e 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, 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 I may not use sacred, 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 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 w