Page:Letters on the Human Body (John Clowes).djvu/204

184 Why, too, should it be said of the Egyptians, their strength is to, if strength and sitting still had involved only the strength and repose of the body? We are constrained then to explain the above passages according to some spiritual idea, if we would collect from them either the sublime wisdom which lies concealed in every expression of Divine language, or the interesting instruction which that language was intended to convey to the children of men. If then by walking, when the term occurs in the, we are not to understand progressions of the body from place to place, but rather some changes in the interiors of the mind and its affections; and if by standing, as applied in the same , our attention was intended to be excited to the fixedness and uprightness of the mind’s purpose and intention rather than to bodily posture; then by nothing else can be meant, in the language of the , but permanency in the state of the interiors of the mind. And since all such permanency is connected with the will or ruling love of man, therefore sitting is a bodily posture more peculiarly applicable to such will or love, as walking and standing are more applicable to the thought or intellect. It is evident then, that not only the human body, with its members and viscera, but likewise all its acts and operations, form a kind of spiritual alphabet,