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124 quent gradual ascent of the creature to a fellowship with the uncreated perfection. The two movements are hierarchically related as husband and wife are in marriage, where force is seen endowing weakness. They combine to constitute creation according to a law of definite proportions, as hydrogen and oxygen combine to produce water, or nitrogen and oxygen to produce atmospheric air, what is mere quantity in the one freely deferring to what is quality in the other. Thus what is greatest in existence, what is generic or universal, in short what is properly substantial, gravitates towards what is least in existence, what is specific or individual, what in short is strictly formal; and this in its turn vigorously reacts to that. The homo, which is the fixed or cosmical and masculine element in existence, yearns towards the vir, which is its free or domestic and feminine element; while the vir again responsively aspires to the homo, aspires to bring all nature, mineral, vegetable, and animal, into its embrace, and reproduce it in every form of its own teeming activity. Thus we may say that the great historic problem—the problem alike of our earliest religious and our latest philosophic culture—has been to reconcile nature and man, to fuse flesh and spirit, to wed force and freedom, to harmonize law and gospel, to marry mechanism and morals, in short permanently to unite the indefinitely great, which is the superb overbearing cosmos, with the indefinitely small, which is our humble domestic earth, the pleasant house of our abode, that so whatsoever is most outward or public and profane in existence may find itself authenticated by what is most inward or private and sacred; that so whatsoever is most absolute or material, and therefore domineering and cruel in experience, may become sanctified by association with whatsoever is most contingent, most moral or free, and therefore most gracious, pliable, and orderly.

Such is the tie which subsists between the two constitutive elements of creation,—a strictly conjugal tie, or one which exhibits the superior and creative element altogether merging and losing itself in the inferior and created one. Creation is manifestly inconceivable on any lower terms. For if the infinite creative substance should refuse to accommodate itself to the finite created form, the creature who is nothing but by the creator would fail to appear, would remain obstinately non-