e 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 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 subtile. 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 the attributes of God. Justice we see and know, Love,
Freedom, Power. These natures no man ever got above, but 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 circumscribes 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 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. 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