Page:The kernel and the husk (Abbott, 1886).djvu/274

258 XXIV

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You take me to task for the abrupt termination of my last letter. I broke off, you say, just when you thought I was on the point of explaining what I meant by a spirit: "Surely you have some theory of your own and are not content with disbelieving other people's theories." Well, I thought I had said before that I am content to know merely this about a spirit, that it possesses capabilities for loving and serving God, or other nobler capabilities corresponding to these. But if you press me to set up some theory of my own that you may have the pleasure of pulling it to pieces, I will confess to you that my nearest conception of a spirit is a personified virtue. This cannot very well be quite right; any more than a carpenter can be like a door, or like anything else that he has constructed. But it is the nearest I can come to any conception that is not too repulsively material. And sometimes, when I try to conceive of the causes of terrestrial thoughts, and emotions, and spiritual movements, I find myself recurring to the antique notion, hinted at in one or two passages of the Bible, and I believe encouraged by some of the old Rabbis, that there are two worlds; one visible, terrestrial, and material, the other invisible, celestial, and spiritual; and that whatsoever takes place down here takes place first (or simultaneously but causatively) up there; here, the mere outsides of