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world of mind itself, in virtue of which the very image and likeness of his own nature look forth upon us from the bosom of the universe, under a created form. This is entitled to our reverence always, not only as the shrine of something higher, but also for its own sake; though only for its own sake again, of course, as it is felt to be comprehended in that which is more general than itself separately considered, and so finally in the Universal Mind itself, forth from which as a parent fountain all other minds proceed. Man thus, in his single capacity, becomes an object worthy of veneration even with angels; because his personality, constituted by reason and will, sets him in real union with the very being of spirit under its universal form, and makes him to be something far more, in this view, than his own individual life as such. "There is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding." God did not simply make him from the dust of the ground, in the beginning, but breathed into him also a portion of his own life, and so constituted him a living soul.

As such an efflux from God, still bound through every point of its separate existence with the ocean of light and love from which it proceeds, the human spirit everywhere challenges our awful respect. We are bound to reverence it, in all men. Even an infant may claim, in such view, the inmost homage of our hearts; for it carries in its tiny life potentially the high and holy mystery of self-acting intelligence, in comparison with which the sun itself is a very small thing. It is related of Leonidas, the father of the celebrated Origen, that he would at times kiss reverentially the breast of his little son, while he lay asleep, as though he felt the presence of the spirit that dwelt there to be higher and greater than himself. There is something beautiful and sublime in that. It carries the true and perfect stamp of Christianity. So should we all reverence our children, and treat them from the beginning as temples of the Holy Ghost. No man can have any true reverence for God, who has not yet learned, or who has forgotten, to entertain reverence for his image as it lies hid in the person of a child. Thus reverencing others, we are led to exercise the same sentiment also towards ourselves. This is something world-wide apart from pride and self-glorification. Such a habit springs from the want of faith in the true nature of spirit, leading its subject to affect a private and separate independence, which is in full violation of all truth and reason. It is only when the man recognizes in himself the presence of a life broader than his own, and finds his consciousness complete as a drop only in the sea of intelligence with which it

is surrounded, that he is at once delivered from selfishness and inspired at the same time with the most profound self-respect.

This of itself implies, however, that our reverence for the single reason and will, whether in ourselves or in other men, is conditioned necessarily by a corresponding regard to reason and will in their more general form. As in the case of Nature, so too in the world of Mind, the individual existence is comprehended always in the bosom of the whole to which it belongs. God reveals himself, in the form of self-acting spirit, not by inspiring truth and law into every man separately taken; that would be as monstrous a supposition as to imagine all natural objects made separately and put together like an orrery or watch; but by a single inspiration rather, or breath of the Almighty, which is at once as broad and full as the compass of our whole Humanity. Our acknowledgement of his authority then in this form, can never be genuine and full, save as it is mediated by a due respect to the living organism of mind, through which alone it is brought to challenge our regard. What we are required to reverence here, as before in the constitution of the outward world, is a divine revelation, an actual self-manifestation of God's glory or name; which in this case meets us, however, in the form of created intelligence and will, and not as before in the form simply of blind nature. This system of created intelligence and will, the life of man in its general or collective character, is itself the revelation we are bound to acknowledge and respect. And do we ask now, in what way this homage is exacted at our hands? The answer is plain. Through the ethical constitution of society (itself God's work,) as it starts in the Family, rises into the State, and completes itself at last in the glorious idea of the Church. Rightly considered, nothing can be more absurd than for men to pretend any true respect for God's will, while they show no respect for these institutions by which his will is carried over into the actual order of the world. The worst of all heresies indeed, as false to philosophy as it is to religion, is comprehended in the imagination, that reason and will are the private property simply of those to whom they belong, by means of which they are called to transact the great work of truth and righteousness directly and immediately with God himself, in an abstract and separate way. Such private judgment and private will may indeed pretend a more than usual regard for the authority of God, as not enduring the intervention of any other authority less absolute than his own; but this is only to substitute in truth an empty thought for a divine reality. God's truth and God's will come not to men, not even

through the Bible itself, in any such abstract and naked style;' and so to be the object at all of reverence or faith, they must be apprehended as a real revelation, under the form of life and spirit in the actual structure of the human world. No child can reverence God a whit farther than it is imbued with reverence for its parents. To despise authority, to speak evil of dignities, to be given to revolution and change, is the mark universally of an irreligious and profane mind. Radicalism and Red Republicanism, however loudly they may prate of religion, reason and right, are as irreverent towards God as they show themselves always in the end selfish and cruel also towards men. In the Church too, the same spirit is ever distinguished by the same bad character. It is the very mother of schisms and sects, ill favored, hard and harsh, from whose presence every sweet charity of the true christian life shrinks affrighted away. Reverence for the Church is the necessary condition, all the world over, of reverence for God and reverence for Christ.

