is a rock, a learned man is a torch.
A lamb is innocence; a snake is subtle spite; flowers express to us
the delicate affections. Light and darkness are our familiar
expression for knowledge and ignorance; and heat for love. Visible
distance behind and before us, is respectively our image of memory
and hope.

Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of
the flux of all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles
that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence.
Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual
life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love,
Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul, he calls Reason: it is
not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its; we are its property and men.
And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its
eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. That
which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in
relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life
in itself. And man in all ages and countries, embodies it in his
language, as the FATHER.

It is easily seen that there is nothing lucky or capricious in these
analogies, but that they are constant, and pervade nature. These are
not the dreams of a few poets, here and there, but man is an
analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the
centre of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being
to him. And neither can man be understood without these objects,
nor these objects without man. All the facts in natural history taken
by themselves, have no value, but are barren, like a single sex. But
marry it to human history, and it is full of life. Whole Floras, all
Linnaeus' and Buffon's volumes, are dry catalogues of facts; but the
most trivial of these facts, the habit of a plant, the organs, or work,
or noise of an insect, applied to the illustration of a fact in
intellectual philosophy, or, in any way associated to human nature,
affects us in the most lively and agreeable manner. The seed of a
plant,--to what affecting analogies in the nature of man, is that little
fruit made use of, in all discourse, up to the voice of Paul, who calls
the human corpse a seed,--"It is sown a natural body; it is raised a
spiritual body." The motion of the earth round its axis, and round the
sun, makes the day, and the year. These are certai