hat is?--are questions always
asked, never fully answered. We would study and admire forever.

But above intellectual curiosity, there is the sentiment of virtue. Man
is born for the good, for the perfect, low as he now lies in evil and
weakness. "The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the
presence of certain divine laws.--These laws refuse to be adequately
stated.--They elude our persevering thought; yet we read them hourly in
each other's faces, in each other's actions, in our own remorse.--The
intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of
the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves.--As we are, so we
associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity,
the vile. Thus, of their own volition, souls proceed into heaven, into
hell."

These facts, Emerson says, have always suggested to man that the
world is the product not of manifold power, but of one will, of one
mind,--that one mind is everywhere active.--"All things proceed out of
the same spirit, and all things conspire with it." While a man seeks
good ends, nature helps him; when he seeks other ends, his being
shrinks, "he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute
badness is absolute death."--"When he says 'I ought;' when love warms
him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed; then
deep melodies wander through his soul from Supreme Wisdom."

"This sentiment lies at the foundation of society and successively
creates all forms of worship.--This thought dwelled always deepest
in the minds of men in the devout and contemplative East; not alone in
Palestine, where it reached its purest expression, but in Egypt,
in Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always owed to Oriental
genius its divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all sane men
found agreeable and true. And the unique impression of Jesus upon
mankind, whose name is not so much written as ploughed into the
history of this world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this
infusion."

But this truth cannot be received at second hand; it is an intuition.
What another announces, I must find true in myself, or I must reject
it. If the word of another is taken instead of this primary faith, the
church, the state, art, letters, life, all suffer degradation,--"the
doctrine of inspiration is lost; the base doctrine of the majority of
voices usurps the place of the doctrine of th