o pass away
in a moment, and preached the cultivated life, the internal Church which
has no laws but beauty, rapture and labour. 'I know of no other
Christianity, and of no other gospel, than the liberty, both of body and
mind, to exercise the divine arts of imagination, the real and eternal
world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow, and in which
we shall live in our eternal or imaginative bodies when these vegetable
mortal bodies are no more. The Apostles knew of no other gospel. What are
all their spiritual gifts? What is the divine spirit? Is the Holy Ghost
any other than an intellectual fountain? What is the harvest of the gospel
and its labours? What is the talent which it is a curse to hide? What are
the treasures of heaven which we are to lay up for ourselves? Are they any
other than mental studies and performances? What are all the gifts of the
gospel, are they not all mental gifts? Is God a spirit who must be
worshipped in spirit and truth? Are not the gifts of the spirit everything
to man? O ye religious! discountenance every one among you who shall
pretend to despise art and science. I call upon you in the name of Jesus!
What is the life of man but art and science? Is it meat and drink? Is not
the body more than raiment? What is mortality but the things relating to
the body which dies? What is immortality but the things relating to the
spirit which lives immortally? What is the joy of Heaven but improvement
in the things of the spirit? What are the pains of Hell but ignorance,
idleness, bodily lust, and the devastation of the things of the spirit?
Answer this for yourselves, and expel from amongst you those who pretend
to despise the labours of art and science, which alone are the labours of
the gospel. Is not this plain and manifest to the thought? Can you think
at all, and not pronounce heartily that to labour in knowledge is to build
Jerusalem, and to despise knowledge is to despise Jerusalem and her
builders? And remember, he who despises and mocks a mental gift in
another, calling it pride, and selfishness, and sin, mocks Jesus, the
giver of every mental gift, which always appear to the ignorance-loving
hypocrites as sins. But that which is sin in the sight of cruel man is not
sin in the sight of our kind God. Let every Christian as much as in him
lies engage himself openly and publicly before all the world in some
mental pursuit for the building of Jerusalem.' I have given the whole of