Page:Society the Redeemed Form of Man.djvu/84

68 is of the very highest grade, as imposing no kind of obligation upon your belief. His judgments doubt less in regard to this world's affairs were those of his day and generation, and strike one as grown very antiquated; but there is almost no fact of spiritual observation and experience he recounts which does not seem of really priceless worth to my imagination, as illustrating and enforcing a new mind in man. If his books seem interesting to you also in this point of view, if they tend to enlighten you upon very many things which have puzzled you in your own mental pathway, or in respect to our race-origin and destiny, well and good; no doubt you too are bound to an ultimate profitable commerce with them. And in this event you will find it unquestionably true that their main advantage to the intellect is, that they furnish it with truths which really nourish and quicken it, or irresistibly compel it to function for itself, and independently of foreign stimulus. His books, in fact, amount to nothing so much as to an intellectual wheat-field, of no use to any one who does not enter in to gather and bind his own golden sheaves, and then proceed to thresh and grind his grain, to bolt his flour, to mix his bread, to build it up and bake it in such shapely and succulent loaves as his own intellectual bread-pan alone determines.

But revenons à nos moutons. I have said that the