stic
Thinker, if such a one were possible, it must be a miracle too, this
huge illimitable whirlwind of Force, which envelops us here;
never-resting whirlwind, high as Immensity, old as Eternity. What is
it? God's creation, the religious people answer; it is the Almighty
God's! Atheistic science babbles poorly of it, with scientific
nomenclatures, experiments and what-not, as if it were a poor dead
thing, to be bottled up in Leyden jars and sold over counters: but the
natural sense of man, in all times, if he will honestly apply his
sense, proclaims it to be a living thing,--ah, an unspeakable, godlike
thing; towards which the best attitude for us, after never so much
science, is awe, devout prostration and humility of soul; worship if
not in words, then in silence.

But now I remark farther: What in such a time as ours it requires a
Prophet or Poet to teach us, namely, the stripping-off of those poor
undevout wrappages, nomenclatures and scientific hearsays,---this, the
ancient earnest soul, as yet unencumbered with these things, did for
itself. The world, which is now divine only to the gifted, was then
divine to whosoever would turn his eye upon it. He stood bare before
it face to face. 'All was Godlike or God:'--Jean Paul still finds it
so; the giant Jean Paul, who has power to escape out of hearsays: but
there then were no hearsays. Canopus shining-down over the desert,
with its blue diamond brightness (that wild blue spirit-like
brightness, far brighter than we ever witness here), would pierce into
the heart of the wild Ishmaelitish man, whom it was guiding through
the solitary waste there. To his wild heart, with all feelings in it,
with no _speech_ for any feeling, it may seem a little eye, that
Canopus, glancing-out on him from the great deep Eternity; revealing
the inner Splendour to him. Cannot we understand how these men
_worshipped_ Canopus; became what we call Sabeans, worshipping the
stars? Such is to me the secret of all forms of Paganism. Worship is
transcendent wonder; wonder for which there is now no limit or
measure; that is worship. To these primeval men, all things and
everything they saw exist beside them were an emblem of the Godlike,
of some God.

And look what perennial fibre of truth was in that. To us also,
through every star, through every blade of grass, is not a God made
visible, if we will open our minds and eyes? We do not worship in that
way now: but is it not reckoned still a merit,