such passages
in the Scripture as these: "God is a Spirit"; "God is love; whoso dwelleth
in love dwelleth in God, and God in him"; "In him we live, and move, and
have our being"; "He is above all, and through all, and in us all." But
beside these texts, which strike the key-note of the music which was to
come after, there are divine strains of spiritualism, of God all in all,
which come through a long chain of teachers of the Church, sounding on in
the Confessions of Augustine, the prayers of Thomas Aquinas, Anselm,
Bonaventura, St. Bernard, through the Latin hymns of the Middle Ages, and
develop themselves at last in what is called romantic art and romantic
song. A Gothic cathedral like Antwerp or Strasburg,--what is it but a
striving upward of the soul to lose itself in God? A symphony of
Beethoven,--what is it but the same unbounded longing and striving toward
the Infinite and Eternal? The poetry of Wordsworth, of Goethe, Schiller,
Dante, Byron, Victor Hugo, Manzoni, all partake of the same element. It is
opposed to classic art and classic poetry in this, that instead of limits,
it seeks the unlimited; that is, it believes in spirit, which alone is the
unlimited; the _in_finite, that which _is,_ not that which appears; the
_essence_ of things, not their _ex_istence or outwardness.

Thus Christianity meets and accepts the truth of Brahmanism. But how does
it fulfil Brahmanism? The deficiencies of Brahmanism are these,--that
holding to eternity, it omits time, and so loses history. It therefore is
incapable of progress, for progress takes place in time. Believing in
spirit, or infinite unlimited substance, it loses person, or definite
substance, whether infinite or finite. The Christian God is the infinite,
definite substance, self-limited or defined by his essential nature. He is
good and not bad, righteous and not the opposite, perfect love, not
perfect self-love. Christianity, therefore, gives us God as a person, and
man also as a person, and so makes it possible to consider the universe as
order, kosmos, method, beauty, and providence. For, unless we can conceive
the Infinite Substance as definite, and not undefined; that is, as a
person with positive characters; there is no difference between good and
bad, right and wrong, to-day and to-morrow, this and that, but all is one
immense chaos of indefinite spirit. The moment that creation begins, that
the spirit of the Lord moves on the face of the waters, and says, "Le