every flower, every remote star, each worm, and the sublimest spirit we
can think of. We are impelled to embrace them, and all nature, in the
arms of our affection, as things most loved. You understand me, Raphael.
A man who has advanced so far as to read off all the beauty, greatness,
and excellence in the great and small of nature, and to find the great
unity for this manifold variety, has advanced much nearer to the
Divinity. The great creation flows into his personality. If each man
loved all men, each individual would possess the whole world.

I fear that the philosophy of our time contradicts this doctrine. Many
of our thinking brains have undertaken to drive out by mockery this
heavenly instinct from the human soul, to efface the effigy of Deity in
the soul, and to dissolve this energy, this noble enthusiasm, in the
cold, killing breath of a pusillanimous indifference. Under the slavish
influence of their own unworthiness they have entered into terms with
self-interest, the dangerous foe of benevolence; they have done this to
explain a phenomenon which was too godlike for their narrow hearts. They
have spun their comfortless doctrine out of a miserable egotism, and they
have made their own limits the measure of the Creator; degenerate slaves
decrying freedom amidst the rattle of their own chains. Swift, who
exaggerated the follies of men till he covered the whole race with
infamy, and wrote at length his own name on the gallows which he had
erected for it--even Swift could not inflict such deadly wounds on human
nature as these dangerous thinkers, who, laying great claim to
penetration, adorn their system with all the specious appearance of art,
and strengthen it with all the arguments of self-interest.

Why should the whole species suffer for the shortcomings of a few
members?

I admit freely that I believe in the existence of a disinterested love.
I am lost if I do not exist; I give up the Deity, immortality, and
virtue. I have no remaining proof of these hopes if I cease to believe
in love. A spirit that loves itself alone is an atom giving out a spark
in the immeasurable waste of space.

SACRIFICE.

But love has produced effects that seem to contradict its nature.

It can be conceived that I increase my own happiness by a sacrifice which
I offer for the happiness of others; but suppose this sacrifice is my
life? History has examples of this kind of sacrifice, and I feel most
vividly that it would cost