The revelation of God however, under the form now in view, is not something at once finished and complete from the beginning. On the contrary it is accomplished in the way of history. In this respect, the world of mind differs from the world of mere nature. This last has no history, in the true sense of the term, except as we may choose to conceive of a vast cosmogony going before its present state, and making room for it in the way affirm

'Inspiration itself forms no exception to this rule. Plainly the supernatural vision of the prophets is conditioned always by the character of their natural life, which holds of course in organic connection with the reigning religious life of their age. To conceive of the psalms of David or the oracles of Isaiah flowing from the lips of a child, would be an offence against true faith, the same in kind, though not in degree, with the imagination of their having proceeded from Balaam's ass. So the inspiration of David or Isaiah cannot be rationally imagined competent, in any way, to reveal what comes to light under wholly new circumstances, in the mind of Paul. The inspiration of Paul again is not the inspiration of Peter or James or John; and could not be so without magic. Any theory of inspiration which implies the contrary is false, and dishonorable to religion. Inspired prophets, (in this respect like uninspired poets, only in far higher view,) movel supernaturally by the Holy Ghost, are notwithstanding, and indeed for this very reason, the birth and product of their own time, the central organs of their generation, in which the inmost meaning of its life comes to apprehension and utterance. Their oracles are no abstractions, Delphic riddles, wizard vaticinations. They are not of any private interpretation, (2 Peter i: 20,) but belong to the true universal life of the world. They come medially through the organization of the religious life, as an existing whole at the time, and not by any means as abrupt meteors shot from the clouds.

ed by geologists. Humanity, on the other hand, is plainly a process, by which one generation is required continually to carry forward the sense of another. History becomes thus, in a deep sense, nothing less than a divine anthropogony, by which the universal life of man, in the form of reason and will is moving forward always to its grand completion. It becomes plain at once, in this way, what sort of homage and respect it is entitled to claim at our hands. Shall we own God's presence in Nature, and take it by faith for the sure guaranty of order, reason and law, even in the whirlwind and earthquake; and shall we then turn round, and say of History, the revelation of Spirit, in which that other revelation finds its whole sense and end: It is chaos without form and void, or a sea of chance whose waves roar eternally the same hollow sound? Shall there be a divine teleology in the universe of matter, and neither end nor plan in the universe of mind? Must we see God in the stars, must we hear him in the storm and in the breeze, must we converse with him through the flowers of the field, and yet have no power to perceive his stately goings in the far more awful sanctuary of the human spirit, carried forward by successive generations towards its proper consummation? There is blasphemy in the very thought. History is no chaos. Earth has not been thus forsaken of Heaven, in the highest sphere of her life. We may find much here to bewilder and confound our thoughts, deep places of providence that we have no power to fathom or comprehend, Gordian knots that all our ingenuity and wisdom are employed in vain to solve; but still notwithstanding all this, we are bound to believe that history, as a whole, is divinely rational, and that it embodies in itself under such view the power of a moral authority, which reason and piety alike require all men to respect. It is not possible to have any sense of the organic constitution of the world, by which the general reason and will become the medium of divine revelation for individual men, without being made to feel to the same extent the intimate and necessary connection of this general life with itself in the flow of time; for every generation grows forth plainly from that which goes before, and must be regarded as the product and result accordingly of all previous history. We cannot reverence the present truly, in any of its institutions, except as we reverence also the past. The individualism, which affects to place private judgment and private will over all authority of a general kind, is characterised always by a corresponding contempt for the world which has come to be in its rear. Radicalism and Sectarianism are by their very constitution unhistorical. They will have it that reason and law start

with themselves, as a direct gift from the Almighty; and to make room for this proud pretension, they turn the whole past life of the world profanely into a moral nullity, or it may be into something much worse. Not to have faith in history however, and not to reverence it as a true revelation of God's mind and will is simply to be without true faith and reverence towards God himself. An undevout astronomer, it has been said, is mad, can he be less so, who is not led to bow in reverence before the Infinite Mind at work in History, but sees in it rather the very opposite only of intelligence and order?

Cultivate, finally, the life and power of true FREEDOM. Man is formed to be free. It lies in the very conception of intelligence, that it should be a law to itself, and not obey blindly and mechanically a power foreign to its own nature. Self-c nsciousness, the image of God in man, completes itself in self-activity. Truth becomes fully actual in the world, only where it passes into the form of freedom; which may be said for this reason, to constitute the crown and glory of the whole creation. No wonder, that such an interest should be held universally in high account, where any sense is had, though it be never so darkly, of the original and proper dignity of our nature. All slavery is an ignominious wrong, which the human spirit can never patiently and quietly endure, without degradation. It is the duty of all men, as well as their divine prerogative, to be free.

Few however have any right conception of freedom. It is taken, for the most part, to consist in the mere outward liberty, by which men are allowed to use their lives according to their own will, without restraint or coercion from abroad; or what is but little better, in that simply civil or political liberty, which stands in the assertion of what are conceived to be the original and inalienable rights of men, under some abstract scheme of law. None but actual madmen are so foolish indeed as to disown all limitation, in the case of their private mind and will. Society could not exist, even under the rudest form, without law; and law implies objective restraint. But the conception now noticed severs the will from the law; makes them to stand altogether out of each other; and so places the value of liberty still, at last, in the supposed independence wholly of the first separately considered. According to the most gross form of this theory, men relinquish in society certain privileges and rights, which belong to them as individuals, in order the more effectually to secure those that are still reserved. By a more refined view, the law demanding such surrendry is regarded as a divine constitution, which men are bound to accept as the necessary condition

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