such purer spirits, whether imagined or real. I am compelled to use
these painful latitudes of expression, because no analysis has hitherto
sufficed to distinguish accurately, in historical narrative, the
difference between impressions resulting from the imagination of the
worshipper, and those made, if any, by the actually local and temporary
presence of another spirit. For instance, take the vision, which of all
others has been since made most frequently the subject of physical
representation--the appearance to Ezekiel and St. John of the four
living creatures, which throughout Christendom have been used to
symbolise the Evangelists.[4] Supposing such interpretation just, one of
those figures was either the mere symbol to St. John of himself, or it
was the power which inspired him, manifesting itself in an independent
form. Which of these it was, or whether neither of these, but a vision
of other powers, or a dream, of which neither the prophet himself knew,
nor can any other person yet know, the interpretation,--I suppose no
modestly-minded and accurate thinker would now take upon himself to
decide. Nor is it therefore anywise necessary for you to decide on that,
or any other such question; but it is necessary that you should be bold
enough to look every opposing question steadily in its face; and modest
enough, having done so, to know when it is too hard for you. But above
all things, see that you be modest in your thoughts, for of this one
thing we may be absolutely sure, that all our thoughts are but degrees
of darkness. And in these days you have to guard against the fatallest
darkness of the two opposite Prides;--the Pride of Faith, which imagines
that the nature of the Deity can be defined by its convictions; and the
Pride of Science, which imagines that the energy of Deity can be
explained by its analysis.

[Footnote 4: Only the Gospels, "IV Evangelia," according to St. Jerome.]

39. Of these, the first, the Pride of Faith, is now, as it has been
always, the most deadly, because the most complacent and
subtle;--because it invests every evil passion of our nature with the
aspect of an angel of light, and enables the self-love, which might
otherwise have been put to wholesome shame, and the cruel carelessness
of the ruin of our fellow-men, which might otherwise have been warmed
into human love, or at least checked by human intelligence, to congeal
themselves into the mortal intellectual disease of imagining