uperlative value on whatever will gratify your selfish lust of
enjoyment, and insure you from hell-fire at a thousand times the true
value of the dirty property. If you have the impudence to persevere in
mis-naming this "love," supply any one instance in which you use the
word in this sense? If your son did not spit in your face, because he
believed that you would disinherit him if he did, and this were his main
moral obligation, would you allow that your son loved you--and with all
his heart, and mind, and strength, and soul?--Shame! Shame!

Now the power of loving God, of willing good as good, (not of desiring
the agreeable, and of preferring a larger though distant delight to an
infinitely smaller immediate qualification, which is mere selfish
prudence,) Bunyan considers supernatural, and seeks its source in the
free grace of the Creator through Christ the Redeemer:--this the Kantean
also avers to be supersensual indeed, but not supernatural, but in the
original and essence of human nature, and forming its grand and awful
characteristic. Hence he calls it 'die Menschheit'--the principle of
humanity;--but yet no less than Calvin or the Tinker declares it a
principle most mysterious, the undoubted object of religious awe, a
perpetual witness of that God, whose image ([Greek: eikon]) it is; a
principle utterly incomprehensible by the discursive intellect;--and
moreover teaches us, that the surest plan for stifling and paralyzing
this divine birth in the soul (a phrase of Plato's as well as of the
Tinker's) is by attempting to evoke it by, or to substitute for it, the
hopes and fears, the motives and calculations, of prudence; which is an
excellent and in truth indispensable servant, but considered as master
and primate of the moral diocese precludes the possibility of virtue (in
Bunyan's phrase, holiness of spirit) by introducing legality; which is
no cant phrase of Methodism, but of authenticated standing in the ethics
of the profoundest philosophers--even those who rejected Christianity,
as a miraculous event, and revelation itself as far as anything
supernatural is implied in it. I must not mention Plato, I suppose,--he
was a mystic; nor Zeno,--he and his were visionaries:--but Aristotle,
the cold and dry Aristotle, has in a very remarkable passage in his
lesser tract of Ethics asserted the same thing; and called it "a divine
principle, lying deeper than those things which can be explained or
enunciated discursively."