id preoccupation with trade or trifles.
Yet this persistency is holding the breath, and can no more be continued
in the mind than that in the body. Blundering and falsehood become
intolerable to the blunderers; they must return to thought, and that is
proper in a single direction, is approached by ten thousand avenues
toward the One. It is religious, not ignorance or dogma. We cannot think
without exploration of the divine order and recognition of its divinity,
without finding ourselves carried away by it to service and adoration.
All good is assured to us in Truth, and Truth follows us hard, drives us
into many a corner, and will have us at last. So Love surprises all, and
every virtue has a pass-key to every heart. Out of conflicting
experience, amid barbarism and dogmatism, from feathers that float and
stones that fall, we deduce the great law of moral gravitation, which
binds spirit to spirit, and all souls to the best. Recognition of that
law is worship. We rejoice in it without a taint of selfishness. We
adore it with entire satisfaction. Worship is neither belief nor hope,
but this certainty of repose upon Perfection. We explore over our heads
and under our feet a harmony that is only enriched by dissolving
discords. The drag of time, the cramp of organization, are only false
fifths. It is blasphemy to deny the dominant. We cannot escape our good;
we shall be purified. When our destiny is thus assured to us, we become
impatient of sleep and sin, and redouble exertion. We devote ourselves
to this certainty, and our allegiance is religion. There is nothing in
man omitted from the uplift of Ideality. That is a central and total
expansion of him, is an inmost entering into his inmost, is more himself
than he is himself. All reverence is directed toward this Creator
revealed in flesh, though not compassed. We adore him in others, while
yet we despise him in ourselves. Every other motion of man has an
external centre, is some hunger or passion, acts on us from its seat in
Nature or the body, and we can face it, deny and repudiate it with the
body; but this is the man flowing down from his source.

We must not be tempted to call things by too fine names, lest we should
disguise them. All that is great is plain and familiar. The Ideal
Tendency is simple love of life, felt first as desire and then as
satisfaction. The men who represent it are not seekers, but finders, who
go on to find more and more; for in the poet desire