Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his own temple doors and recites fables merely of his brother's, or his brother's brother's God.
Eyes are bold as lions,--roving, running, leaping, here and there, far and near. They speak all languages. They wait for no introduction; they are no Englishmen; ask no leave of age or rank; they respect neither property nor riches, neither learning nor power, nor virtue, nor sex, but intrude, and come again, and go through and through you in a moment of time. What inundation of life and thought is discharged from one soul into another through them!
Rude poets of the tavern hearth,
squandering your unquoted mirth,
which keeps the ground, and never soars,
while jake retorts, and reuben roars;
tough and screaming, as birch-bark,
goes like bullet to its mark;
while the solid curse and jeer
never balk the waiting ear.
Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.
Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of the prophets. He saw with an open eye the mystery of the soul. . Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man.
Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat the new comer like a travelling geologist, who passes through our estate, and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture.
Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him?
The mind is a finer body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing, excluding, and generating, in a new and ethereal element. Here, in the brain, is all the process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring, comparing, digesting, and assimilating of experience. Here again is the mystery of generation repeated.
The wise and just man will always feel that he stands on his own feet; that he imparts strength to the state, not receives security from it; and if all went down, he and such as he would quite easily combine in a new and better constitution.
The idealism of Berkeley is only a crude statement of the idealism of Jesus, and that again is a crude statement of the fact thatall nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself.