rayers are hurtful to
him, until he have made his own. Our religion vulgarly stands on
numbers of believers. Whenever the appeal is made,--no matter how
indirectly,--to numbers, proclamation is then and there made that
religion is not. He that finds God a sweet enveloping thought to him
never counts his company. When I sit in that presence, who shall dare
to come in? When I rest in perfect humility, when I burn with pure love,
what can Calvin or Swedenborg say?

It makes no difference whether the appeal is to numbers or to one. The
faith that stands on authority is not faith. The reliance on authority
measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul. The
position men have given to Jesus, now for many centuries of history, is
a position of authority. It characterizes themselves. It cannot alter
the eternal facts. Great is the soul, and plain. It is no flatterer,
it is no follower; it never appeals from itself. It believes in itself.
Before the immense possibilities of man all mere experience, all past
biography, however spotless and sainted, shrinks away. Before that
heaven which our presentiments foreshow us, we cannot easily praise any
form of life we have seen or read of. We not only affirm that we have
few great men, but, absolutely speaking, that we have none; that we have
no history, no record of any character or mode of living that entirely
contents us. The saints and demigods whom history worships we are
constrained to accept with a grain of allowance. Though in our lonely
hours we draw a new strength out of their memory, yet, pressed on our
attention, as they are by the thoughtless and customary, they fatigue
and invade. The soul gives itself, alone, original and pure, to the
Lonely, Original and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits,
leads and speaks through it. Then is it glad, young and nimble. It is
not wise, but it sees through all things. It is not called religious,
but it is innocent. It calls the light its own, and feels that the grass
grows and the stone falls by a law inferior to, and dependent on, its
nature. Behold, it saith, I am born into the great, the universal mind.
I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the
great soul, and thereby I do Overlook the sun and the stars and feel
them to be the fair accidents and effects which change and pass. More
and more the surges of everlasting nature enter into me, and I become
public and human in my regards and a