I beg your pointed attention to the observation, for unless you clearly apprehend the truth I am now enforcing, you will infallibly miss in my judgment the whole distinctive scope of the new economy.

The spontaneous life, as I have just said in the preceding note, is one which interiorates object to subject. That is to say, it is a life which necessarily brings the object of all my action, the object of all my aspiration, the object of all my worship, within the conditions of my own nature. In short, it is a life which exacts the essential humanity of God, which requires that the Deity I aspire to unite myself more and more intimately with, should be an infinite or perfect man, in all the length and breadth, height and depth, of that much misunderstood word. Now such being the true life of man, it must always have existed in a shape proportionate to his consciousness of himself. That is, it must have always existed either in a negative or positive form, either as germ or flower, either as egg or chick. But it does not even yet exist in this latter state. We have not yet attained to our true human consciousness. Individuals here and there dimly discern the Divine seed in them, but the mass of mankind seem utterly destitute of spiritual quickening. Priestridden and police-ridden, amidst all God's overwhelming bounties they nourish only the furtive courage of mice, and under the kindling sunshine

of truth contentedly maintain the darkened intelligence of owls and bats. It follows, then, that our true life must have hitherto existed only in a germinal or rudimentary form, only in the form of an egg, as it were, out of which in the fulness of time should be hatched the consummate vital reality. And this germ of the perfect life-this rudimental embodiment of it—this sheltering and succulent egg, so to speak-has always been furnished by what we call revelation, or simply religion, or still more simply the Church as distinguished from the State. Some purely spi

ritual revelation of the Divine name in the individual soul, and failing that, some merely ritual and symbolic attestation of it, appears to have been as much a preliminary necessity of our perfected consciousness, as the egg is a preliminary necessity of the chicken, which is for a long time unconsciously housed within its frail transparent walls.

I say a "necessity," and this necessity will be obvious to you when you consider the true scope and meaning of our perfected life, when you consider what is inseparably implied in it. The form of the Divine or perfect life in man, is that of spontaneity or freedom, because it is a life which is developed exclusively from within to without, and never from without to within. This is the distinctively human form of life, at all times and under all circumstances, whether man knows it or

whether he is ignorant of it, and it invariably brings forth fruit precisely apposite to such knowledge or such ignorance. But man's first consciousness is natural, and afterwards spiritual: that is to say, he feels his common or associated existence before he feels his individual or private one. Of course therefore both these forms of consciousness, both his natural and spiritual form, must reflect the true law of his life, which is freedom or spontaneity. His natural selfhood, his common or associated existence, no less than his individual or private one, must in its own manner reflect the human form of life, must image the great controlling law of freedom or spontaneity. Otherwise his unity of consciousness, his sense of personal identity, would lapse, inasmuch as there could be no basis of continuity between his natural and spiritual existence. In short, the true and Divine life of man, the life of spontaneity, must shape his natural development as well as his spiritual one into conformity with itself: that is to say, must subject the mind of man in nature to a strictly historic evolution, to such an evolution as makes its highest spiritual or individual culture to be nothing more than the strict efflorescence of natural or universal germs. Such is the idea of History. It means efflorescence. It means the continuity of an identical germ through root and branch, through stalk and leaf, to fruit: the procession of life from a hidden or invisible

seed to a gorgeous and kingly flower fit to illustrate the sunlight. In fine, it means the growth of selfhood.

But you have enough now to think of 'till the next Letter.

Yours truly,

LETTER XIX.

MY DEAR W.,

Paris, Jan. 20th, 1857.

You complain of my last Letter as insufficient. It could not very well be otherwise, seeing that I had not bargained to send you a volume of welldigested metaphysics, but only a friendly and suggestive Letter. Let me endeavour now to resume the same theme in a form somewhat more expansive.

You know that ninety-nine persons out of a hundred (and this is speaking with exemplary moderation) envisage creation as a question of time and space-as, at most, a series of sensible facts or incidents, like the American Revolutionand as essentially involving therefore no considerations beyond the ordinary collation and discrimination of evidence. The mass of people believe that creation took place "once upon a time," somewhere in Asia probably, and was complete on the instant by an exertion of physical energy on the part of the Creator. They suppose that some