eir energies, thoughts, feelings, to one faulty, fading,
changing object, vainly pouring that worship upon the creature, which
should be rendered only to the Creator.

'He that sits above
In His calm glory, will forgive the love
His creatures bear each other, even if blent
With a vain worship, for its close is dim
Ever with grief, which leads the wrung soul back to Him.'

The despair which this feeling sometimes occasions in the perverted soul
of one intent upon feeding it with the gross aliments of the debased
senses, is, without doubt, a very frequent cause of suicide. It may
lead, in the soul of the infidel or sensualist, to the idolatry of art.
It is a feeling, and requires direction. When enlightened by revelation
and purified by faith, it manifests itself in the sublime abnegation and
ardent love of the faithful follower of Jesus Christ.

This instinctive longing for the infinite, existing in the soul itself,
cannot be satisfied by any earthly longing, sensual gratification, or
external possession. Made 'to glorify God and enjoy Him forever,' man is
ruined and eternally miserable if he refuse to fulfil the destiny for
which he was created. His misery springs from the root of his greatness;
it is because there is an infinite in him, which, with all his cunning,
he cannot succeed in burying under the finite. This is a pregnant
subject; under this strange caption might be written the psychological
history of most human despair.

'The Fiend that man harries
Is love of the Best;
Yawns the pit of the Dragon
Lit by rays from the Blest.
The Lethe of nature
Can't trance him again,
Whose soul sees the Perfect
His eyes seek in vain.'

Thus is faith a necessity of the soul, 'the evidence of things not
seen.'

The idea of eternity is necessarily evolved from the negation contained
in the limited meaning of the word time. Eternity is the all embracing,
completely complete time; eternity, which is infinite not only _a parte
externa_, that is everpassing yet everlasting, without beginning and
without end; but also infinite _a parte interna_--so that in the
endlessly living, thoroughly luminous present, the whole past, also the
whole future, are equally actual, equally clear, and equally present to
us, as the very present itself. Can we indeed form any other conception
of a state of _perfect_ bliss? Is the idea of a state of entire
happiness at all compatible with the regret