ends,
but to numberless and endless benefit; that there is in it no
private will, no rebel leaf or limb, but the whole is oppressed by
one superincumbent tendency, obeys that redundancy or excess of life
which in conscious beings we call ecstasy."
Here is another of those almost lyrical passages which seem too long for
the music of rhythm and the resonance of rhyme.
"The great Pan of old, who was clothed in a leopard skin to signify
the beautiful variety of things, and the firmament, his coat of
stars, was but the representative of thee, O rich and various Man!
thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning
and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain the geometry
of the City of God; in thy heart the bower of love and the realms of
right and wrong."
His feeling about the soul, which has shown itself in many of the
extracts already given, is summed up in the following sentence:--
"We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but we know
that it is divine. I cannot tell if these wonderful qualities which
house to-day in this mental home shall ever reassemble in equal
activity in a similar frame, or whether they have before had a
natural history like that of this body you see before you; but this
one thing I know, that these qualities did not now begin to exist,
cannot be sick with my sickness, nor buried in any grave; but that
they circulate through the Universe: before the world was, they
were."
It is hard to see the distinction between the omnipresent Deity
recognized in our formal confessions of faith and the "pantheism" which
is the object of dread to many of the faithful. But there are many
expressions in this Address which must have sounded strangely and
vaguely to his Christian audience. "Are there not moments in the history
of heaven when the human race was not counted by individuals, but was
only the Influenced; was God in distribution, God rushing into manifold
benefit?" It might be feared that the practical philanthropists would
feel that they lost by his counsels.
"The reform whose fame now fills the land with Temperance,
Anti-Slavery, Non-Resistance, No Government, Equal Labor, fair and
generous as each appears, are poor bitter things when prosecuted for
themselves as an end."--"I say to you plainly there is no end to
which your practical faculty can aim so sa
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