ill for
righteousness, and then his hoping imagination; and out of these, in the
knowledge of Jesus, he spoke.

The letters he has left behind him, written in the power of this
uplifting, have waked but poor ideas in poor minds; for words, if they
seem to mean anything, must always seem to mean something within the
scope of the mind hearing them. Words cannot convey the thought of a
thinker to a no-thinker; of a largely aspiring and self-discontented
soul, to a creature satisfied with his poverty, and counting his meagre
faculty the human standard. Neither will they readily reveal the mind of
one old in thought, to one who has but lately begun to think. The higher
the reader's notion of what St Paul intends--the higher the idea, that
is, which his words wake in him, the more likely is it to be the same
which moved the man who had seen Jesus, and was his own no more. If a
man err in his interpretation, it will hardly be by attributing to his
words an intent too high.

First then, what does Paul, the slave of Christ, intend by 'the
creature' or 'the creation'? If he means the _visible world_, he did not
surely, and without saying so, mean to exclude the noblest part of
it--the sentient! If he did, it is doubly strange that he should
immediately attribute not merely sense, but conscious sense, to that
part, the insentient, namely, which remained. If you say he does so but
by a figure of speech, I answer that a figure that meant less than it
said--and how much less would not this?--would be one altogether
unworthy of the Lord's messenger.

First, I repeat, to exclude the sentient from the term common to both in
the word _creation_ or _creature_--and then to attribute the
capabilities of the sentient to the insentient, as a mere figure to
express the hopes of men with regard to the perfecting of the insentient
for the comfort of men, were a violence as unfit in rhetoric as in its
own nature. Take another part of the same utterance: 'For we know that
the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now:'
is it not manifest that to interpret such words as referring to the mere
imperfections of the insensate material world, would be to make of the
phrase a worthless hyperbole? I am inclined to believe the apostle
regarded the whole visible creation as, in far differing degrees of
consciousness, a live outcome from the heart of the living one, who is
all and in all: such view, at the same time, I do not care