Essays, First Series

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Men descend to meet. In their habitual and mean service
to the world, for which they forsake their native
nobleness, they resemble those Arabian sheiks who dwell
in mean houses and affect an external poverty, to escape
the rapacity of the Pacha, and reserve all their display
of wealth for their interior and guarded retirements.

As it is present in all persons, so it is in every
period of life. It is adult already in the infant man.
In my dealing with my child, my Latin and Greek, my
accomplishments and my money stead me nothing; but as
much soul as I have avails. If I am wilful, he sets his
will against mine, one for one, and leaves me, if I
please, the degradation of beating him by my superiority
of strength. But if I renounce my will and act for the
soul, setting that up as umpire between us two, out of
his young eyes looks the same soul; he reveres and loves
with me.

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know
truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what
they choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken
what they do not wish to hear, 'How do you know it is
truth, and not an error of your own?' We know truth when
we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that
we are awake. It was a grand sentence of Emanuel Swedenborg,
which would alone indicate the greatness of that man's
perception,--"It is no proof of a man's understanding to
be able to confirm whatever he pleases; but to be able to
discern that what is true is true, and that what is false
is false,--this is the mark and character of intelligence."
In the book I read, the good thought returns to me, as
every truth will, the image of the whole soul. To the bad
thought which I find in it, the same soul becomes a
discerning, separating sword, and lops it away. We are wiser
than we know. If we will not interfere with our thought, but
will act entirely, or see how the thing stands in God, we
know the particular thing, and every thing, and every man.
For the Maker of all things and all persons stands behind
us and casts his dread omniscience through us over things.

But beyond this recognition of its own in particular
passages of the individual's experience, it also reveals
truth. And here we should seek to reinforce ourselves by
its very presence, and to speak with a worthier, loftier
strain of that advent. For the soul's communication of
truth is the highest event in nature, since it then does
not give somewhat from itself, but it gives itself, or
passes into and becomes that man whom it enlightens; or,
in proportion to that truth he receives, it takes him to
itself.

We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its
manifestations of its own nature, by the term Revelation.
These are always attended by the emotion of the sublime.
For this communication is an influx of the Divine mind
into our mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet
before the flowing surges of the sea of life. Every distinct
apprehension of this central commandment agitates men with
awe and delight. A thrill passes through all men at the
reception of new truth, or at the performance of a great
action, which comes out of the heart of nature. In these
communications the power to see is not separated from the
will to do, but the insight proceeds from obedience, and
the obedience proceeds from a joyful perception. Every
moment when the individual feels himself invaded by it is
memorable. By the necessity of our constitution a certain
enthusiasm attends the individual's consciousness of that
divine presence. The character and duration of this
enthusiasm varies with the state of the individual, from an
ecstasy and trance and prophetic inspiration,--which is its
rarer appearance,--to the faintest glow of virtuous emotion,
in which form it warms, like our household fires, all the
families and associations of men, and makes society possible.
A certain tendency to insanity has always attended the opening
of the religious sense in men, as if they had been "blasted
with excess of light." The trances of Socrates, the "union"
of Plotinus, the vision of Porphyry, the conversion of Paul,
the aurora of Behmen, the convulsions of George Fox and his
Quakers, the illumination of Swedenborg, are of this kind.
What was in the case of these remarkable persons a ravishment,
has, in innumerable instances in common life, been exhibited
in less striking manner. Everywhere the history of religion
betrays a tendency to enthusiasm. The rapture of the Moravian
and Quietist; the opening of the internal sense of the Word,
in the language of the New Jerusalem Church; the revival of
the Calvinistic churches; the experiences of the Methodists,
are varying forms of that shudder of awe and delight with
which the individual soul always mingles with the universal
soul.

The nature of these revelations is the same; they are
perceptions of the absolute law. They are solutions
of the soul's own questions. They do not answer the
questions which the understanding asks. The soul
answers never by words, but by the thing itself that
is inquired after.

Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The popular
notion of a revelation is that it is a telling of
fortunes. In past oracles of the soul the understanding
seeks to find answers to sensual questions, and undertakes
to tell from God how long men shall exist, what their
hands shall do and who shall be their company, adding
names and dates and places. But we must pick no locks.
We must check this low curiosity. An answer in words is
delusive; it is really no answer to the questions you ask.
Do not require a description of the countries towards
which you sail. The description does not describe them to
you, and to-morrow you arrive there and know them by
inhabiting them. Men ask concerning the immortality of
the soul, the employments of heaven, the state of the
sinner, and so forth. They even dream that Jesus has left
replies to precisely these interrogatories. Never a moment
did that sublime spirit speak in their patois. To truth,
justice, love, the attributes of the soul, the idea of
immutableness is essentially associated. Jesus, living in
these moral sentiments, heedless of sensual fortunes, heeding
only the manifestations of these, never made the separation
of the idea of duration from the essence of these attributes,
nor uttered a syllable concerning the duration of the soul.
It was left to his disciples to sever duration from the
moral elements, and to teach the immortality of the soul
as a doctrine, and maintain it by evidences. The moment the
doctrine of the immortality is separately taught, man is
already fallen. In the flowing of love, in the adoration of
humility, there is no question of continuance. No inspired
man ever asks this question or condescends to these evidences.
For the soul is true to itself, and the man in whom it is
shed abroad cannot wander from the present, which is infinite,
to a future which would be finite.

These questions which we lust to ask about the future
are a confession of sin. God has no answer for them. No
answer in words can reply to a question of things. It is
not in an arbitrary "decree of God," but in the nature
of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow;
for the soul will not have us read any other cipher than
that of cause and effect. By this veil which curtains
events it instructs the children of men to live in to-day.
The only mode of obtaining an answer to these questions
of the senses is to forego all low curiosity, and,
accepting the tide of being which floats us into the
secret of nature, work and live, work and live, and all
unawares the advancing soul has built and forged for
itself a new condition, and the question and the answer
are one.

By the same fire, vital, consecrating, celestial, which
burns until it shall dissolve all things into the waves
and surges of an ocean of light, we see and know each
other, and what spirit each is of. Who can tell the
grounds of his knowledge of the character of the several
individuals in his circle of friends? No man. Yet their
acts and words do not disappoint him. In that man, though
he knew no ill of him, he put no trust. In that other,
though they had seldom met, authentic signs had yet passed,
to signify that he might be trusted as one who had an
interest in his own character. We know each other very well,
--which of us has been just to himself and whether that
which we teach or behold is only an aspiration or is our
honest effort also.

We are all discerners of spirits. That diagnosis lies
aloft in our life or unconscious power. The intercourse
of society, its trade, its religion, its friendships,
its quarrels, is one wide, judicial investigation of
character. In full court, or in small committee, or
confronted face to face, accuser and accused, men offer
themselves to be judged. Against their will they exhibit
those decisive trifles by which character is read. But
who judges? and what? Not our understanding. We do not
read them by learning or craft. No; the wisdom of the
wise man consists herein, that he does not judge them;
he lets them judge themselves and merely reads and
records their own verdict.

By virtue of this inevitable nature, private will
is overpowered, and, maugre our efforts or our
imperfections, your genius will speak from you,
and mine from me. That which we are, we shall teach,
not voluntarily but involuntarily. Thoughts come into
our minds by avenues which we never left open, and
thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we
never voluntarily opened. Character teaches over our
head. The infallible index of true progress is found
in the tone the man takes. Neither his age, nor his
breeding, nor company, nor books, nor actions, nor
talents, nor all together can hinder him from being
deferential to a higher spirit than his own. If he
have not found his home in God, his manners, his
forms of speech, the turn of his sentences, the build,
shall I say, of all his opinions will involuntarily
confess it, let him brave it out how he will. If he
have found his centre, the Deity will shine through
him, through all the disguises of ignorance, of
ungenial temperament, of unfavorable circumstance.
The tone of seeking is one, and the tone of having
is another.

