Page:Aesthetic Papers.djvu/141

Rh draw to an indefinite extent upon the Divine permissions, which granted legions of substantial evils in all the kingdoms of nature.

Light is to the eye what truth is to the mind; and heat is to the body what love is to the man. Hence heat and light are the natural vicegerents of truth and love; because, by accordance of use, they prolong and extend the empire of truth and love through inferior nature. The Divine Light, per se, cannot enter the material creation; but, by the obsequious arm of light-giving suns, it reaches the lowest world with creative love and power, and becomes omnipresent even through death itself by the perfect correspondence of the instrument to the end. This correspondence necessarily carries with it the greatest force; for wherever there is a well-adapted instrument of use, a body expressly built and informed by nature for accomplishing a given design, there that design or end is spiritually present with it (for likeness of end or love is spiritual presence), and inaugurates it into active functions. Thenceforth there is no way of severing the two but by injuring the instrument, or unfitting it for the purposes of that principle which can make use of it. This principle cleaves to its convenient form on the same grounds, and with tenfold the tenacity, that a wealthy citizen cleaves to his comfortable and convenient home, or civilized mankind in general to the appliances which make their position in the world.

On account of the universality of this force, the magic of the ancient world arose out of the science of correspondences. The conjuring rod and the paraphernalia of the magician's cave were symbols, into which, as appropriate bodies, spiritual forces entered. For, the natural circumstances occurring in a certain order, by the laws of creation the upper world will animate them, and rush down through them with new and marvellous efficacityefficacy [sic]. This, indeed, is the ground for which the two comprehensive symbols of Christianity, Baptism and the Lord's Supper, are solid means or verities, and not superstitious abracadabra. But it is not surprising, after obscurant philosophers have been preaching for ages against the power of circumstances, and endeavoring to erect the freedom of the human will upon the ruins of natural facts,