Page:Aesthetic Papers.djvu/109

Rh men, in the first phase of their existence, become empassioned by any and all the objects in the universe with which they are in contact; and that they are, in fact, hurried hither and thither, perpetually losing themselves through the richness of their subjective nature, in objects which are at best but signs of an absolute good, of which they have the undying but undefined presentiment. For the various objects which entrance the eye of the natural man, and draw him to adventure his bark towards them, may be likened to light-houses on the rock-bound coast of a rich country, which are mistaken by savage discoverers for the riches that they indicate; and the ignorant mariner rushes towards them, and gets shipwrecked on the rocks upon which they are built.

To stop here: our religion would be gloomy, but it teaches us another thing. It teaches us, that the first phase of human life does not exhaust us, but that it is ours to see the futility of all feeling and activity, unenlightened by God's plan for making his finite creature live on an infinite principle. And to see this futility, and bravely acknowledge it, is to die to the life of mere passion, and to rise to the intellection of the secret of life eternal, which is no less than this: All human passion is to re-appear even upon earth, no longer as master, but as servant, to do the behests of that will, become by gratitude an infinite principle of love, and displaying the office of every faculty and every feeling of human nature, to manifest something of the divine life.

Never before the birth of our political constitution, which was not made by man, but grew up from the instincts of Christian men who had brooked no control of their relations with God, was there any nation on earth, within which the life eternal could unfold its proportions; and it is not wonderful, therefore, that we are slow to enter upon our inheritance, and have not yet unfolded a system of education correspondent to our large privileges.

Let us, however, briefly touch some outlines of such a system; and, in order to give form to our remarks, we will run a sort of parallel between the form of culture proper for us, and the Dorian form that we have just considered.

Men do not now, in sitting in judgment upon the physical