The great distinction between teachers sacred or
literary,--between poets like Herbert, and poets
like Pope,--between philosophers like Spinoza, Kant
and Coleridge, and philosophers like Locke, Paley,
Mackintosh and Stewart,--between men of the world
who are reckoned accomplished talkers, and here and
there a fervent mystic, prophesying half insane under
the infinitude of his thought,--is that one class
speak from within, or from experience, as parties
and possessors of the fact; and the other class from
without, as spectators merely, or perhaps as acquainted
with the fact on the evidence of third persons. It is
of no use to preach to me from without. I can do that
too easily myself. Jesus speaks always from within,
and in a degree that transcends all others. In that is
the miracle. I believe beforehand that it ought so to
be. All men stand continually in the expectation of the
appearance of such a teacher. But if a man do not speak
from within the veil, where the word is one with that it
tells of, let him lowly confess it.

The same Omniscience flows into the intellect, and makes
what we call genius. Much of the wisdom of the world is
not wisdom, and the most illuminated class of men are no
doubt superior to literary fame, and are not writers.
Among the multitude of scholars and authors, we feel no
hallowing presence; we are sensible of a knack and skill
rather than of inspiration; they have a light and know
not whence it comes and call it their own; their talent
is some exaggerated faculty, some overgrown member, so
that their strength is a disease. In these instances the
intellectual gifts do not make the impression of virtue,
but almost of vice; and we feel that a man's talents stand
in the way of his advancement in truth. But genius is
religious. It is a larger imbibing of the common heart.
It is not anomalous, but more like and not less like other
men. There is in all great poets a wisdom of humanity
which is superior to any talents they exercise. The author,
the wit, the partisan, the fine gentleman, does not take
place of the man. Humanity shines in Homer, in Chaucer, in
Spenser, in Shakspeare, in Milton. They are content with
truth. They use the positive degree. They seem frigid and
phlegmatic to those who have been spiced with the frantic
passion and violent coloring of inferior but popular
writers. For they are poets by the free course which they
allow to the informing soul, which through their eyes
beholds again and blesses the things which it hath made.
The soul is superior to its knowledge, wiser than any of
its works. The great poet makes us feel our own wealth,
and then we think less of his compositions. His best
communication to our mind is to teach us to despise all
he has done. Shakspeare carries us to such a lofty strain
of intelligent activity as to suggest a wealth which
beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works
which he has created, and which in other hours we extol
as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold
of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on
the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet
and Lear could utter things as good from day to day for
ever. Why then should I make account of Hamlet and Lear,
as if we had not the soul from which they fell as syllables
from the tongue?

This energy does not descend into individual life on
any other condition than entire possession. It comes
to the lowly and simple; it comes to whomsoever will
put off what is foreign and proud; it comes as insight;
it comes as serenity and grandeur. When we see those
whom it inhabits, we are apprised of new degrees of
greatness. From that inspiration the man comes back
with a changed tone. He does not talk with men with
an eye to their opinion. He tries them. It requires
of us to be plain and true. The vain traveller attempts
to embellish his life by quoting my lord and the prince
and the countess, who thus said or did to him. The
ambitious vulgar show you their spoons and brooches and
rings, and preserve their cards and compliments. The
more cultivated, in their account of their own experience,
cull out the pleasing, poetic circumstance,--the visit to
Rome, the man of genius they saw, the brilliant friend
They know; still further on perhaps the gorgeous landscape,
the mountain lights, the mountain thoughts they enjoyed
yesterday,--and so seek to throw a romantic color over
their life. But the soul that ascends to worship the
great God is plain and true; has no rose-color, no fine
friends, no chivalry, no adventures; does not want
admiration; dwells in the hour that now is, in the
earnest experience of the common day,--by reason of the
present moment and the mere trifle having become porous
to thought and bibulous of the sea of light.

