Page:Spiritual Reflections for Every Day in the Year - Vol 3.pdf/79

 obstacle to impede his progress, often standing still in the most perverse obstinacy, and injuring those who attempt to accelerate his progress. The obstinate ass is a true portrait of the man who will admit nothing to be true but what his senses can grasp. The intellectual man will investigate truth by the process of reasoning, hearing willingly the opinions of others. The sensual man will receive nothing but what he can see and feel. Is the soul of man dicussed? in nothing will the sensual man display greater perversity—"Who has seen the soul? can any one shew me what it is?" Is heaven, or eternal life, alluded to, he asks—"Who can tell anything about it? who has returned from heaven to describe it, so as to make it familiar to our senses?" The intellectual man will reason upon the matter thus:—"Can matter of itself think and reason? It cannot. There must then be a soul." Or, "Can I altogether die? and if not, where, and in what manner, shall I live; There is a distinction between vice and virtue in this world; why should it not be perpetuated? and if it be, will not the virtuous reside in some place of happiness, and the vicious be there incapable of troubling them? None of my friends have, it is true, returned to give me information of this; yet reason tells me there must be some place of residence for the good; and if there be a God, as there must be, that God delights to see His creatures happy." There is, it is true, in these sentiments none of the certainty enjoyed by the spiritual man, but there is progression towards them. The difference analogically is the same between the horse and the ass. The one goes forward acquiring truth after truth; the other stumbles, or even stands still, at every obstacle.