completely assured, and regard spiritual existence much less in the light of a truth than of a probability. Who can say that minds of this cast will ever be satisfied, even when they go into what they call the "spirit-world:" who can say that even then they will not go about for further evidence and testimony, and, like the sieve of the Danaides, never know when they shall have got enough ?*

But however all this may be, I want you distinctly to observe that the spiritual world is utterly void of claim to our rational regard, except as ministering to our exclusively finite side, to our purely constitutional endowments, as distinguished from our proper life. It has no direct relation to our life, but only an indirect one through our physical and moral natures, through our natural and social existence. My life is spontaneous and free, flowing from the immediate presence of God in me. No doubt this life demands as a platform, or basis of its own manifestation, my physical and moral existence, just as the upper stories of a house demand an underground foundation: but life is no more to be confounded with its mere subter

* I count several beloved and admired friends in this movement, who predict excellent results from it. While I rejoice that their own ample and powerful wills shield them individually from the mischiefs which inhere in an undue familiarity with these ghostly Jeremy Diddlers, these spiritual ticket-of-leave men, I all the more abhor and deplore the frequent and fearful disasters which ensue to feebler organizations.

raneous conditions, or with existence, than the drawing-rooms and bed-chambers of a palace are to be confounded with its kitchen and larder. All the wretchedness of our past and present history refers itself in some shape to this shallow and pestilent error. The cleanly and beautiful temple of God in our souls is incessantly overrun with spiritual vermin in consequence; we are daily chased from corner to cupboard, from cellar to garret, by stenches so infernal as to put us to our wits' end for a remedy: and no remedy appears but at once and manfully to learn to separate between existence and life, or what is the same thing, to compel the spiritual world equally with the natural one into the humble harness of use, into the undeviating and eternal subjection of God's life in man. Thus if any nasty spiritual person should contrive to come to us through the reeking chinks of our still unscientific mental sewerage, saying that he has been divinely relegated to a certain charge over our servile and constitutional interests, over our natural affections and intelligence, let us tell him in return that he is a very precious ass to affect a mission of that nature, since all the good we do each other in such connection is strictly contingent upon our being utterly unconscious of it. And if he go on, on the other hand, to allege that he bears any the faintest conceivable relation to our real and immortal parts, or to that life which is alone worth our thought because it alone

comes from God, let us greet him with a cachinnation so hearty and derisive, as shall bid him instantly disperse, nor ever shew his foolish face again within the breezy realm of cockcrow. Understand well that no human being, angelic or diabolic, touches us except circumferentially : never in the regal and transcendent plane of Life, but only in the servile plane of Law. In so far as I am a fixity, that is to all the extent of my relations to nature and society, of my physical and moral existence, I am intimately dependent upon angel and devil. I have neither health of body nor sanity of soul but by a preponderant influx from heaven; nor have I disease of body and insanity of soul but by a preponderant influx from hell. Thus if I had no commanding life in God, I should be the mere chance puppet of these warring influences, and go on myself to swell the ranks of angel or devil to all eternity, as my own inherited tastes might decide. What I feel bound then by my supreme loyalty to the Divine life to do, is, to shake my cordial fist at both angel and devil, bidding one and the other alike to observe a respectful distance. I will have no private relations with either of them. If between them they can contrive any benefit to my common nature, physical and moral: if by the growing subordination of hell to heaven, and of heaven to the Divine, the ordinary level of our natural and social existence becomes elevated, I no doubt, like

every body else, will prove a grateful participant of that boon: but I will accept no special advantage from either quarter. In fact, I would not give one fig to call all the good that gladdens any heaven my own; nor would it cost me one pang of self-reproach to find myself charged with all the evil that festers in any hell: simply because I am profoundly sure that in both cases alike the possession would be only apparent, not real; that is to say, would attach to me exclusively on the side of my moral or quasi freedom, and not on that of my spontaneous and genuine freedom.*

But it is high time that we got back to our great symbolic starting-point and progenitor— Adam. But as I shall still have much to say in this connection, I shall probably consult your convenience by deferring it to another letter. Yours truly,

*See Appendix B.

LETTER XVII.

MY DEAR W.,

Paris, Jan. 5th, 1857.

WE have seen that the truth which inspires all revelation and enlivens all history, is the truth of the Divine vivification of human nature, or of God's essential humanity. God gives life, no doubt, to angels and spirits, but only because angels and spirits are partakers of human nature, because they are germinal or rudimentary men. In short, A TRULY INFINITE GOODNESS AND WISDOM INFORM AND ANIMATE HUMAN NATURE, AND THAT

NATURE ALONE. This truth which only our tardy docility in Divine things, in other words, our infatuated self-conceit, hinders us seeing, is the sole interior meaning of revelation, constitutes the entire spiritual burden of the literal dogma of Christ's glorification or divinity. It is a truth so utterly remote from the unassisted reason of the race, that its clearest and most emphatic enunciation in the Christ, has been incessantly perverted to the damage and degradation of our common