nderstand it, of the
nature of worship? There are many, in all countries, who, in this
confused time, have no other method of worship. He who, in any way,
shows us better than we knew before that a lily of the fields is
beautiful, does he not show it us as an effluence of the Fountain of all
Beauty; as the _handwriting_, made visible there, of the great Maker of
the Universe? He has sung for us, made us sing with him, a little verse
of a sacred Psalm. Essentially so. How much more he who sings, who
says, or in any way brings home to our heart the noble doings, feelings,
darings and endurances of a brother man! He has verily touched our
hearts as with a live coal _from the altar_. Perhaps there is no worship
more authentic.

Literature, so far as it is Literature, is an "apocalypse of Nature," a
revealing of the "open secret." It may well enough be named, in Fichte's
style, a "continuous revelation" of the Godlike in the Terrestrial and
Common. The Godlike does ever, in very truth, endure there; is
brought out, now in this dialect, now in that, with various degrees
of clearness: all true gifted Singers and Speakers are, consciously or
unconsciously, doing so. The dark stormful indignation of a Byron, so
wayward and perverse, may have touches of it; nay the withered mockery
of a French sceptic,--his mockery of the False, a love and worship of
the True. How much more the sphere-harmony of a Shakspeare, of a Goethe;
the cathedral music of a Milton! They are something too, those humble
genuine lark-notes of a Burns,--skylark, starting from the humble
furrow, far overhead into the blue depths, and singing to us so
genuinely there! For all true singing is of the nature of worship; as
indeed all true _working_ may be said to be,--whereof such _singing_ is
but the record, and fit melodious representation, to us. Fragments of a
real "Church Liturgy" and "Body of Homilies," strangely disguised from
the common eye, are to be found weltering in that huge froth-ocean of
Printed Speech we loosely call Literature! Books are our Church too.

Or turning now to the Government of men. Witenagemote, old Parliament,
was a great thing. The affairs of the nation were there deliberated and
decided; what we were to _do_ as a nation. But does not, though the name
Parliament subsists, the parliamentary debate go on now, everywhere
and at all times, in a far more comprehensive way, _out_ of Parliament
altogether? Burke said there were Three Estate