But hear me once more, beloved
Hypatia. You refuse to give up the beautiful, the sublime, the heavenly?
What if Raphael Aben-Ezra, at least, had never found them till now?
Recollect what I said just now--what if our old Beautiful, and Sublime,
and Heavenly, had been the sheerest materialism, notions spun by our own
brains out of the impressions of pleasant things, and high things, and
low things, and awful things, which we had seen with our bodily eyes?
What if I had discovered that the spiritual is not the intellectual, but
the moral; and that the spiritual world is not, as we used to make it,
a world of our own intellectual abstractions, or of our own physical
emotions, religious or other, but a world of righteous or unrighteous
persons? What if I had discovered that one law of the spiritual
world, in which all others were contained, was righteousness; and that
disharmony with that law, which we called unspirituality, was not being
vulgar, or clumsy, or ill-taught, or unimaginative, or dull, but simply
being unrighteous? What if I had discovered that righteousness, and it
alone, was the beautiful righteousness, the sublime, the heavenly, the
Godlike--ay, God Himself? And what if it had dawned on me, as by a great
sunrise, what that righteousness was like? What if I had seen a human
being, a woman, too, a young weak girl, showing forth the glory and the
beauty of God? Showing me that the beautiful was to mingle unshrinking,
for duty's sake, with all that is most foul and loathsome; that
the sublime was to stoop to the most menial offices, the most
outwardly-degrading self-denials; that to be heavenly was to know that
the commonest relations, the most vulgar duties, of earth, were God's
commands, and only to be performed aright by the help of the same spirit
by which He rules the Universe; that righteousness was to love, to help,
to suffer for--if need be, to die for--those who, in themselves, seem
fitted to arouse no feelings except indignation and disgust? What if,
for the first time, I trust not for the last time, in my life, I saw
this vision; and at the sight of it my eyes were opened, and I knew it
for the likeness and the glory of God? What if I, a Platonist, like John
of Galilee, and Paul of Tarsus, yet, like them, a Hebrew of the Hebrews,
had confessed to myself--If the creature can love thus, how much more
its archetype? If weak woman can endure thus, how much more a Son of
God? If for the good of others, man ha