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and
literature looks like word-catching. The simplest
utterances are worthiest to be written, yet are
they so cheap and so things of course, that in the
infinite riches of the soul it is like gathering a
few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little
air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole
atmosphere are ours. Nothing can pass there, or make
you one of the circle, but the casting aside your
trappings, and dealing man to man in naked truth,
plain confession, and omniscient affirmation.

Souls such as these treat you as gods would, walk as
gods in the earth, accepting without any admiration
your wit, your bounty, your virtue even,--say rather
your act of duty, for your virtue they own as their
proper blood, royal as themselves, and over-royal,
and the father of the gods. But what rebuke their
plain fraternal bearing casts on the mutual flattery
with which authors solace each other and wound
themselves! These flatter not. I do not wonder that
these men go to see Cromwell and Christina and Charles
the Second and James the First and the Grand Turk. For
they are, in their own elevation, the fellows of kings,
and must feel the servile tone of conversation in the
world. They must always be a godsend to princes, for
they confront them, a king to a king, without ducking
or concession, and give a high nature the refreshment
and satisfaction of resistance, of plain humanity, of
even companionship and of new ideas. They leave them
wiser and superior men. Souls like these make us feel
that sincerity is more excellent than flattery. Deal so
plainly with man and woman as to constrain the utmost
sincerity and destroy all hope of trifling with you. It
is the highest compliment you can pay. Their "highest
praising," said Milton, "is not flattery, and their
plainest advice is a kind of praising."

Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act
of the soul. The simplest person who in his integrity
worships God, becomes God; yet for ever and ever the
influx of this better and universal self is new and
unsearchable. It inspires awe and astonishment. How
dear, how soothing to man, arises the idea of God,
peopling the lonely place, effacing the scars of our
mistakes and disappointments! When we have broken our
god of tradition and ceased from our god of rhetoric,
then may God fire the heart with his presence. It is
the doubling of the heart itself, nay, the infinite
enlargement of the heart with a power of growth to a
new infinity on every side. It inspires in man an
infallible trust. He has not the conviction, but the
sight, that the best is the true, and may in that
thought easily dismiss all particular uncertainties
and fears, and adjourn to the sure revelation of time
the solution of his private riddles. He is sure that
his welfare is dear to the heart of being. In the
presence of law to his mind he is overflowed with a
reliance so universal that it sweeps away all cherished
hopes and the most stable projects of mortal condition
in its flood. He believes that he cannot escape from
his good. The things that are really for thee gravitate
to thee. You are running to seek your friend. Let your
feet run, but your mind need not. If you do not find
him, will you not acquiesce that it is best you should
not find him? for there is a power, which, as it is in
you, is in him also, and could therefore very well bring
you together, if it were for the best. You are preparing
with eagerness to go and render a service to which your
talent and your taste invite you, the love of men and
the hope of fame. Has it not occurred to you that you
have no right to go, unless you are equally willing to
be prevented from going? O, believe, as thou livest, that
every sound that is spoken over the round world, which
thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear! Every
proverb, every book, every byword that belongs to thee
for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open
or winding passages. Every friend whom not thy fantastic
will but the great and tender heart in thee craveth,
shall lock thee in his embrace. And this because the
heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a
wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature,
but one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation
through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea,
and, truly seen, its tide is one.

Let man then learn the revelation of all nature and
all thought to his heart; this, namely; that the
Highest dwells with him; that the sources of nature
are in his own mind, if the sentiment of duty is
there. But if he would know what the great God
speaketh, he must 'go into his closet and shut the
door,' as Jesus said. God will not make himself
manifest to cowards. He must greatly listen to himself,
withdrawing himself from all the accents of other men's
devotion. Even their prayers are hurtful to him, until
he have made his own. Our religion vulgarly stands on
numbers of believers. Whenever the appeal is made,--no
matter how indirectly,--to numbers, proclamation is then
and there made that religion is not. He that finds God a
sweet enveloping thought to him never counts his company.
When I sit in that presence, who shall dare to come in?
When I rest in perfect humility, when I burn with pure
love, what can Calvin or Swedenborg say?

