t was Milton's. They may be right, or we may be; but we
must not think we are reading either one or the other by putting our
meaning into their words.

23. I go on.

"But, swollen with wind, and the rank mist they draw."

This is to meet the vulgar answer that "if the poor are not looked
after in their bodies, they are in their souls; they have spiritual
food."

And Milton says, "They have no such thing as spiritual food; they are
only swollen with wind." At first you may think that is a coarse type,
and an obscure one. But again, it is a quite literally accurate one.
Take up your Latin and Greek dictionaries, and find out the meaning of
"Spirit." It is only a contraction of the Latin word "breath," and an
indistinct translation of the Greek word for "wind." The same word is
used in writing, "The wind bloweth where it listeth"; and in writing,
"So is every one that is born of the Spirit"; born of the _breath_,
that is; for it means the breath of God, in soul and body. We have the
true sense of it in our words "inspiration" and "expire." Now, there
are two kinds of breath with which the flock may be filled; God's
breath, and man's. The breath of God is health, and life, and peace to
them, as the air of heaven is to the flocks on the hills; but man's
breath--the word which _he_ calls spiritual,--is disease and contagion
to them, as the fog of the fen. They rot inwardly with it; they are
puffed up by it, as a dead body by the vapors of its own decomposition.
This is literally true of all false religious teaching; the first and
last, and fatalest sign of it is that "puffing up." Your converted
children, who teach their parents; your converted convicts, who teach
honest men; your converted dunces, who, having lived in cretinous
stupefaction half their lives, suddenly awakening to the fact of there
being a God, fancy themselves therefore His peculiar people and
messengers; your sectarians of every species, small and great, Catholic
or Protestant, of high church or low, in so far as they think
themselves exclusively in the right and others wrong; and preeminently,
in every sect, those who hold that men can be saved by thinking rightly
instead of doing rightly, by word instead of act, and wish instead of
work:--these are the true fog children--clouds, these, without water;
bodies, these, of putrescent vapor and skin, without blood or flesh:
blown bag-pipes for the fiends to pipe with--corrupt, and
corrupting