Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/137

 his editor does, that he believed the sun to be an "animated being," like the deer or lion. Wherein are we more believers in a God than the heathen, with their mysterious magic rites? as if one name were not as good as another. It is time to have done with these follies. I confess to more sympathy with the Druidical and Scandinavian, as handed down to us, than with the actual creeds of any church in Christendom. They have been reproached for worshipping the ghosts of their fathers rather than any unsubstantial forms; but do we not worship the ghosts of our fathers?

It is the characteristic of all religion and wisdom to substitute being for seeming, and to detect the anima or soul in everything. It is merely an evidence of inner faith when God is practically believed to be omnipresent. None of the heathen are too heathenish for me but those who hold no intercourse with their god. I love the vigorous faith of those heathen who sternly believed something. I say to these modern believers, "Don't interrupt those men's prayers." How much more do the moderns know about God [89]