow us, we cannot easily praise any form of
life we have seen or read of. We not only affirm that we have few great men,
but, absolutely speaking, that we have none; that we have no history, no record
of any character or mode of living that entirely contents us. The saints and
demigods whom history worships we are constrained to accept with a grain of
allowance. Though in our lonely hours we draw a new strength out of their
memory, yet, pressed on our attention, as they are by the thoughtless and
customary, they fatigue and invade. The soul gives itself, alone, original and
pure, to the Lonely, Original and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly
inhabits, leads and speaks through it. Then is it glad, young and nimble. It is
not wise, but it sees through all things. It is not called religious, but it is
innocent. It calls the light its own, and feels that the grass grows and the
stone falls by a law inferior to, and dependent on, its nature. Behold, it
saith, I am born into the great, the universal mind. I, the imperfect, adore my
own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the great soul, and thereby I do
overlooked the sun and the stars and feel them to be but the fair accidents and
effects which change and pass. More and more the surges of everlasting nature
enter into me, and I become public and human in my regards and actions. So come
I to live in thoughts and act with energies which are immortal. Thus revering
the soul, and learning, as the ancients said, that "its beauty is
immense," man will come to see that the world is the perennial miracle
which the soul worketh, and be less astonished at particular wonders; he will
learn that there is no profane history; that all history is sacred; that the
universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time. He will weave no
longer a spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will live with a divine
unity. He will cease from what is base and frivolous in his own life and be content
with all places and any service he can render. He will calmly front the morrow
in the negligency of that trust which carries God with it and so hath already
the whole future in the bottom of the heart.