It makes no difference whether the appeal is to
numbers or to one. The faith that stands on authority
is not faith. The reliance on authority measures the
decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul. The
position men have given to Jesus, now for many centuries
of history, is a position of authority. It characterizes
themselves. It cannot alter the eternal facts. Great is
the soul, and plain. It is no flatterer, it is no
follower; it never appeals from itself. It believes in
itself. Before the immense possibilities of man all mere
experience, all past biography, however spotless and
sainted, shrinks away. Before that heaven which our
presentiments foreshow us, we cannot easily praise any
form of life we have seen or read of. We not only affirm
that we have few great men, but, absolutely speaking,
that we have none; that we have no history, no record of
any character or mode of living that entirely contents
us. The saints and demigods whom history worships we are
constrained to accept with a grain of allowance. Though
in our lonely hours we draw a new strength out of their
memory, yet, pressed on our attention, as they are by
the thoughtless and customary, they fatigue and invade.
The soul gives itself, alone, original and pure, to the
Lonely, Original and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly
inhabits, leads and speaks through it. Then is it glad,
young and nimble. It is not wise, but it sees through all
things. It is not called religious, but it is innocent.
It calls the light its own, and feels that the grass grows
and the stone falls by a law inferior to, and dependent
on, its nature. Behold, it saith, I am born into the great,
the universal mind. I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect.
I am somehow receptive of the great soul, and thereby I do
Overlook the sun and the stars and feel them to be the fair
accidents and effects which change and pass. More and more
the surges of everlasting nature enter into me, and I
become public and human in my regards and actions. So come
I to live in thoughts and act with energies which are
immortal. Thus revering the soul, and learning, as the
ancient said, that "its beauty is immense," man will come
to see that the world is the perennial miracle which the
soul worketh, and be less astonished at particular wonders;
he will learn that there is no profane history; that all
history is sacred; that the universe is represented in an
atom, in a moment of time. He will weave no longer a spotted
life of shreds and patches, but he will live with a divine
unity. He will cease from what is base and frivolous in his
life and be content with all places and with any service he
can render. He will calmly front the morrow in the negligency
of that trust which carries God with it and so hath already
the whole future in the bottom of the heart.

CIRCLES.

NATURE centres into balls,
And her proud ephemerals,
Fast to surface and outside,
Scan the profile of the sphere;
Knew they what that signified,
A new genesis were here.

X.
CIRCLES.

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it
forms is the second; and throughout nature this
primary figure is repeated without end. It is the
highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St.
Augustine described the nature of God as a circle
whose centre was everywhere and its circumference
nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious
sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already
deduced, in considering the circular or compensatory
character of every human action. Another analogy we
shall now trace, that every action admits of being
outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth
that around every circle another can be drawn; that
there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning;
that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon,
and under every deep a lower deep opens.

This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of
the Unattainable, the flying Perfect, around which the
hands of man can never meet, at once the inspirer and
the condemner of every success, may conveniently serve
us to connect many illustrations of human power in
every department.

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is
fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of
degrees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent
law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the
fact and holds it fluid. Our culture is the
predominance of an idea which draws after it this
train of cities and institutions. Let us rise into
another idea: they will disappear. The Greek
sculpture is all melted away, as if it had been
statues of ice; here and there a solitary figure or
fragment remaining, as we see flecks and scraps of
snow left in cold dells and mountain clefts in June
and July. For the genius that created it creates now
somewhat else. The Greek letters last a little longer,
but are already passing under the same sentence and
tumbling into the inevitable pit which the creation
of new thought opens for all that is old. The new
continents are built out of the ruins of an old planet;
the new races fed out of the decomposition of the
foregoing. New arts destroy the old. See the investment
of capital in aqueducts made useless by hydraulics;
fortifications, by gunpowder; roads and canals, by
railways; sails, by steam; steam by electricity.

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